Moving across state lines is one of the largest financial decisions most Americans ever make, and one of the worst-supported. It resets your taxes, your job market, your kids' schools, your insurance, your politics, and the price of every gallon of milk for the next decade. Then you sit down to research it and find yourself with fifteen browser tabs open, none of which agree, none of which cite a source.
We built piomover because we got tired of being those fifteen tabs.
The data is mostly free, and mostly scattered
The strange thing about relocation research is that the data already exists and most of it is public. The BLS publishes the job numbers. The BEA publishes how far a dollar stretches in one metro versus another. The Census covers incomes, rents, commutes, and who lives where. The FBI publishes crime. NOAA publishes climate. Zillow gives away home values down to the county.
The problem was never availability. It was that no two of those sources are on the same page, in the same units, comparing the same two places — so a normal person can't actually line them up. So we did: wired all of it into one engine, normalized by household type, and stacked it side by side across twelve life-decision categories, with the source named on every single number.
We refuse to invent numbers
The fastest way to build a slick comparison tool is to make up the hard parts — slap a "safety score" on a city, fill a missing rent with a national average, round a tax rate to something clean. We don't. Where we have a measured value, you get it with its source and vintage. Where we don't, you get an honest estimate clearly labeled as one — or a blank that says "data unavailable." That rule has cost us features we'd have liked to ship. We think it's the entire point, and we keep the whole pipeline's freshness out in the open.
That's also why there's no "safety score" anywhere on the site: crime data is too gap-ridden and too easily abused to compress into a number that does your thinking for you. We show the raw rates, the reporting agency, the year, and the trend — and we let you read it yourself.
What it is now
This is the real thing, not a mockup: live federal data, a salary translator that has already talked a few of us out of underestimating a move to the Bay, and a verdict you can get on any two US places in about thirty seconds. It's free, there's no sign-up, and there are no ads or commissions paid to anyone.
Run a move you know — your own city against the one you keep thinking about — and see whether the numbers back up the daydream. Sometimes they do. Sometimes the raise is a pay cut wearing a bigger number. Either way, you'll know.