As life becomes more important, so does the city as the space in which we live. The growing prominence of cities and life has brought Numbeo to more people’s attention.
Numbeo is a crowd-sourced global database and the world’s largest cost-of-living database. Its range of data includes housing indicators, perceived crime rates, healthcare quality, transport quality and other statistics for every country and region.
On the Numbeo homepage, you can find the three main types of data it offers: cost of living, property prices and quality of life. The three figures are not only presented most straightforwardly, but you can also compare and calculate the statistics through the options on the page and even see the ranking of the figures. For example, you can compare the cost of living for a family of four in London and New York in a month. You can also see the 2022 Health Care Index ranking so far and find that the current data shows Glasgow is the city with the highest Health Care Index in the UK.
Numbeo was initially founded in 2009 by Mladen Adamovic, a former Google software engineer. All you need to do is provide your email address and your city to register on Numbeo, and then you can submit the most realistic data that happens to you. As a result, almost anyone can contribute to the site’s data. It is even possible to comment under the available data, point out errors or add information, all of which can be done anonymously. More than 700,000 people have contributed over 8 million pieces of price data for over 10,000 cities.
Although it is a crowdsourced data site, Numbeo still has its own operations team to manage the data and dictate how it is used. According to the terms published on the website, the data can be used free of charge for personal use. However, Numbeo also has premium services for Commercial License, Insights and API. The Commercial License is aimed primarily at companies, with prices corresponding to the three sizes of companies, small, medium and large, that can use the data for commercial purposes. Alternatively, Insights is a more detailed version of the cost of living data, providing additional precision in standard deviance, number of item contributors, data percentiles and scatter graphs. The API paid service is divided into three price points: Basic, Professional and Enterprise. This is for the convenience of those who need to use Numbeo data in their software applications.
Thus, the data resources on Numbeo are not entirely open but are being commodified. Such an outcome is predictable, as Numbeo is not a purely shared data site. The data transmitted by users was more fragmented, and the site developed the statistics, integration and functionality of this shared data to create what we now see as Numbeo. The site is free for everyday and academic use, which covers most people who use Numbeo. While additional services are available to a small number of users, depending on the category of access.
Numbeo can still be called a commons-based media due to its features and attributes. But it is not so pure, as it still has paid items present. And as a profitable web-based resource platform, Numbeo is also expected to provide a better service to address the criticism it has received about disinformation.