MorgCalc VS PlotYourHome

MorgCalc's answer

Most mortgage calculators either lowball the real payment by only showing principal and interest, or gate the full breakdown behind an email signup. MorgCalc shows the complete monthly payment — principal, interest, property tax, and homeowners insurance — using state-specific tax rates instead of a national average, and automatically factors in PMI when the down payment is under 20%. It also checks the payment against the 28% housing-to-income benchmark lenders actually use, so you know where you stand before talking to anyone. No signup required.

PlotYourHome's answer:

Most affordability calculators return a single number and hide the ratio that produced it. PlotYourHome leads with debt-to-income — the figure underwriters actually work to — and plots the entire range instead of one point. Every purchase price is shaded green where your DTI stays comfortable, amber where it becomes a stretch, and red where conventional financing generally stops. Every DTI cap is an input, so if your lender works to 43% you set it and the zones redraw.

MorgCalc's answer

The calculator itself is fully free with no email gate — you get the complete number immediately, not a teaser followed by a signup wall. It's also more accurate than calculators that only show principal and interest: MorgCalc includes property tax, insurance, and PMI by default, using real state-level tax data rather than a flat national estimate.

PlotYourHome's answer:

Three things Zillow, Bankrate and NerdWallet don't do. It shows the whole range rather than one approval figure, so you can see which prices were never realistic. It includes full PITI — principal and interest, property taxes at your state's rate, insurance, PMI or MIP under 20% down, and HOA — rather than the principal-and-interest number that makes budgets look better than they are. And it has a simulation panel: toggle a rate change, clearing a debt, or a few more months of saving against your baseline and watch the ceiling move. In one worked example, clearing a single car loan and buying the rate down three quarters of a point moved the comfortable ceiling by $79,105.

MorgCalc's answer

Home buyers and prospective home buyers — especially first-time buyers — doing affordability research before contacting a lender or real estate agent. People checking whether they can afford a specific listing, comparing scenarios across different down payments or interest rates, or estimating what property tax and insurance will actually cost in their state.

PlotYourHome's answer:

First-time home buyers in the United States, primarily. Also repeat buyers working out what a move actually costs, and renters using the buy-vs-rent breakeven to decide whether to start at all. It assumes US conventional, FHA, VA and USDA lending rules, so it is not useful outside the US.

MorgCalc's answer

I built MorgCalc after running into the same problem with every existing mortgage calculator: they either underestimated the real payment by skipping taxes and insurance, or hid the full breakdown behind an email form. I wanted something that just showed the real number — instantly, accurately, and without a signup wall.

PlotYourHome's answer:

It started as a few Python scripts to visualize my own budget while house-hunting. I hadn't heard of DTI when I began — I just wanted to see the whole thing color-coded and play with the numbers. What kept me going was the one-off approvals: a bank hands you a number for one specific budget, with no way to work out in advance which loans you'd likely qualify for and which were never going to be possible. So I plotted the whole range instead.

MorgCalc's answer

the primary technologies is Next.js

PlotYourHome's answer:

Vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no framework and no runtime dependencies. There is no backend and no database — everything runs in the browser, and state lives in the URL hash, which is also how sharing works.