What we promise

The four rules we hold ourselves to

1. No email, no accounts, no tracking. The calculator never asks who you are. There is no signup wall, no analytics pixel, no session replay, and no profile of you anywhere. Your scenario lives in the URL of your browser tab and nowhere else. The one prompt you will see is the advertising-consent banner described below — it exists to give you a choice about ads, not to identify you.
2. No affiliates. Advertising, not commissions. We do not take referral fees from mortgage brokers, real-estate portals, lenders, or anyone else. The math has no reason to nudge you toward buying — or renting — because we are not paid either way. The site is supported by contextual advertising served on our Learn articles only; the calculator itself is ad-free.
3. Every default is visible and every default is cited. Tap "Source" beside any input to see where the number came from — Freddie Mac, the US Census, the Insurance Information Institute, etc. Every default is editable. If you do not agree with ours, override it and see the answer change live.
4. Every conclusion is explained in plain English. The results view tells you the break-even year in a single sentence and shows the reasoning underneath. If a number cannot be defended in plain English, it does not go on the page.

What we do not collect

Nothing you type into the calculator ever leaves your browser. The inputs are serialized into the URL query string so that refreshing, bookmarking, and sharing all work — but that URL is only in your hands. We do not store scenarios server-side, we do not build user profiles, and we do not have a database of your inputs to leak.

We store exactly one thing in your browser: your advertising-consent choice, under the local-storage key ror.consent.v1, so we do not have to ask again on your next visit. We set no cookies of our own, and we embed no analytics or fingerprinting script — no Google Analytics, no Facebook pixel, no session replay, no heatmaps. The only third-party script on the site is Google AdSense, which serves the ads on our Learn articles; it stays in a denied consent state until you choose otherwise, and it is never given anything you typed into the calculator.

What we do collect

To know whether the site is working we count three aggregate signals, and only these three:

1. Page visits — how many times the calculator loaded. This tells us whether anyone is finding the page.
2. Calculator completions — how many visits led the person to edit at least one input to match their own situation. This is our "did we actually help someone answer the question" number.
3. Share-link uses — how many times the "Copy shareable link" button was pressed. This tells us whether the share flow is worth its space on the page.

Each signal is fired as a same-origin request to a fixed path (/beacon/visit, /beacon/complete, /beacon/share). The request carries no body, no cookie, no user ID, no scenario data — just the URL. Cloudflare, our host, counts the requests per path in aggregate. Nobody at RentOrOwn.info can look at a single request and learn anything about the person who sent it, because there is nothing there to look at.

We honour the Global Privacy Control signal and the Do Not Track header. If your browser sends either, we send nothing at all.

No cookies. No fingerprinting. No cross-session identifiers. No third parties in the analytics path at all beyond Cloudflare, which is already serving you the HTML you are reading — and no third party anywhere on the site except the consent-gated AdSense units on the Learn articles. If a future change violates any of these rules, we consider it a bug.

Who is behind this

A small independent team who got tired of every rent-vs-buy calculator on the web being either a lead-generation funnel for brokers or a black box built on undisclosed assumptions. We open the assumptions, drop the funnel, and let the math speak.

Full details of every formula, default, and source live on the methodology page. If you find something you disagree with, tell us — the calculator improves fastest when people push back on our numbers.

Where to start

If you came here to check whether we are worth trusting before you trust a number, these are the three doors into the site:

• The rent-vs-buy calculator — enter your rent, a home price, and your horizon, and get a break-even year in under two minutes. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to dismiss.
• The methodology page — every default, every formula, and every citation, generated from the same constants the calculator runs on, so it cannot drift out of date.
• The Learn library — the long-form arguments behind the defaults. Good places to begin: the five numbers most calculators skip, break-even year in plain English, and what happens if you invest your down payment instead.

Our privacy policy and terms spell out the same promises in the language a lawyer would use. If the two ever disagree with this page, this page is the one we intend to be held to.