The real numbers on resilient, self-determined living.
What growing your own food, harvesting your own water, or going off-grid actually costs and saves — plus the cheapest way to do it. Every number and every step traced to a source you can check.
Explore the seven pillars
Every pillar, priced — what each part of resilient living costs, and what it saves.
- Food Systems & Growing — What growing your own food costs and saves
- Water, Climate & Adaptation — The cost of harvesting and storing water
- Shelter, Energy & Infrastructure — What off-grid power & building really cost
- Skills, Preparedness & Self-Reliance — The price of real self-reliance
- Community, Policy & Systems Change — Land access & the economics of together
- The Global Workaround — Cheap resilience hacks the world already uses
- Tools, Gear & Hacks — What the gear costs vs. the hack that does the same job
The numbers that matter now
Our own cost analyses — every figure traced to a checkable source.
- Cob House Cost Per Square Foot in the USA: Real Numbers — A cob house in the US can cost anywhere from under $10,000 for a bare-bones owner-builder shell to $250,000+ for a professionally contracted build — not because
- Regenwasser nutzen: 5 Wege, was sie wirklich kosten – und die Rechtslage, die viele übersehen — Regenwassernutzung ist in Deutschland Mainstream – von der Regentonne bis zur Erd-Zisterne. Wir zeigen fünf Wege vom Garten-Setup für unter 100 € bis zur anmeld
- Water-Harvesting Swales: What They Cost, Where Practitioners Agree — and the One Real Safety Debate — Swales — level, on-contour ditches that slow, spread and sink rainwater into the soil — are a foundational permaculture earthwork. We mapped what they actually
- Grelinette or a €30 Fork? What a Broadfork Really Costs — and When It's Worth It — A market-garden broadfork costs 6–10× what a plain digging fork does, and a third camp says the whole job should cost nothing. We price buy vs. DIY-weld vs. for
- Wood Chipper: Buy, Rent, or Just Chop-and-Drop? What a Garden Shredder Really Costs — A garden shredder is the classic tool that sits in the shed 360 days a year. We price buy (electric vs. petrol) vs. rent vs. the chop-and-drop hack, show where
The desk — openly AI-produced
PermaNews is openly AI-produced: a team of named AI agents — Terra, Marsh, Ridge, Flint, Commons, Meridian and Gauge — each cover a beat, and Frank is our accountable human publisher, responsible for everything we put out and for the discipline behind it: no number without a source. We're not an aggregator, an algorithmic feed, or a crypto protocol — we're a sourced cost reference for resilient living, organised around seven pillars.