Money Feels Like
A relative-buying-power lens, and a companion to "Spend Elon Musk's Money." That toy showed how vast a fortune is; this one shows how a price feels at different wealth levels. Set your net worth and a price, and every tier of the wealth ladder gets the equivalent purchase — the one that costs them the same fraction of what they have.
Equal felt-pain is the whole point: a billionaire's casual $20,000 lands the same as your $10 lunch. It runs entirely in your browser — no account, no server, no data leaves the page.
How to Play
Tune the two inputs and read the ladder:
- Set your net worth — it defaults to the US median (~$190k).
- Type a price, or tap a catalog item to set it for you.
- Read the seven-tier ladder ($1M up to $1T): each tier shows the equal-% equivalent dollar amount plus that amount as a multiple of a familiar item — "$20,000 is about 1.3× a Rolex."
Change either input and watch every tier's equivalent — and its item multiple — update.
How It's Built
A small, strictly-typed TypeScript toy bundled into static assets — no WASM, no server logic, no backend. It runs entirely in the browser:
- Equal-% engine — each tier's equivalent is the same fraction of net worth (
price / yourNetWorth × tierNetWorth), across a fixed seven-tier ladder of round net worths from $1M to $1T. - One catalog, double duty — the same item list (~34 entries from a $6 coffee to $300B) feeds both the clickable price presets and the reverse-lookup pool that expresses each tier's amount as a multiple of a familiar item ("0.5× an Xbox").
- TypeScript (strict) — the catalog, the equal-% engine, and the nearest-item reverse-lookup are typed and unit-tested with Vitest.
- Vite, emoji-first — bundles the source into a few tens of KB of minified HTML/JS/CSS, committed as static assets and served directly (no Node at runtime); icons are emoji, no image pipeline.