Cost to Own

Effective August 9, 2026

Privacy Policy

Cost to Own is a free public reference site. There is no account to create, nothing to subscribe to, and no login. This page sets out exactly what is collected when you read a page here, why, and how to stop it.

What we collect

Three things, all about pages rather than people.

Page analytics Which page you viewed, the site that linked you here, your approximate city and country, and your browser type No cookies
Server logs Standard request records kept briefly by our hosting provider to deliver pages and block abuse Transient
Performance beacon Cloudflare, which serves this site, adds its own timing beacon measuring how fast pages load. It is injected at the network edge rather than by this site's code, records page timings and browser type, and sets no cookie No cookies

We do not set analytics cookies, we do not fingerprint your device, and we do not build a profile of you across visits. Your IP address is never stored. It is combined with your browser string and the current date and converted into a one-way hash so that repeat views in a single day can be counted once. That hash cannot be reversed into an IP address and cannot be linked across days.

What we do not collect

  • Your name, email or phone number while you browse. The only exceptions are the two forms you can choose to submit, the contact form and the agent connection form, and each is used solely for the purpose stated beside it.
  • Any financial information. We never ask for income, credit, bank or card details.
  • Precise location. City and country are derived from your network, not from GPS.
  • Anything you type into the calculators. Home price, down payment and rate are computed entirely in your browser and are never sent to us.

Advertising

This site is funded two ways: display advertising, and only if you choose to use the agent connection form and go on to work with the agent introduced, a standard referral fee paid by that agent, never by you. Nothing else is monetised, and no advertiser or agent can change a figure on this site. When advertising is enabled, Google and its partners may use cookies or similar technologies to serve ads and measure their performance. Google's use of advertising cookies lets it and its partners serve ads based on your visit to this and other sites.

  • You can opt out of personalised advertising at Google Ads Settings.
  • You can opt out of third-party vendor cookies at aboutads.info.
  • Readers in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are shown a consent choice before any advertising cookie is set, and can change that choice at any time.

We do not sell or share your personal information, and we have no ability to identify you personally from anything collected here.

Your rights

Residents of California, and of other jurisdictions with comparable laws, have the right to know what personal information is collected, to request deletion, and to opt out of its sale or sharing. We do not sell or share personal information, and the analytics described above are not tied to an identifiable person, so in practice there is very little held about you to disclose or delete. If you would like to make a request anyway, use the contact form and we will respond within 30 days.

To stop analytics entirely, use any browser or extension that blocks scripts. The site works normally without them.

Children

This site is intended for adults researching housing costs. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, the effective date at the top of this page changes with it. This version is effective August 9, 2026.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about any figure on this site, go through the contact form.