See what parents really pay for childcare.
Live app → https://royce1998.github.io/totrate/
Daycare pricing is a black box. Centers rarely publish rates, so parents cold-call a dozen places just to guess what's normal — for what is often their second-biggest expense after rent. TotRate fixes that: it shows the real going rate near you, tells you whether a quote is fair, and compares every care option — instantly, privately, in your browser.
This project is an exercise in copying the success pattern of levels.fyi into a brand-new domain. levels.fyi boomed by attacking information asymmetry in a high-stakes money decision, with crowdsourced data that gets better as more people contribute, wrapped in a dead-simple tool that's useful on day one.
The critical, easy-to-miss requirement is that the data has to be a comparable unit. "Google L5 SWE in SF" is comparable across thousands of people, so pooling it produces signal. A "kitchen remodel," by contrast, is not — every house, scope, and finish differs, so "what others paid" is noise. That kills home-renovation price transparency as a levels.fyi analog.
Childcare passes the comparable-unit test. "Full-time infant care at a daycare center in Austin" is a genuinely comparable bucket, and a specific center's monthly tuition is a hard number. So pooled prices mean something — exactly the property that makes transparency valuable.
It also checks every other box:
- Brutal information asymmetry — prices are rarely listed; you have to call around.
- Passionate community — new parents obsessively compare notes.
- Crowdsourceable + network effects — "add what you pay" improves it for everyone.
- Viral hook — "Is your daycare overcharging?"
- Wide open — Care.com is a marketplace, not a price-transparency tool.
- Useful solo, day one — the estimator, fair-price checker, and option comparison work before any network exists.
- Estimate cost — the going monthly rate for your state/metro, care type, child age, and schedule, with a comparison to state & national averages and your cost as a share of local median income (flagged against the U.S. 7% "affordable" benchmark).
- Is my price fair? — enter a quote and see its percentile in your local market, a plain-English verdict, and how much you're over/under per year.
- Compare care options — daycare center vs. home daycare vs. nanny vs. nanny share vs. au pair, sorted by cost, with each option's pros, cons, and hidden costs (nanny payroll taxes, au pair program fees, etc.).
- Real prices near you — browse reported prices, filterable by care type.
- Add what you pay — a 30-second, pre-filled contribution flow.
- Private & shareable — everything runs client-side; shareable links encode the scenario, not your identity.
- Parents submit a price via the pre-filled GitHub issue form ("Add what you pay").
- A maintainer verifies and appends it to
public/community.json. - The live site fetches
community.jsonat runtime, so new reports appear without a code redeploy — real community data sitting right next to the estimates.
React + TypeScript + Vite + Tailwind CSS + Recharts. No backend, no database, no tracking. Static site auto-deployed to GitHub Pages via GitHub Actions.
npm install
npm run dev # http://localhost:5173/totrate/
npm run build
npm run previewEstimates start from state-level average costs for full-time, center-based infant care (compiled from public averages), then adjust for metro, age, care type, and schedule; the fair-price checker models the local price distribution. These are estimates for guidance only — not financial advice. Sample reports seed the "real prices" list until enough community data arrives. Always confirm pricing directly with providers.
MIT © royce1998