PlotYourHome VS MortMetrix

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.