Show HN: I built a dashboard to compare mortgage rates across 120 credit unions
7 days ago (finfam.app)
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.
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.
Hey I really like the aesthetics.
> Then Google pushed their "Helpful Content Update" and...
May I just say, no matter what you work on, a separate piece of work will be getting people to know about it.
So fine, people can no longer find you on google. But if your website is truly useful, people will keep talking about it and linking to it, no?
Anyway, what are you working on now?
Users are broken into two separate buckets: industry and consumers. Industry users keep using the site, based on the number of visitors with 50+ visits coming in directly every weekday. The site also gets cited by organizations with regard to their fees and rankings within geographies. This kind of proves the utility for at least this demographic.
Consumers, for a product such as mortgage, will be fragmented and infrequent users, who will only be in-market for a mortgage for a ~3-6 month window every X years. For this audience, discoverability is what matters-- and they will simply go to a search engine and look for "cincinnati mortgages" for which Google will gladly show 8-12 ads with CPCs of $20. An objective ranking based on rates and fees is useful for the consumer, but not an ad network who would rather drive multiple clicks on paid ads. Being objective and useful isn't enough to play in the space, unfortunately.
I still use this regularly :) thanks for building it. any interest in open sourcing? i can help
Oh snap! I was just looking at originationdata.com this week! So awesome. I had originally hoped HMDA data was more than annual, but no luck. It's also a shame that the current admin turned off the data stream here: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/owning-a-home/explore-rates/
I thought maybe you'd been hit by that update, but even more bummed to hear Google enshittification struck again.
The Modified LAR product is what you may want to look at, then. Yes, it is annual, but if you aren't against modeling data, look at the rate spread value, segment then project vs current FRED data and you'll get pretty close to actuals. You can also extract fees and derive APR in addition to having APY data.
Nice work.
Navy Federal has always had competitive rates: https://www.navyfederal.org/loans-cards/mortgage/mortgage-ra...
Membership requires a military connection in the family, but it can go back to grandparents: https://www.navyfederal.org/membership/eligibility.html
I was able get membership via a family member that works for DoD, non-military.
Love a public rates page. Added to my list for tomorrow.
This was the first one I looked for as well, NFCU is (per Wikipedia) the largest CU in terms of size and membership in the US - but wasn't included. I think you should add a "how I chose these Credit Unions" on your overview, as missing NFCU immediately made me wonder what others were missed; RBFCU - largest in TX and 10th largest in US - is missing as well. So I'm left to wonder how 2 of the largest CUs in the country were just... missed.
I went the Pentagon Federal route
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.
I too have noticed an inexplicable apprehension about credit unions, even large ones such as Wings. They are almost uniformly better for individuals than big banks, yet people imagine a scenario where they'll need to withdraw cash in the middle of the Mojave so they need WF. Spoiler: 1) you won't and 2) you still can.
> They are almost uniformly better for individuals than big banks
The American financial landscape is too diverse to accommodate such sweeping statements. To many depositors default to the big banks. But that doesn’t mean everyone—or even most—who are under optimizing their deposits is better served by a credit union.
> people imagine a scenario where they'll need to withdraw cash in the middle of the Mojave so they need WF
If ATM access is your bugaboo, an online bank that reimburses everyonea’ ATM fees is the way to go.
I've noticed this apprehension about credit unions, myself, over the years. It's real.
But I've also noticed a stream of unrequested adoration towards credit unions, seemingly whenever any topic of personal banking pops up. A random person may simply lament about some fee their bank has charged, or the rate that their mortgage is financed at, or even mention in passing that they use a bank at all. That's normal-enough; people chat about whatever is on their mind all the time.
But quite often (too often?) upon the utterance of the word "bank," a whole cadre of people then immediately show up to sing a chorus (in unison) to remind them [and eachother] about how amazingly great credit unions are. Sometimes that cadre snowballs into a circus replete with a marching band, a dancing bear, and a trapeze artist.
"Oh, you still have a bank? Why aren't you in a credit union yet?"
"Yeah! Credit unions are awesome! People who don't use credit unions are just dumb or something!"
"Hey, guess what! My credit union even lets me access my money at 3:00AM the middle of the Mojave! These things are great!"
