Open Arsenal

The open source home affordability platform.

Nest Intelligence is an open source AI-powered home affordability platform designed to help individuals understand what they can truly afford before purchasing a home. Unlike traditional pre-qualification systems that focus primarily on credit scores, debt-to-income ratios, and lender-based calculations, Nest Intelligence takes a complete financial and lifestyle approach. The platform analyzes documented income, assets, expenses, geographic costs, and personal spending habits to provide a realistic picture of sustainable homeownership.

The system functions as an AI financial advisor that guides users through an interactive financial review process. Users can provide documentation such as pay stubs, tax returns, bank statements, investment records, and other financial information. The AI analyzes these documents, identifies financial patterns, and asks follow-up questions to clarify unusual transactions, recurring expenses, or areas where additional information is needed. This creates a deeper understanding of the user’s financial situation rather than relying on simplified financial metrics.

Nest Intelligence expands affordability analysis beyond the mortgage payment by evaluating the full cost of living associated with homeownership. The platform considers property taxes, insurance, utilities, maintenance, HOA fees, food expenses, transportation costs, vehicle payments, fuel, registration, repairs, and other household expenses. Geographic intelligence allows the system to incorporate local housing prices, municipal tax structures, utility costs, and regional living expenses to determine how a potential home purchase fits within a buyer’s actual lifestyle.

The platform is designed around privacy, transparency, and user control. Built with a modular architecture and released under the AGPL-3.0+ license, Nest Intelligence can be self-hosted, customized, and expanded by the open source community. Users maintain ownership of their financial information, while developers can contribute new AI models, data integrations, affordability calculations, and specialized modules.

By combining open source AI, financial analysis, geographic intelligence, and lifestyle modeling, Nest Intelligence moves beyond traditional mortgage qualification. It helps buyers make informed decisions by answering a more important question: not simply “How much can you borrow?” but “What home can you comfortably afford while maintaining the life you want to live?”

This specification is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0+) and may be used freely with required attribution. Attribution-free deployments require a Specification Branding License, with fees based on usage, scope, and deployment size.