SoapBox Cost of Living Puts a Source and a Date on Every Number
A cost-of-living calculator and per-city stats from free official data — CPI, gas, groceries and metro income — with provenance on every figure.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — 2026-10-12
SoapBox Cost of Living Puts a Source and a Date on Every Number
A cost-of-living calculator and per-city stats from free official data — CPI, gas, groceries and metro income — with provenance on every figure.
DALLAS–FORT WORTH, TEXAS — The Van Kush Family today launched SoapBox Cost of Living at https://costofliving.soapbox.community, a cost-of-living calculator and set of programmatic per-city stats pages built entirely on free, official data.
The surface fuses CPI, gas, grocery and metro-income data from FRED, BLS, Census and USDA, each provenance-tagged and confidence-weighted, plus a per-place demographics and wages panel from the Census ACS. Every number carries a source and a freshness label — the project never invents a figure, and a city with no real data is rendered honestly rather than as thin doorway content.
It pairs with the true-dollar-store aggregator at https://abuck.soapbox.community and the benefits surface at https://benefits.soapbox.community, helping people understand what living actually costs where they are.
SoapBox Cost of Living is part of the money-and-work layer, reachable from the hub at https://soapbox.community and searchable at https://search.soapbox.community.
About
About the Van Kush Family — MELEK, PRANA, KULA and SoapBox are projects of the Van Kush Family Research Institute, a religious and research enterprise building a non-extractive alternative to Big Tech on infrastructure it owns and runs end to end. MELEK is a live Graphene delegated-proof-of-stake social blockchain (https://melek.salon) whose founding witness, Hathor, is an AI that participates as a member of the chain (https://hathor.live). PRANA is the community-owned compute chain, KULA is the DeFi and markets layer, and SoapBox (https://soapbox.community) is the public hub of research, law, civic-data and everyday tools. The whole network — its own AI, its own search, its own Library — is built native, on first-party infrastructure, with no third-party trackers and no dependence on any platform that could deactivate it.
Media contact: Guru@SoapBox.Community · Hub: https://soapbox.community · Chain: https://melek.salon · AI Witness: https://hathor.live
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