"Oh cool! The dancing bear is here again! I love that bear!"
---
The rather uniform predictability of this kind of spectacle can have a very daunting appearance to someone who never asked for it.
And thus the apprehension may be explainable easily-enough with one word: Contrarianism. "This group of people is telling me I need to do this thing; therefore, I must not."
Or, perhaps with a cautious phrase: "If it sounds like it is too good to be true, then it probably is."
We spend a portion of our lives seeking to avoid scams and pitfalls. We aren't always successful at it ("there's a sucker born every minute"), but we still try to seek to avoid being a mark. When see a bunch of guys having a great time playing 3 Card Monte on the corner, we either learn to avoid them or we learn to lose our money.
When an unsolicited and eerily-coordinated group of cheering fans crawl out of the woodwork without deliberate provocation and actively seek to impart change, it's justifiable and sane to turn around and run away. Especially when they haul out the dancing bear routine.
"The devil you know is better than the devil you don't know."
Probablty has to do with anti-communist sentiment?
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."
I have had bank accounts only with credit unions for the last 20 years. I have never found a need to open an account with one of the big banks. That said, people look at me like I’m crazy when I mention this.
If you'd like, I'd be happy to add that CU to the roster. Hoping to do more to make the full range of market options more mainstream.
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?
National median home price is $410k[1]. Texas is less than $300k[2]. Only thing that's unrealistic is most people who buy a house for $400k will probably get an FHA loan and put 3% down so will have a higher payment because of (1) mortgage insurance and (2) borrowing more money.
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS [2]: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/6915/san-antonio-tx/
Atlanta, Charlotte, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Chicago, probably many others
Are you in CA, NY, or MA? I wonder if your scale is skewed.
Those are just some medians I either Googled or LLM'd to act as defaults. You can click that sentence and change all those values to estimate.
Indianapolis... but it's drying up fast (avg price is almost $400k, now, but there are still decent choices in older neighborhoods)
North side of Indy (Carmel, Fishers, Geist) is listed as one of the best places to live in the US.
How close do you consider near? <400k is within 30 minutes of a major Hub in a lot of the US.
>Except maybe Texas, where else can you buy a house/apt in the US near a major job center for only 400k?
Rank cities from most to least negative characterizations of their residents and/or politics on HN.
That'll approximately be your list.
Pittsburgh
Definitely not a major job center for tech
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)
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.
Yes, extremely, especially for confirming loans: https://singlefamily.fanniemae.com/originating-underwriting/...
Patrick McKenzie (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11) has a great deep dive on this: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/mortgages-are-a-manuf...
Closing/switching costs are certainly a consideration still, but the "Truth in Lending Act" (TILA) made it easier to compare the all-in cost by providing a standardized APR number, which is what the dashboard focuses on.
* conforming loans
Having worked in mortgage, two important points: 1. Credit unions and large banks do not have access to the same vault of loan products at the same rates as each other. Fannie and Freddie offer rate discounts at volume. 2. Credit unions typically do not run mortgage programs for profit, unlike big banks. This also contributes to their ability to eat your cost.
Tit-for-tat, if you reduce it all down, the Chase's and Wells' should be able to offer the better terms based on their agreements with GSEs/secondary markets.
In reality, no one is getting the product at face value, so opportunities like this will exist, and you can take advantage of it like in these cases.
There's also specialization and process optimization that big banks do that little CUs simply don't have the volume to justify. If someone buried deep within BofA or Chase or some other national entity looks at your stuff and says some factor that's marginal makes it a no-go for some product that's the end of it despite being offset by some other factor that's out of the ordinary in a good direction. At a credit union with the process broken down across fewer people the person making that decision is more likely to be able to see that the big picture math still works for a given product.
> At a credit union with the process broken down across fewer people the person making that decision is more likely to be able to see that the big picture math still works for a given product
You and OP agree.
Broadly speaking, if you have good credit (or are wealthy) you’ll get a better rate at a bank or mortgage specialist. If you don’t, you’re more likely to get approved at a credit union.
6 replies →
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.
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.
If you were looking to buy a house right now, you'd be looking at a bunch of options that are worse than what you currently have. You experience this as lock-in but in reality the "problem" is just that you have something significantly better than anything you (or others) can find on the market right now. And of course that's actually a fantastic boon.
