How this site works, and what it will not do

Doll Budget Guide is a total-cost planner for adults facing a first purchase. It answers one question: how should the total be split, which amounts are known, and what should be adjusted — form, material or expectations — before browsing. It is not a shop, quotes no prices, and invents no amounts.

The core promise is visibility: budget uncertainty made explicit, as cost lines with known / estimate / confirm states, instead of a precise-looking number with nothing behind it.

The budget plan asks five questions with fixed enum answers (no amounts, no ZIP codes, no free text) and applies a fixed priority: destination costs first — they can move the total more than any product choice — then budget pressure, then material clarity, before calling a direction workable.

Rules and result copy are versioned. Current version: 1.0, last reviewed 2026-08-23. The routing lives in one pure function so verified CostRule data can extend it without touching the interface.

Cost fields come from categories of sources: seller policy and specification documents for delivery and tax lines, maker care guidance for first-use essentials, and the seller's own upgrade pricing where it exists. The site cites source types, never live listings.

Every known line requires an amount, a currency, a source and a dated updatedAt. Anything less degrades to confirm and never joins a total. Regions differ structurally — delivery tiers, tax treatment, import steps — so no line is portable between destinations without its own confirmation.

No competitor snapshots, scraped pages or search results are used as user-facing pricing. They may help choose article questions, never numbers.

This MVP is a structured cost planner, not a price calculator: COST_LINES ships empty, every scenario shows item composition and status badges only, and no page displays a currency amount or an "under X" claim. When verified first-party data is connected, only same-currency, same-region, unexpired known lines may join a total — estimates and confirms stay visually separate and never masquerade as a final price.

If a guide needs an example, it uses currency-free category examples labelled as not a quote.

The budget plan stores your five enum answers in sessionStorage; the cost checklist stores tick-marks in localStorage under this site's key alone — clearing it never touches other sites. No names, addresses, payment information, amounts or free text, and nothing in URLs.

Self-hosted Umami page-view analytics (um.dollhelp.com) runs on this site — cookieless, no personal data, no cross-site tracking. Custom tool events are forwarded to the same self-hosted Umami endpoint as enum-only payloads: site and tool identifiers, result type and checklist states. Individual answers never leave the browser.

This site is maintained by a small editorial team. Companion tool sites (first-purchase path, material, space) are sibling projects under the same ownership and are labelled as companion tools wherever they appear.

Curated picks and partner links: pages mix locally hosted example photos with partner-store listings. Partner links are marked on the card and may earn us a commission at no extra cost to the reader; picks never influence the tools' logic, and no pick can change a result.

A budget status is a reading of your conditions, not a verdict on what you can afford, and never a promise that any purchase fits. Amounts, where they eventually appear, carry their dates — prices, delivery tiers and tax rules all move.

Content is written for adults only. The site carries an adult content rating and uses no imagery or language sexualizing minors, ambiguous ages, or school contexts.

The layout is migrated from the free SaaSCandy Next.js template (kept for audit in template-source/), with its SaaS pricing, auth and subscription structures removed. The cost-sheet graphic is original vector work owned by this project.

Product imagery appears only inside the clearly framed curated-picks sections — locally hosted example photos and partner listing images. Nothing elsewhere should be read as showing a purchasable product. Placeholder photos collected from third-party listings were removed from all pages in September 2026; nothing on any page should be read as showing a purchasable product.