Challenge
The Roanoke Regional Partnership markets the region to businesses and the people who work for them, and one of its strongest arguments is cost: a salary goes further here. Its Cost Advantages page made that case with an embedded third-party calculator that the Partnership could not style, extend, or control.
The Partnership wanted its own tool: one that showed what a salary is worth in the Roanoke region, broken down by housing, groceries, and other costs, plus the time people get back from a shorter commute, and that could run on its Get2KnowNoke site as well.
Approach
I had worked with the Partnership before, on its 2025 annual report, built as an interactive web report rather than a PDF. For the calculator, the first gate was the data: before any building, the licensed cost of living provider had to confirm the Partnership could show its data in a custom interface instead of the provider’s own embed.
The calculator was built as one plugin serving two sites, with a brand switch for each. The licensed data key stays on the server, responses are cached because the index only changes quarterly, and the public endpoint is rate limited, so the Partnership’s paid data cannot be scraped through it.
Delivery
Visitors pick where they are moving from and enter a salary. The calculator shows the equivalent salary in the Roanoke region, the difference in housing, groceries, utilities, transportation, and health care, the commute time they would get back each year, and a plain bottom line.
During review, the Partnership reported commute savings that did not look right and asked whether swapping in their own spreadsheet would fix it. Their spreadsheet turned out to be the same Census measure the calculator already used, so swapping it would have changed nothing. The real fault was in how city names were matched to metro areas: Alexandria, Virginia was landing on Alexandria, Louisiana, and Arlington, Virginia on the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington area of Texas. Matching now checks every state a metro spans, and where nothing matches confidently, the calculator shows no figure rather than a wrong one.
Outcome
The calculator runs on roanoke.org and Get2KnowNoke from one codebase, in each site’s own brand, and the third-party embed is gone. A $70,000 salary from Alexandria, Virginia now correctly shows the D.C. area commute, and about 92 hours a year that a move to Roanoke gives back.