The website was founded in April 2009 by former Google employee Mladen Adamović,[1][2] to enable users to share and compare information about the cost of living between countries and cities.

[3] Since 2012, the website has been operated by NUMBEO DOO Beograd-Palilula, a Serbian private limited company run by Adamović.

[7][8][9] Data is also manually gathered by the operator, from sources such as company and governmental websites,[10][11][12] which is done in half-year intervals;[13] it is then combined with user-generated data by giving it extra weight in the final score calculation, according to the company.

[16] The quality of life index is a combination of eight sub-indexes: purchasing power, safety, healthcare, cost of living, property price to income ratio, traffic commute time, pollution, and climate.

[19] Numbeo's data points on crime have been criticized by academics[20] and by the media as unreliable and, at times, misleading.