About Townleap

Who Made This

One person. A Russian developer who left in 2022, landed in Tbilisi, and has spent the five years since trying to answer a question that turned out to be much harder than it looks: where do I actually live now?

Not "where should I spend the winter." Where do I sign a lease, renew a residence permit, file taxes, and eventually stop refreshing the news at 3am. Answering that took spreadsheets, embassy PDFs in three languages, contradictory forum posts from 2019, and an unreasonable number of tabs. Townleap is what those tabs turned into once they got organized.

Why It Exists

There are plenty of tools for digital nomads. They rank cities by coworking desks, cappuccino prices, and how fast the wifi is in a café you will visit twice. That is a real audience and it is not this one.

The people this site is for are trying to stop moving. They need to know whether a country will let them stay, whether their spouse can legally work there, what the school situation looks like, how much of their salary the tax office keeps, whether the courts are real, and whether the whole arrangement still makes sense in eight years. Those questions have answers. They're just scattered across government sites, statistical agencies, and PDFs that were last redesigned in 2011.

So Townleap collects them in one place, attaches numbers where numbers exist, and tries not to be boring about it.

What's Actually In It

132 cities across 56 countries, each with cost of living broken down the way a resident pays it, safety and democracy scores, climate, internet speed, language and English proficiency, healthcare, schools, and the residency routes that actually exist for that country.

On top of the data there's a quiz that ranks cities against your priorities, a head-to-head comparison, a cost-of-living calculator, a take-home-pay simulator for local tax rules, and country guides for people leaving specific places. You can use any of it without telling us anything about yourself.

Where the Numbers Come From

Every figure traces back to a published source. The main ones:

• Numbeo — rent, groceries, transport, utilities, and crime perception. Crowd-sourced.
• World Bank — GDP per capita, growth, inflation, unemployment, population.
• UNODC — intentional homicide rates. The one violent-crime statistic countries report on comparable terms.
• EIU Democracy Index — elections, civil liberties, participation, and whether criticizing the government is a hobby or a crime.
• EF English Proficiency Index — how far you'll get before you have to learn the language.

The full breakdown, including how the livability score is calculated, is on the methodology page.

What the Numbers Can't Do

The cost-of-living data is crowd-sourced. That means it is directionally right and not precise. If Townleap says rent in Valencia is meaningfully cheaper than rent in Munich, believe it. If it says a one-bedroom in Valencia is €912, treat that as a neighborhood, not a quote. Sample sizes vary by city, submissions skew toward people who fill out cost-of-living surveys, and prices move faster than any dataset.

National statistics carry their own lag — a World Bank indicator may be a year or two behind, and a homicide rate is a country average that says nothing about the specific street you're looking at. Visa and residency rules change with elections and can change overnight. Nothing here is legal, tax, or immigration advice, and anything with a deadline attached should be confirmed against the relevant government's own site before you act on it.

Where a number is missing, the section is hidden rather than filled with a guess. Missing beats wrong.

Found Something Wrong?

Please say so. People who spot a bad number are the cheapest quality control available. Every city page has a 🚩 Off button with a box for what's wrong — that goes straight into the queue and gets read.

A dedicated contact page is coming. Until then, corrections through that button are the fastest route, and anything that needs a human can go through Daring Internet, the studio Townleap belongs to.

How It's Paid For

It isn't, really. Townleap is free, there are no accounts, no signup wall, no ads, no newsletter popup, and nothing to buy. We don't sell your data — mostly because we don't collect enough of it to be worth anyone's money. Analytics tell us which pages people actually use; the privacy policy spells out exactly what that means.

If that changes — if there's ever a paid tier — it will be announced on this page rather than discovered.