Groundsense

The numbers are all public. Nobody can put them side by side

Anyone weighing up a move can find the house prices, the council tax, the school catchments and the flood history. Every one of those figures is published and free. What nobody has is the same figures for four different places, on one scale, sitting next to the place they already know.

Groundsense started from one household in East Dulwich weighing up Exeter. Leaving London is supposed to be the cheap move. Running a car in Exeter costs £505.10 a year more, which at that rate takes 597 years to swallow the difference in house prices. Both of those figures took one person four hours to find.

So the problem was never gathering the data. It was making two places readable against each other without either one flattering itself, for a household that has never opened a spreadsheet of local authority statistics and never will.

An instrument, not a dashboard

The interface is built as a measuring device rather than a product page. A research service has one asset, which is being believed, so nothing on screen gets dressed up and no number is made to look better than it is.

• A warm off white paper ground with white cards and 1px hairline rules, so every division is drawn rather than boxed in
• Serif figures large enough to be the first thing you read, sans for interface text, tracked mono for labels. Three families, three jobs, no overlap
• Navy reserved absolutely for one meaning, where you live now, so the baseline never shifts while you compare against it
• Nothing carried by colour alone. Every verdict shows a sign or a word beside it, because the comparison is the product and deuteranopia makes green and red useless
• Two shadows in the entire system, so depth means something genuinely floats instead of decorating a card
• House price maps covering all 360 UK local authorities, shaded on a single scale so two places read against each other rather than separately
• A twenty minute travel time layer built on Mapbox isochrones, cached on a 250m grid so it stays inside the free tier at real volume
• Security headers and domain redirects committed to the repo rather than set in a hosting dashboard, so they get reviewed like any other change

We did the positioning, the interface, the copy and the commercial site that sells it. The plan itself is researched by a person and delivered within five working days for £49, which is deliberate: the product is the judgement, and software on its own would not have earned the trust it needs.

Live at groundsense.co.uk, with the instrument built before the pitch

Most products get a landing page first and work out what they are afterwards. This one was built the other way round, so the site could show a real comparison instead of describing one.