CalculatorBasics.com
Real PITI calculations for all 50 states + D.C. State & city
Most mortgage calculator sites are a nightmare — slow, ad-stuffed, and built in 2008. But the bigger problem isn't the UX. It's that they all give you the same generic national number.
A mortgage in Jacksonville, FL hits different than one in San Francisco or rural Montana. Property taxes, insurance, HOA costs — it all varies wildly by state and city. Yet every major calculator just spits out a monthly payment with zero local context.
I built calculatorbasics.com because I wanted a calculator that actually reflects what YOU will pay — not some national average.
What I built:
State-level and city-level mortgage calculator variants for all 50 states + D.C.
Real PITI breakdowns (Principal, Interest, Taxes, Insurance)
FHA, Conventional, and VA loan comparisons
Home affordability by salary across every state
No ads. No sign-ups. No paywalls.
The technical side: Built on Next.js 14, Supabase, and Vercel. The whole platform is architected for AI-era search — HowTo schema, atomic answer blocks, semantic depth sections — so it surfaces inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, not just traditional search rankings.
The gap I'm filling: Bankrate and NerdWallet are bloated and monetized to death. There's real room for something clean, fast, locally accurate, and built for how people actually search in 2026.
Still early but shipping fast. Would love feedback from anyone who's tackled SEO in a YMYL niche or built against entrenched incumbents.
1 Comment
The local angle is the right wedge. “Mortgage calculator” alone is too broad, but “what will this actually cost me in my city?” is much closer to real search intent.
The main thing I’d be careful with is trust. In a YMYL niche, clean UX and no ads help, but they are probably not enough against Bankrate/NerdWallet. You need the page to prove why the local estimate is credible before the user trusts the number.
I’d think about the page around three layers:
local monthly cost
why this state/city changes the number
what assumption the user should verify before making a decision
That makes the page feel less like a calculator clone and more like a local mortgage answer page.
The AI-search angle is interesting too, but I’d avoid making schema the whole moat. The real moat is probably better local assumptions, cleaner explanations, and pages that answer the exact “can I afford this here?” question better than the big finance sites.
Happy to put together a tighter breakdown if useful. The useful part here is probably a clean SEO/GTM map: strongest page types, trust signals, local content structure, and which queries are actually worth attacking first.