Fit first. Then the real price.

1. Your answers

The Builder asks seven things: what you train, your space, the room size, the ceiling height, your budget, where you live and what you already own. Where you live sets the currency, the sales tax and which stores can actually deliver to you. You never need an account; if you have one, it fills these in for you.

2. What has to fit

Every product is checked against your room before it can be picked:

• Floor: it has to fit inside the room. If the big pieces together cover more than 50% of the floor, the plan warns you, because the rest is the room you need to actually move.
• Ceiling: racks and machines have to fit under it. For racks, we also look for 18 inches above the top bar so you can do pull-ups without hitting your head, and warn you if there isn't.
• Barbell room: a 7-foot bar needs about 24 inches more than its length to slide plates on. If your room is shorter, the plan says so.
• What you own: anything you already have is left out, so the budget goes to what you need.

Measurements come from the brand's own store. When a brand doesn't publish one, we say so instead of guessing.

Every product page also shows its space to use it: the piece plus the room around it you need, like 4 ft in front of a rack to walk a bar out, room at both ends of the bar to load plates, or the 2 m runway the ASTM F2115 safety standard asks for behind a treadmill. The calculators use the same rules.

3. What gets picked

For each piece your goals need, the Builder compares every option that fits and picks the best value at your door, not the lowest sticker price. The order of importance is: power rack, barbell, weight plates, bench, dumbbells, cardio machine. If the budget runs short, pieces come off the end of that list first, and the plan tells you what you'd add next. Every pick shows its reasons, its warnings and the alternatives.

4. The all-in price, worked out

Here's the real arithmetic for one piece of the sample plan on our home page (a 14 × 20 ft basement in Manitoba, Canada):

Customs: some stores ship from the US. We record whether each store pays the customs fees for you (many Canadian storefronts do) and warn you on any pick where you might pay them at the door.

Currency: Canadians see Canadian stores in Canadian dollars; Americans see US stores in US dollars. We never quietly convert a US price into a Canadian one and call it the price.

5. Keeping prices fresh

Every price carries the date we checked it. After 90 days it's marked as old, and after 180 days the Builder stops using it at all. Prices are checked by hand today; once our store feeds are connected, they'll update every day.

6. What we don't do

• No brand can pay to be picked, rated higher or listed first.
• We don't claim to have tested equipment we haven't used. Our ratings come from published specs, prices and store policies, and each one says so.
• We don't copy listings, reviews or prices from review sites.
• It's a planning tool: always measure your own room, and check a product's manual before you drill or bolt.

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