Program · Household Cost Tools
Two household-cost indices, delivered as one program.
The True Cost Basket Index and the True Shelter & Family Cost Index were built from a documented, repeatable recipe and launched together — and carried through a live publishing incident without ever shipping a broken state to readers. This page is the program lens; the analytical depth is in each tool's case study.
Tool One — TCBI
True Cost Basket Index — a five-domain weekly household basket, tract resolution inside fifteen mega-counties
Tool Two — TSCI
True Shelter & Family Cost Index — the fixed monthly shelter-and-family nut at the county grain
Delivery
Built from a documented recipe · launched together on 2026-05-12
Sources
EIA, BLS, USDA, Census ACS5, DOL, NAIC — all federal public domain, every value provenance-flagged
The Program in Brief
One recipe, two tools, one launch.
The True Cost Basket Index and the True Shelter & Family Cost Index answer two halves of the same household question: what does a week of variable costs run, and what does the fixed monthly nut run? They were not built as two unrelated projects that happened to ship near each other. They were run as one program — built from a single documented recipe for federal-grade household-cost indices, sharing a provenance discipline where every value carries a source flag, and launched together so a reader arrives at a complete picture rather than half of one.
Treating the two tools as one program is the leadership decision on this page. It set a shared standard, a shared build cadence, and a shared launch window — and it meant that when a publishing problem hit one tool during launch, the response was a program response, not a scramble.
The Two Tools
What each tool delivers.
TCBI · Weekly Variable Cost
True Cost Basket Index
A five-domain weekly household basket cost — gas, pantry, plate, restaurant, and a composite — across all fifty states and 3,142 counties, with tract resolution inside fifteen mega-counties (roughly 17,500 tracts) and 262 New York City Neighborhood Tabulation Areas.
Built from EIA Weekly Retail Gasoline, BLS APU and CPI, the USDA Thrifty Food Plan, and Census ACS5. Every value carries a provenance flag.
Read the TCBI Case Study →TSCI · Monthly Fixed Cost
True Shelter & Family Cost Index
The fixed monthly shelter-and-family nut at the county grain across all 3,222 U.S. counties plus Puerto Rico — rent, mortgage, homeowner and renter insurance, and childcare — with ZIP search across 33,791 mapped ZIPs and a side-by-side two-county comparator.
Built from Census ACS5, the DOL National Database of Childcare Prices, and NAIC HO-3 / HO-4 insurance tables.
Read the TSCI Case Study →Run as a Program
Three decisions that made it a program.
A documented recipe
Both tools were built from the same written, repeatable recipe for a federal-grade household-cost index — source selection, join discipline, provenance flagging, and a methodology page. The recipe is the reason the second tool did not have to relearn the first tool's lessons.
A shared provenance standard
Every value in both tools carries a provenance flag back to its federal source. That is not a feature bolted on at the end; it was a program-level standard set before either tool was built, so neither could ship a number a reader could not trace.
A joint launch window
The tools launched together on 2026-05-12 so the household-cost picture arrived complete. A joint launch concentrates the risk into one window — which is exactly why the publishing incident below was caught and handled inside that window.
Risk Managed in Flight
A publishing incident, handled inside the launch window.
The host compresses files on the way out, and that compression has a buffer cap: a static file above roughly one megabyte can return a server error on a compressed request rather than serving. During the joint launch, the larger of the two tools tripped that cap — a real publishing failure, mid-launch, on a page that was supposed to be going live.
The program response was structural, not a patch. The tool was re-architected into a lazy-loading split: a small shell page well under the buffer cap, with the heavy county dataset and secondary features loaded separately after the shell. The result is a tool that ships cleanly, a documented cause-and-fix recorded for the next build, and a launch window that closed with both tools live rather than one tool live and one returning errors. The incident did not derail the program because the program had a place to put it — a build log, a fix, and a lesson carried forward.
How this program sits in the section
The household cost tools are presented here through the program lens — a shared recipe, a shared standard, a joint launch, and an incident handled in flight. They do not carry the full chartered artifact set that the Workforce Stability program does: a standalone charter, a formal risk register, an executive deck.
What this program does carry is the same operating discipline, evidenced in its own way — a documented build recipe, a provenance standard applied to every value, and a methodology page for each tool. The full methodology and the attribution for every domain live in the two case studies.
Go Deeper
The full case studies.
Each tool has its own case study — what it is and is not, who it is built for, the four moves to get an answer, the interactive map, and the attribution for every domain.
Work Together
A program has a place to put an incident.
A documented recipe, a standard set before the build, and a launch window that closes clean even when something breaks in it. If your team needs that kind of delivery discipline, let's talk.