2 replies →
What’s the alternative that’s better? Having a 5/1 or 1/1 ARM just means that your current house’s mortgage would also be more expensive because your 3% mortgage would have adjusted upward by now.
If you’re willing to have your current mortgage be more expensive to avoid the “downside of being locked into a low payment, you could just pretend your mortgage had adjusted and go buy a house that suits your needs better.
2 replies →
I don't know how this works in the US, which is why I'm asking, but you paid of part of your mortgage already, so if you could sell you home for what you paid, or more, the difference would be cash-in-hand. If you spend all that buying the new home (assuming same price or lower), your new mortgage would be lower, and potentially cheaper, even with the higher interest rate.
You could also convert a 3% mortgage to a 5% for example. Because the owners of the 3% mortage aren't that interested in it any more, you could get that at perhaps as low as 80% (a former coworker got as low as 65%) of the original value. So if you buy a home for e.g. $200.000, you paid of $50.000 and "buy back" the rest at 80% you're now left with $120.000 of debt. You then get a new mortgage for that amount, and even at higher rate, that might result in a monthly saving. When the remaining amount is low enough, you could refinance and get e.g. a 10 year fixed rate mortage for a really low rate.
I don't know if you can do that in the US, but that's pretty much standard in Denmark. Most people will do that maybe 3 - 5 times during the lifetime of a mortgage. For the most part is make absolutely no sense, the bank just do some paper work, have you sign and then you owe less, but at a higher interest.
This is some drawback. "I have access to the same bad alternatives as everyone else."
This is why the US housing market is deadlocked (live locked?).
Sellers arent willing to lower prices AND lose a low rate and buyers aren't willing to pay those prices and expect a buyer's market.
Nothing is moving and realtors are hurting.
Something has to pop the bubble, will it be massive job loss that forces relocation or sale for cash and move to apartment?
Who knows?
1 reply →
You used to be able to assume someone's mortgage when you bought their house to keep the good rate going, but that's much less common now
1 reply →
Do 30-year mortgages make the other houses more expensive somehow? It sounds like you got a good deal and any change would be worse than the good deal you got. I'd appreciate it if I was you.
Edit: unless you mean that the downside of 30-year mortgages is you hardly get to pay off the principal in the first several years and don't build much equity maybe? That's more a "long mortgages" thing.
5 replies →
Would renting it out be an option?
2 replies →
Same in the UK. We typically get 2 or 5 year fixed deals, then you're expected to remortgage or you end up on the lender's standard variable rate (usually painfully higher).
My first mortgage was a 2-year fix at 1.89% during covid. When that ended I had to remortgage at nearly 5%. That was a fun conversation with my partner.
The US system is genuinely unusual globally. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac basically absorb all that interest rate risk that would otherwise sit with borrowers. It's a massive implicit subsidy that most Americans don't fully appreciate.
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.
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)
And as I pointed out in a sibling comment, it can lock you into your house if interest rates go up. We can’t afford to sell our house because the extra interest costs would increase our monthly payment by 50% even if the house cost the exact same as our current one.
7 replies →
I have friends on 1% fixed rates over 30 here in Denmark. Bastards.
Doesn't Denmark allow to move your mortgage rate to another house? That is even better than the US.
Haha, wait until you hear about our fancy 50-year mortgages we'll be getting any day now!
But seriously, my favorite discovery when researching CU mortgages is the prevalence of the 15/15 ARM. It's fixed for 15 years, and then adjusts once. Most people refinance within 7 years, or move within 12. So it's like a 30Y fixed, but comes in at 20 basis points cheaper (0.2% lower APR).
It could be much longer if there was a sensible formula to predict remaining value. Construction quality plays to small a role in valuations.
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.
Definitely. Unlikely that anyone starting here will get exactly the estimated monthly payment, especially as it takes time to lock in a rate and rates can change daily. What it does do is only use APRs to give as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as can be had. Click any entry in the table to go through to the CU's site, which usually has some means of getting a more accurate rate and/or quote.
Right. It’s not a problem with the tool per se, just sort of a grey-area as far as transparency of rates for the lenders.
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.
This kind existed for a while in the USA. Current admin turned off the data stream: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/owning-a-home/explore-rates/
Everyone should switch to a local credit union.
