Geekabode terms (draft)

DRAFT: owner and counsel must review before launch

These draft terms describe Geekabode's educational estimates, written reads, accounts, credits and paid links. Pricing, refunds and final legal terms remain open for owner and counsel review before launch.

What Geekabode is

Geekabode is an educational calculator. It is meant for adults 18 or older in the United States. Geekabode is not a lender, mortgage broker or real estate agent: it does not make loans, take loan applications or represent buyers or sellers. It compares what buying a home now could cost against waiting, using numbers you type and public data. Every result on the calculator carries the line Educational estimate, not financial advice. Nothing here is an offer, an approval, or advice to buy, wait, borrow, or refinance, and no figure on the site predicts what a market will do.

How the numbers are produced

Pressing Run computes calculator scenarios in your browser. Separate written-read and listing-analysis actions send the inputs needed for those requests to this site's server. Location searches and city comparisons also make requests, as described on the Privacy page.

• Assumptions. Several fields arrive prefilled — closing costs, refinance costs, rate changes and price changes are set around the official forecast — and you can edit them. An assumption you leave alone is still an assumption, not a measured fact, and the answer names the basis it used.
• Missing inputs. Items you leave blank stay out of that part of the math. They are reported as not counted, the answer lists what was left blank, and it says how that changes the result instead of quietly inventing a number.
• Sources. Mortgage-rate observations come from Freddie Mac through the FRED service of the St. Louis Fed. Forecast scenarios use the bundled Fannie Mae housing forecast. City and market figures come from bundled Realtor.com and FHFA data files, property-tax rates from the U.S. Census Bureau, and listing results from the ZillAPI listing data provider. Sources are named next to the figures they support.
• Staleness. Rate observations older than 14 days are marked stale, and after 90 days their value is not shown at all. Stale data is displayed as stale rather than replaced with a made-up rate, and a failed source is reported as unavailable.

The written read and the AI providers

The written read is produced by a third-party AI provider. The code supports OpenRouter (which routes each request to a free third-party model) and Gemini models: OpenRouter is used first when its key is configured and Gemini is the fallback. Which keys are actually configured in the live deployment is an owner setting, not something this page can read from the code.

The provider receives the location text when it reads as a city or a ZIP, the timeline, the loan term, a price band instead of your exact price, a down-payment band instead of your exact amount, the names of the cost fields you left blank, scenario rows rounded to the nearest $500, the scenario basis, and the public evidence items. It does not receive your email address, your account id, or your IP address from this code, and provider keys stay on the server.

Each answer is shown with its own disclaimer — informational analysis based on the cited data, not financial advice — and it can be wrong; treat it as one more read of the same public data. A successful answer is stored server-side under a digest of the validated inputs so the same question can be shown again, and the model's own text may repeat the location you typed. Written reads need a sign-in by default. Signed-out reads are optional and are switched off unless the operator turns them on.

Accounts, credits and listing analyses

You sign in with an email address, using a one-time code or link, or through a sign-in provider when the account service offers one. The email address is sent from your browser to the account service. This site's server verifies your bearer token with that service and obtains your account details, including your id, email address and email confirmation time. The account page shows your id, email and credit balance.

Credits are counted in a credit ledger, and a one-time free grant is recorded against a normalized form of your email so it can be given only once. Every fresh listing analysis costs one credit. Exact cached rereads of a saved analysis stay free. Recorded paid attempts link the charge, any refund and the outcome, so a reversal is tied to its own charge. These records are kept to prevent duplicate charges or refunds and have no routine expiry purge. Cached listing analyses are reused for 30 days.

Payments

Payments are switched off on the live site. The code refuses to run payments unless a test-mode switch is set, it refuses production outright, and it accepts only test-mode keys and test sessions — so the production deployment does not accept payments, and no purchase can complete there. This draft does not change that setting; turning payments on, and any wording about price, refunds or credits, is an owner decision made separately.

Where test checkout is enabled outside production, checkout is hosted by Stripe. This site sends a user id, pack id, credit count and request id as checkout metadata. Card details are entered on Stripe's page. Stripe's own records and retention are governed by its policy and remain an owner review item.

Paid links

Some links on the site are paid partner links, and the footer keeps the site's disclosure in its original words: "Advertising disclosure: Any paid partner link is marked next to it. Partners never receive your inputs." A paid link is marked next to the partner it points to, opens in a new tab with a sponsored relationship in its link attributes, and comes from an operator-configured list of hosts, so which links are live is the owner's choice. Paid links can carry tracking parameters configured by the operator. Following one leaves this site entirely — the partner's own site applies there — and nothing from your calculator is sent to a partner by this site.

What this draft leaves open

Pricing, refunds and final legal terms remain open for owner and counsel review. The owner also needs to confirm the service settings and retention questions listed on the Privacy page before these pages can be finalized.

The calculator names the sources used for its figures. Review the assumptions and any missing-input or stale-data notices before using an estimate.