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Show HN: I built a dashboard to compare mortgage rates across 120 credit unions (finfam.app)

393 points by mhashemi ↗ HN
When I bought my home, the big bank I'd been using for years quoted me 7% APR. A local credit union was offering 5.5% for the exact same mortgage.

I was surprised until I learned that mortgages are basically standardized products – the government buys almost all of them (see Bits About Money: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/mortgages-are-a-manuf...). So what's the price difference paying for? A recent Bloomberg Odd Lots episode makes the case that it's largely advertising and marketing (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2025-11-28/odd-lots-thi...). Credit unions are non-profits without big marketing budgets, so they can pass those savings on, but a lot of people don't know about them.

I built this dashboard to make it easier to shop around. I pull public rates from 120+ credit union websites and compares against the weekly FRED national benchmark.

Features:

- Filter by loan type (30Y/15Y/etc.), eligibility (the hardest part tbh), and rate type - Payment calculator with refi mode (CUs can be a bit slower than big lenders, but that makes them great for refi) - Links to each CU's rates page and eligibility requirements - Toggle to show/hide statistical outliers

At the time of writing, the average CU rate is 5.91% vs. 6.23% national average. about $37k difference in total interest on a $500k loan. I actually used seaborn to visualize the rate spread against the four big banks: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1pcj9t7/oc...

Stack: Python for the data/backend, Svelte/SvelteKit for the frontend. No signup, no ads, no referral fees.

Happy to answer questions about the methodology or add CUs people suggest.

41 comments

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msuniverse2026
God I wish we had 30 year fixed mortgages here in Australia. Imagine getting one of those during covid when rates were below 3%. Incredible.
denimnerd42
just makes the prices higher... you qualify for a house based on ratio of income to payment. so the demand is heavily influenced by the type of financing available..

Other than natural demand, Australia has a high real estate market due to the tax and a superannuation/pension distortions. Should try to fix those first. (probably impossible)

cortesoft
There are downsides.

I have a really great rate on my mortgage, but our house is super expensive and small for our family… but now we can’t afford to move.

If we moved to a new house, we would have to pay off this great mortgage and get a new one, at a much higher interest rate. Even if we found a house that cost the exact same as ours, the monthly payment would be 50% higher, because current interest rates are more than twice what we have. We are locked into our house.

IceDane
I have friends on 1% fixed rates over 30 here in Denmark. Bastards.
venturecruelty
Listen. I'm sure they seemed like a good idea at the time, but we tied them to retirement (so your entire material wealth is stuck in an illiquid asset that also falls apart slowly over time), and now we can't build any new housing because people think it will affect their golden years. Learn from our mistakes.
aliljet
This is absolutely fantastic. I wish this included commercial loans like DSCRs...
ambicapter
"Rates" dropdown doesn't seem to work. I'm using uBlock Origin.
bluGill
My credit union gives me better rates if I'm "active", which means some number of transactions per month. Thus you really need to pick a credit union and start using them a few months before if you want the best rates. (maybe, depending on how that credit union works)
xnx
> No signup, no ads, no referral fees.

Nice

latortuga
It's always fun to open the front page of HN and see a familiar face. I went to college with this guy! Congrats on shipping Mahmoud!
satellite2
Are those really standardized in the US?

Where I live the condition vary widely. And basically the switching costs might easily dominate the total costs if you move/sell.

I've found that taking this into account it was better to trade a few places in term of interests for better conditions.

duraace2
At first glance, this site seems fantastic! Great job! (As a side note, I've been reading Hacker news for years but have never been active; I created an account just to make this comment)
joshuamcginnis
Very cool. Can you tell us the tech and tools you used to reliably scrape? or get all of the rate data from the various websites?
t_mann
Great initiative and beautiful site! Tiny nitpick, the wrapping of the controls above the table on my phone could probably be improved. What did you use for the table?
CommenterPerson
Nice Work!

I found our credit union posts the mortgage rates clearly on a plain text like page. There's no BS and no games. Whereas with the big banks, you get the games and higher rates .. no matter if they have records of 10 years of your salary deposits. When I tried to suggest credit unions to friends, I got looks. Like, people just assume what everyone else does (get conned by big banks) is good.

ssl-3
When the question is "How do I ask a friend if they're in a credit union," then the answer is:

"You don't. They'll tell you."

vgeek
Good idea. A few years back I built https://originationdata.com that compares mortgage lenders (both FDIC & FCUA members) using HMDA data. I modeled rates by lender, product type as well as by facets like MSA (as well as STL FRED data, too). It grew for a few years and I was ecstatic-- getting backlinks organically from some impressive sites (e.g. larger banks themselves, consumer publications) as well as positive user feedback. Then Google pushed their "Helpful Content Update" and Google search traffic absolutely tanked, so I kind of abandoned it and moved onto other projects that won't be SEO oriented, since Google's view of quality is unbeknownst to me.
cubes
Curious, where did you source the data from? Did you just scrape the invidividual bank web sites?
redindian75
Do you do daily scraping to get fresh data? or use services like firecrawler or something?
throwaway2037 

    > Estimated monthly payment based on purchasing $400,000 home with 20% down, $567/mo taxes and insurance, and 1.65% closing costs.
Does anyone know the source of these numbers? Example: The are national median values.

Except maybe Texas, where else can you buy a house/apt in the US near a major job center for only 400k?

calmworm
Cool concept, but it doesn’t account for assumptions the sites make when displaying rates. Not something to you can really account for across the board though is it? Like “assuming a $300k loan on a home valued at $600k” to get a low 5’s rate… for example.
nunez
I didn't do a CU for my mortgage (mostly because my lender is awesome and I'm happy with our rate), but I did for my recent auto loan and moved my accounts to them.

NIGHT AND DAY DIFFERENCE. customer service is fantastic and their online banking app/website is no bullshit. It even supports TOTP 2FA, which I definitely wasn't expecting given that the huge bank I came from didn't for some reason.

Can't recommend a credit union enough.

jameson
Love it! Where do you get the data?
ryandrake
Great work. I used to use Bankrate for this, but its UX has gone to shit over the past few years, so it's nice to have an alternative!
Epa095
Good work!

Does anyone else think that the government should do something like this? Either enforce that vendors sends their offers to a central database which is publicly accessible, or at least make it available so the vendors can choose to send data there (maybe enforce it for big vendors, to get it started).

In general I think it makes sense for the government to be responsible for the market place, and the infrastructure around the market. The data should be avaliable publicly through a API so one could build different frontends and analysis services on it.

Example markets are electricity, deposits, mortgages, housing.