The method
MTC Lab is one person building software in Finland. One half watches public money, public registers and public power. The other half makes tools and games. This page is the part that is easy to skip and hard to fake: where the material comes from, what is done to it, what is refused, and what any of it costs you.
The watching half - vahti in Finland, Vigla across the European Union, Asuntodata and its Danish and Swedish siblings for housing - takes information that is already public, already published, and already unread, and puts it where one person can find it. Public bodies publish enormous amounts, and it then sinks into portals and PDF archives nobody has time to watch. These sites read those sources on a schedule and show what moved.
The making half - Gamecove, Facet, Forge and PageForge, keeplocal - is the opposite problem: work that used to need a team, a budget or a subscription now fits in a browser tab, so it is built that way and handed over rather than rented.
Every figure on a watching site comes from an official publisher, through the interface that publisher provides for exactly this purpose, under a licence that permits it. Statistics Finland, the National Land Survey, the Finnish Tax Administration, the Finnish Patent and Registration Office, the State Treasury, Traficom, Tukes, Statistics Denmark, Statistics Sweden, the European Commission and the EU agencies. The publisher, the licence and the update cadence are named on the product's own sources page, section by section, and repeated on the attribution page here.
Nothing is scraped out of people. There is no crawler collecting profiles, no purchased marketing list, no data broker in the chain. Where an official register happens to contain the name of a private individual - a trademark applicant, for instance - that is the register's own published content, shown as it is published and linked back to the source.
Nothing is resold either: these are reading rooms for open data, not a data business with a login in front.
A figure appears with the year or quarter it describes and the body that published it, or it does not appear. When a source stops publishing something, the gap is stated rather than papered over: Asuntodata says plainly that individual home sale prices stopped being free in June 2026 and that its price figures are Statistics Finland area-level statistics, and vahti's cost-of-living section marks where a measured price ends and an estimate begins. When coverage is uneven, the unevenness is printed next to the number, as with the Finnish building-permit register, which is still in a transition period and varies by municipality.
The same rule runs through the making half. A daily game is only built when its subject has a public, openly licensed dataset behind it, which is why Gamecove has a volcano game and no film game. Facet's learning packs name their sources in the pack itself. Forge's sprite engine is deterministic: the same inputs return the byte-identical image, forever, with no image model in the loop.
These sites show what the registers say. They do not tell you what to do about it. The housing sites carry it in their own words: the service is not investment, financial or legal advice, and no financial decision should rest on it alone. There is no scoring of neighbourhoods, no valuation of your flat, no recommendation of a supplier, no "you should apply for this grant". Where a calculator exists, it prints the assumptions it used and what it leaves out, and the figure it produces is arithmetic you can check, not counsel.
The line is deliberate. A tool that hands out advice takes on responsibility for the reader's money or safety; statistics, sources and links to the official record do not.
Reading is free everywhere. vahti has no fees and no billing at all, and its email alerts are free in the sections that have them. Vigla is free to browse and search, with no accounts. The housing sites are free, and the Danish and Swedish ones describe themselves as non-commercial. Gamecove, Facet, PageForge and keeplocal are free, with no account required to use them.
One paid layer exists, and it is aimed at machines rather than readers: the Finnish and Danish housing sites sell a bulk export of their whole dataset for about five cents per call, paid by the calling program itself. Every page a person reads stays free, and so does everything on Forge, whose per-render charge was switched off in September 2026. If anything else ever charges, the page that charges will say so on itself, in plain words, before it asks.
This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics and asks for nothing; the only thing kept in your browser is whether you chose the light or the dark theme. The privacy and cookies pages say so in full.
The products differ, and each says so on its own pages. Gamecove keeps your streak and your finished puzzles in your own browser and runs no analytics and no advertising. The housing sites collect no personal data and use no third-party tracking cookies, only cookieless aggregate visitor counts. Vigla has no sign-in at all. vahti does have accounts, because an email alert needs somewhere to go: it processes your address, your session and the watches you saved, and nothing else. keeplocal goes furthest - its file tools run in your browser over WebAssembly, so your file is never uploaded, and every page prints a receipt of what it just did on the network so you can check the claim instead of trusting it.
Tests here have to prove the reader got the result, not that a function returned success. The rule came from a real defect: a suite entirely green while the product handed the player nothing. So the gates drive the built artifact through the whole journey the way a person would, and every bug found becomes a permanent test that is proven to fail when the fix is removed.
Changes are staged on a separate machine and walked through as a user before they reach production. Data work has its own gate first: the real endpoint, fields, coverage and licence are probed live before anything is built on a source, because a section built on an assumption about a register is a section that lies quietly.
All of it is one person's work: the registers, the ingestion, the design, the copy, the tests and the deploys. That is the reason for the restraint on every page above. One person cannot promise a support desk, cannot underwrite your decisions and cannot pretend to be an institution, so none of these sites do. What one person can do is name every source, publish the method, keep the reading free, and fix what is reported.
[email protected]Corrections are the most useful message you can send: a wrong figure can usually be traced to its source and fixed in both places.
Elsewhere: vahti·Vigla·Asuntodata·Gamecove·Facet·Forge·keeplocal