It started with a pension and a question nobody could answer.

He did everything he was told to do. A career in the federal public service. No house, no portfolio, no inheritance coming. Just a pension, and a plan to live on it.

Then an injury at work ended the career early, and a diagnosis of dementia ended the plan.

When his family went looking for care, the money turned out not to be the hard part. The hard part was that nobody could tell them what anything cost.

All of it was public the whole time. It was spread across a paper form, a phone line, and a program almost nobody has heard of. By the time most families find it, the decision that mattered has already been made.

So we built what should have existed. You enter an income; it tells you what care costs, what the government will cover, and what to do on Monday morning. It shows its arithmetic. It cites its sources. It is free, and it will stay free.

The Care Cost Index is made by sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. People who went looking for this, found nothing, and decided that wasn't good enough.

Nobody.

Every large directory in this category is funded by the care homes it lists. That is why none of them will ever rank by affordability. The cheapest suitable home is rarely the one writing the cheque, and no business demotes its own customer.

We took the money out entirely. There are no adverts on this site, no sponsored listings, no featured placements, no referral fees, and no commission when anyone moves in. Families are never charged, and neither is anyone else. There is nothing to sell and nobody to please.

That is a deliberate constraint rather than a temporary state. The moment a home can pay for position, every number on the page becomes a negotiation. And a family reading it at eleven at night has no way to tell which parts were bought.

It also means this will never be a large business, and it was never meant to be one. Running costs are small and Loveseyland carries them. If the project ever needs more than that, it will come from grants and public funding, on the record.

We are a small volunteer team. We use AI systems to do the work of a department: reading regulation, tracking rate changes, keeping every figure current and dated.

That is not the point of the project and we would rather it never became the point. It is simply the only reason a tool of this scope can be built and kept accurate without charging the people who need it.

Ontario first, because that is where we found the problem and where the arithmetic is knowable. British Columbia and Alberta follow. Both are income-tested, and BC has already proven the model works.

But nothing about this problem is Canadian. Every country with an ageing population and a means-tested care system has the same gap, and the same silence around it. The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand are the obvious next steps. We intend to reach all of them.

The directory is incomplete. Ontario has licensed long-term care homes. We have of them, chosen to cover every region rather than every building, and we add more every week. A home missing from this directory is missing from our work, not from the system.

Retirement homes don't publish prices and no regulator requires them to, so our regional ranges are indicative rather than exact. Ontario Health atHome does not publish regional waitlists. The Ministry of Long-Term Care has eighteen datasets on the provincial open data portal and exactly one of them is open.

We would rather tell you that than invent a number.