DwellQ Help

No. The free analysis works instantly with no signup, no email, and no personal information required. Just enter your numbers and see your results. An account is created when you start a free trial or upgrade to Q+ — you’ll enter an email and password as part of the signup flow.

At a minimum: the home price you're considering, your expected down payment, your current or expected rent, how long you plan to stay, and a rough mortgage rate. Adding your income unlocks the affordability check. The tool has sensible defaults for everything else — property tax, insurance, maintenance, growth rates — so you can start immediately and refine later.

Your analysis updates in real time as you adjust any input — no resubmitting or reloading. However, if you’re not signed in, your inputs aren’t saved between sessions — if you close the page, you’ll need to re-enter your numbers. Q+ users can save up to 10 scenarios — the Scenarios tab — with notes, a 1–5 star rating, and quick tags. These are synced to your account and persist across devices, browsers, and browser clears, making it easy to pick up where you left off or compare different homes over time.

The engine simulates every single month of your time horizon — up to 480 months (40 years) — using your actual inputs. Nothing is averaged or annualized. That said, the output is only as good as the assumptions you feed it. Home appreciation, investment returns, and rent growth are projections, not guarantees. Tax calculations are simplified estimates and may not reflect your full financial situation. The tool is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, and is designed to help you understand the sensitivity of each variable — not predict the future or replace professional advice.

Each month, the engine calculates both paths independently. For the buy path: mortgage payment (principal + interest via standard amortization), property tax, insurance, maintenance, HOA, PMI — or, if you pick an FHA, VA, or USDA loan, that program's financed upfront fee plus its ongoing mortgage insurance — FHA MIP or the USDA annual fee, while VA charges none — and utilities. For the rent path: rent payment, renter's insurance, utilities, and the remaining capital invested at your specified return rate. The monthly cost difference between buying and renting is added to (or withdrawn from) the renter's investment portfolio. Net worth is compared at the end of each month. You can verify any calculation by checking the year-by-year tables — in the Buyer tab open the Your loan section, and see the Renter tab.

The engine does not model: inflation-adjusted purchasing power, variable maintenance costs by home age, mortgage escrow timing, local tax assessment ratios that differ from market value, or life events like job changes or family changes. It also assumes constant annual rates for appreciation, investment returns, and rent growth — real markets fluctuate. Capital gains tax on both the renter’s investment portfolio and the buyer’s home sale (including the $250K/$500K Section 121 exclusion) can be switched on with the “Include Capital Gains Taxes” toggle, under “Capital Gains at Exit” in the Tax Modeling section — that section is part of Q+. These simplifications mean results are directional estimates, not precise forecasts.

Defaults are based on widely cited national averages: property tax at 1.1% (U.S. Census ACS 2023), homeowner’s insurance at 0.30% (Insurance Information Institute 2024), maintenance at 0.5% (conservative end — many advisors suggest budgeting 1–2% annually, particularly for older homes), rent growth at 3% (BLS CPI Shelter 2024), home appreciation at 3.0% (FHFA HPI long-run average), and investment returns at 7% (S&P 500 historical nominal return minus ~3% average inflation). Default values are reviewed annually. Insurance varies more by state than any other cost — the free estimator at dwellq.io/tools/insurance turns your state, deductible, and home age into a range you can plug in. On the free tier, property tax, insurance, PMI rate, home appreciation, investment return, rent growth, and mortgage term (15/20/30-yr) are all editable in the input panel; closing costs, selling costs, and maintenance are shown there as read-only defaults and become editable with Q+.

Most free calculators compare monthly payments and stop there. They ignore the renter’s invested savings, skip selling costs, and don’t simulate wealth over time. The free tier here already does all of that — month-by-month simulation, break-even analysis, and a basic report you can email to yourself. Q+ adds tax intelligence, capital gains modeling, ARM loans, refinance simulation, early-payoff planning, property comparison, and an unabridged report with complete tax breakdowns — the kind of detail that can meaningfully change the outcome of your analysis. Q+ also lets you ask questions about your own results in plain English and describe what-if scenarios in a sentence — every answer is drawn from figures the engine already computed, never invented — within a fair-use limit of 500 AI requests a month.

Run the numbers anyway. Many people are surprised by the result. Across the 44 city scenarios we publish, buying overtakes renting as early as 1–2 years in one market and as late as 27–28 years in another — and in 19 of those markets it does not overtake renting at all inside the 30-year horizon. Where you land depends on your own price-to-rent ratio, your appreciation assumption, and whether tax benefits are included. The point of the tool is to replace gut feelings with actual projections based on your specific situation.

No. DwellQ is a decision-support tool that helps you model outcomes based on your inputs. It does not recommend buying or renting. For personalized guidance, consult a licensed financial advisor.

The calculation engine runs entirely in your browser using client-side JavaScript — your figures reach our servers only when you ask for something that needs them: saving a scenario, emailing yourself a report, or using the Q+ assistant. If you save a scenario to your account, those inputs and results are stored securely in Supabase (our database provider) so you can access them across devices. If you email yourself a report, the report contents are delivered through Resend, our email provider. When you create a Q+ account, your email and a cryptographic hash of your password are stored via Supabase. Payment is processed by Stripe — we never see or store your full card number. If you use the Q+ assistant or AI report summary, your analysis is sent to Anthropic, the AI provider, to write the response — it is not stored by DwellQ and not used to train AI models. We never sell, rent, or share your data with third parties for marketing. For full details, see our Privacy Policy.

Your email address is stored securely via Supabase, and the report is delivered through Resend, our email delivery provider. The report itself contains your analysis results — the same numbers you see on your dashboard — so that data passes through Resend’s servers during delivery. We do not store copies of your report on our own servers. Sensitive details like income or tax filing status are not stored in your user profile.

When you upgrade to Q+, your account credentials (email and hashed password) are stored via Supabase, and your payment is processed through Stripe. The calculation engine still runs entirely in your browser. If you save scenarios, those inputs and results are stored in your Supabase account for cross-device access — only you can see them. If you use the Q+ assistant or AI report summary, your analysis is sent to Anthropic, the AI provider, to write the response. We never sell your data, and our service providers (Supabase, Stripe, Resend, Anthropic) process it only to run the service. See our Privacy Policy for full details.

When you ask a question about your results, run a plain-English what-if, or generate an AI report summary, your current analysis — your inputs and the results computed from them — is sent to Anthropic, PBC, whose model writes the response. Every answer is grounded in figures the engine already computed: the AI explains your numbers, it never computes or invents them. DwellQ does not store your questions or the analysis sent with them, and under Anthropic’s commercial terms they are not used to train AI models. If you’re not a Q+ subscriber, no AI feature runs and nothing is sent. Full details are in the Privacy Policy.

Email support@dwellq.io. Whether it's a question about your analysis results, Q+ features, billing, or a bug report — we read every message and typically respond within 24 hours.

Q+ comes with a 7-day free trial, no credit card required, so you can explore every feature — Tax Intelligence, ARM modeling, refinance scenarios, and full reports — before committing. At the end of the trial your account reverts to the free tier unless you purchase; it never converts to a paid subscription on its own. Every purchase is also covered by a 30-day money-back guarantee: if Q+ isn’t useful, one email to support@dwellq.io within 30 days gets you a full refund. Your receipt arrives by email from Stripe at purchase — need it re-sent, email support@dwellq.io.