daversa

Thanks, these are all good suggestions and thoughts! We do have a switch for Celsius already by the monthly temp graph. This will switch everything in the comparison table to metric first too.

Right now you can save a comparison, but we definitely plan to add "favorite" cities down the line, potentially as part of a paid account.

We also want to develop the relocation aspect of the site more. You can see a rough outline of what we're planning here: https://whythere.life/move-pack.

This way you could feed a favorite city into an actual move. Eventually we want the move portion give you all the info you need for a move and even connect you with a local concierge to be your point of contact.

I should mention, this is just my side project. If anyone is hiring for Senior/Lead/Staff Designer positions, I'm looking for work!

There's a sources link below the comparison table that will give you all of that detail. Admittedly the U.S. has much better coverage right now, but we're always working to improve internationally.

We would like to add more community focused elements but that introduces a massive layer of moderation whereas the current model is intended to "just show the data" and let people decide what it means to them.

We are playing around with the idea of designated "concierges" for a city or region.

We were getting slammed pretty hard and some of our db sources had to resort to fallbacks. If you visit the city page individually, this should update for you https://whythere.life/city/munich-upper-bavaria-germany

Thanks!

Totally agree, we had that and I think it may have been stomped on by making the city titles clickable through to the city pages. Thanks for the heads-up!

I think we're back (fingers crossed).

Looks like we're getting the hug of death! We're trying to rectify things on our end.

We just added average home and rent cost for the U.S.—looking into international options.

You’re not wrong at all. Automated discovery breaks down fast in big global cities because raw tags don’t capture “iconic” very well.

I actually just pushed an update that heavily retunes the scoring, boosting national and royal parks and penalizing tiny or generic parcels, which knocks out a lot of the “Drivers Triangle”–type noise. It’s meaningfully better now, but Sydney and London are good examples of where the limits show.

Treating Hyde Park differently from some obscure patch of trees using only OSM-style data is a genuinely hard problem, and at a certain point manual curation just wins. I’m likely going to add curated overrides for major hubs so the obvious, culturally important parks always surface first.

Appreciate the concrete examples. This is exactly the kind of feedback that helps tighten things up.

Good idea, I'll look into that!

Thank you, I think we have the search fixed, but yeah only having Parks show is not ideal and wasn't the intent. We're just dealing with a hodge-podge of API's with rate limits and several layers of caching trying to make things work lol.

Reserves like Drivers Triangle, Rea, and Blue Gum are showing for me in Sydney Now.

Following up on this! Instead of just patching the empty state, we built out a proper 'Local Nature' integration using OpenStreetMap.

International cities now have their own dedicated row showing real local reserves and parks (e.g., Tiergarten for Berlin) instead of a broken generic fallback. It's live now if you want to take another look. Thanks again for highlighting this early.

Great catch! It turns out there is a tiny village in Gloucestershire also named Cambridge (pop. 394) that was trying to steal the spotlight from the University town. Because they were both labeled as 'Cambridge, England,' our system was getting them mixed up.

I've just pushed a fix that includes the County for international cities to keep them distinct (e.g., 'Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK'). I also cleared our database cache so the correct data is ready for you.

If you already have Cambridge in your comparison grid, just remove it and add it back to see the fresh data. Thanks for the heads-up.

Done

100%, we want to add that but the data is expensive. If this has legs we will probably spring for Zillow or Redfin API access.

We actually hit a rate limit with the image API tonight, but we're caching everything we pull into a DB, so the more people use it, the less we'll have to rely on API calls.

We want to add home prices and rent, but that is really expensive data unfortunately. If this has legs, we may be able to justify paying for the Zillow API or something similar. We do plan on adding affiliate links to realtors in that city, although that's not nearly as helpful.

There's also an entire "Explore" section of this site we're working on once the database reaches a higher level of maturity. We want to do all the filtering you're mentioning.

Great comment, thanks!

Great point, we'll add a toggle.

This is an early Alpha and we actually were considering locking it down to the US initially but I think it's important to get out there early and expose problems like this. All valid points.

Haha yeah, that needs some refinement! Ultimately it's a restriction of the API's we're using now.

"Would I feel happier? What are the cultural differences? What is the food like? What sort of social groups thrive in the cities? What's public transport like? What's commuting like? What's tourism like?"

These are all great suggestions, and some are on the roadmap. One thing is we never want to get in the game of saying one place is "Better" or "Worse" than another. We just want to provide data and let people decide what's important.

Thanks for giving it a spin!

It's the ol' designer with a 27" cinema display problem.