Introducing CostMaps: One API for Global Data Across 200+ Countries

The Problem

If you have ever built an application that compares countries -- whether for relocation planning, travel budgeting, market research, or remote work decisions -- you know the pain. Cost of living data lives in one place. Salary benchmarks live somewhere else. Safety scores, climate data, and economic indicators each come from their own source, with their own format, their own quirks, and their own reliability problems.

We built CostMaps to fix that.

Developers building global comparison tools face the same set of challenges over and over again.

The World Bank API gives you economic indicators, but the response format is deeply nested and the data is often two years old. The WHO has health data for 194 countries, but their API returns XML and requires understanding their indicator code system. OECD data is comprehensive but paginated in unusual ways. Open-Meteo is excellent for climate but covers weather, not cost of living. And none of these sources agree on country codes, date formats, or data structure.

The result is that every developer ends up writing the same normalization layer. They build adapters for six different APIs, handle inconsistent country identifiers, manage caching to avoid rate limits, and spend weeks on data plumbing before they write a single line of product code.

This is the work that CostMaps eliminates.

Our Solution

CostMaps is a REST API that aggregates data from authoritative global sources and serves it through a single, consistent interface. Every endpoint uses ISO 3166 country codes. Every response comes back as clean JSON with standard pagination. Every data point is sourced from a reputable institution.

The API covers nine domains: cost of living, economic indicators, real estate, jobs and salaries, healthcare, education, safety and crime, transportation, and climate. That means a single API key gives you access to the kind of data that would normally require integrating with half a dozen different providers.

Beyond basic data retrieval, CostMaps provides a unified comparison endpoint that lets you compare multiple countries across all domains in a single request. There are also ranking endpoints for building leaderboards and an export endpoint for generating reports.

Response times are under 200 milliseconds, backed by Redis caching. Rate limiting is handled per-tier so you do not need to build your own throttling logic.

Data Sources

We believe in transparency about where our data comes from. CostMaps aggregates from the following sources:

World Bank -- economic indicators including GDP, inflation rates, and unemployment figures for 200+ countries

OECD -- purchasing power parity indices and cost of living benchmarks

WHO Global Health Observatory -- healthcare data covering life expectancy, health system metrics, and disease prevalence for 194 countries

BIS (Bank for International Settlements) -- residential property price indices for 57 countries

Open-Meteo -- climate and weather data for 260+ cities

AQICN -- real-time air quality index data for 60+ cities

Each data source is ingested through automated workflows that run on a regular schedule. Data is normalized, validated, and stored in PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB for efficient time-series queries.

Getting Started

Getting started with CostMaps takes about a minute. Sign up at costmaps.com to get your API key, then start making requests.

Here is a simple example that fetches cost of living data for Germany:

import requests

API_KEY = "your_api_key_here"
BASE_URL = "https://api.costmaps.com/api/v1"

# Get cost of living data for Germany
response = requests.get(
    f"{BASE_URL}/cost-of-living/countries/DE",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}"}
)

data = response.json()
print(f"Country: {data['country']['name']}")

for category, items in data["categories"].items():
    print(f"\n{category}:")
    for item in items:
        print(f"  {item['name']}: ${item['price_usd']:.2f}")

You can also compare multiple countries in a single request:

# Compare cost of living across three countries
response = requests.post(
    f"{BASE_URL}/compare",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}"},
    json={
        "base_country_code": "US",
        "compare_country_codes": ["DE", "JP", "BR"],
    }
)

comparison = response.json()
for result in comparison["results"]:
    print(f"{result['country_name']}: "
          f"COL index {result['cost_of_living_index']}, "
          f"avg salary ${result['average_salary_usd']:,.0f}")

The free tier includes 100 API calls per day -- no credit card required. That is enough to build and test a complete integration. When you are ready to scale, paid plans start at $29 per month for 1,000 calls per day and go up to the Enterprise tier at $499 per month for 100,000 calls per day.

What's Next

CostMaps is live and actively maintained. Here is what we are working on next.

First, expanded city-level data. While we already cover 260+ cities for climate data, we are adding city-level granularity to cost of living, safety, and transportation domains. Second, historical data access. We are building time-series endpoints that let you track how indicators change over time -- useful for trend analysis and forecasting. Third, webhook notifications. We will be adding the ability to subscribe to data updates for specific countries or indicators, so your application stays current without polling.

We are also expanding our data sources. We are integrating additional providers for real estate transaction data, job market indicators, and education quality metrics.

If you are building something that involves global data, we would love to hear from you. Sign up at costmaps.com, explore the API, and let us know what you think at support@costmaps.com.