A city database and remote worker community combining cost of living, internet speed, safety scores, and trip planning tools.
Nomad List was built by Pieter Levels, an indie developer, and launched in 2014. It started as a spreadsheet of cities ranked by cost of living and internet speed for remote workers, and has grown into a comprehensive platform with a community, trip planning tools, and a Slack group. The core product is the city database — a searchable, filterable list of cities around the world with data on the factors that matter to remote workers.
Each city in the Nomad List database has scores for cost of living (monthly budget estimates broken down by category), internet speed (average and reliability), safety, weather, air quality, healthcare quality, and overall nomad score. The data is crowdsourced and updated by community members, which means it's more current than most travel guides but also subject to individual bias. The cost of living estimates are particularly useful — they give you a realistic monthly budget for accommodation, food, coworking, and transport in a specific city.
The community features include forums organized by city and topic, a Slack group with channels for specific locations, and a trip planning tool that shows you which other Nomad List members are in a given city at a given time. The community skews toward tech workers and digital nomads who are actively traveling, which means the advice is practical and experience-based rather than theoretical. If you're planning to spend a month in a specific city, the city-specific forum threads are worth reading before you go.
Nomad List uses a one-time payment model for community access — approximately $99 for lifetime membership. This is unusual in a world of subscriptions and gives you permanent access to the community features without ongoing cost. The city data is partially accessible for free, but the community, forums, and Slack group require the one-time payment. For someone who is seriously considering location independence, the one-time fee is reasonable. For someone who is casually curious, the free tier may be sufficient.
The trip planning tools let you compare cities side by side, filter by specific criteria (budget under $2,000/month, internet speed above 50 Mbps, warm weather), and see a timeline of where you could go based on visa requirements and seasonal weather. The visa information is particularly useful — it shows how long citizens of different countries can stay in each destination without a visa, which is a critical planning factor for location-independent workers.
Nomad List is most useful for remote workers who are actively considering or already practicing location independence — moving between cities or countries while working remotely. For home-based remote workers who have no interest in traveling, the platform offers little value. The community is also more useful if you're in the tech or creative industries, as the membership skews heavily in that direction. If you're a remote worker in a traditional industry, you may find fewer relevant connections.