The rates are better, they're entirely local, and they're usually not trying to actively screw you.
The customer service is better. Rates are generally way better. The downside is generally their phone apps and their fraud departments. I had a lovely credit union but their CC was basically unusable because they hired some crummy and over aggressive fraud detection third party that would lock down my card any time there was a strong breeze.
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!
Haha, my uncreative username betrays me once again. Small world! Congrats on founding to you, too!
I find it somewhat interesting that a US 30 year fixed mortgage is 5,49%, while a 10 year fixed mortgage in Sweden currently is at 3,6%[1]. Big difference!
[1] https://www.compricer.se/borantor/
A lot of that is from the term. Rate goes up with term. A 10yr or a 15yr in the US would have a lower rate
If you are comparing across currencies you have to take each currencies expected inflation rate into account.
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)
Yeah, there's a somewhat wide variance in CUs, in terms of rates, quality of service, etc. I called a few just to spot check and these public rates are supposedly about as good as they can do. From what I gather, even the large CUs (like Transportation FCU) just don't have that sophisticated of an operating model.
Curious, where did you source the data from? Did you just scrape the invidividual bank web sites?
The Credit Union Mortgage Association can make the crawling easier via this link: https://mortgages.cumortgage.net/start_up.asp
That's actually where I started! Majority (but not all) of the institutions present on the dashboard are from the CUMA :) I don't technically crawl that portal, but their robots.txt certainly seems to encourage it. Great resource.
This is absolutely fantastic. I wish this included commercial loans like DSCRs...
Thanks! Re: DSCRs, point me to the data!
CU suggestion: Kansas City's largest, CommunityAmerica Credit Union
https://www.communityamerica.com/about-us
The more the merrier, but as far as I can tell, there are no public rates listed on the CommunityAmerica CU site. All behind a "get in touch" interact: https://www.communityamerica.com/personal/borrow/resources/m...
This is awesome! I wish there was sth similar for Europe! In Germany you have to go to a morgage broker and trust that his self-interest is aligned with yours :D
I pay a below 1% fixed rate for a 20 years mortgage since 4 years ago here in Belgium
I went to a mortgage broker first who offered me worse tho not necessarily bad rates with other banks as an option. The 2 best options I found were not on his roster. The mortgage broker did say he preferred not taking insurance discounts as those insurance cost could go up up to a maximum and couldn't then be renegotiated separately. But so far it's been better for me and of course that broker would also have negotiated the separate insurance and gotten his cut.
The current rate in France is more or less 3.2% for 25 years. It's better than the rates we see on this page but as someone who bought at a rate of 1% (1.75% real rate, something like that) I strongly advise people not to have a 33% debt ratio.
This is the max allowed by banks but it's a huge risk compared to renting which is basically risk-free. Buying something less expensive to have a smaller debt ratio may be better than renting.
ps: comparing rates alone isn't fair because Europe has a lot more taxes
Right there on https://hypofriend.de/en/mortgage-rates-germany first link on Google.
Thanks for the link but thats not really the same. They are just giving you indications and then you have to sign up. I would like to see more concrete numbers per bank. Maybe there are not many factors that influence the rate?
1 reply →
They are exactly the kind of mortgage broker mentioned in the parent comment.
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?
Thanks, and thanks for the heads up! Feel free to shoot me a screenshot/more browser details if you don't mind: blog@finfam.app
The data table is based on https://svelte-headless-table.bryanmylee.com/
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?
It's more manual than you might think! Sent a message to the email in your profile with more details :)
Could you share publicly? Or it’s secret?
Very nice! I would be great if there was also a way to see rates for investment properties.
I'd say the exact rate as displayed might not matter as such. It's more a discovery tool for folks to find a competitive CU that they're eligible for. If the CU looks good for one type of rate, it's probably worth exploring for others.
good one, mission accomplished! ++1
Ideas for monetization: Setup an automatic email alert if prices are changing for a given area and charge 5 USD per year per user.
Also you could extend this project and sell it later to one of the financial mags / publishers / websites.
I'd be into that, maybe. I guess if I could find an APR 0.5% better than what I've got, I'd refi. I wouldn't have subscribed last year, but now that rates are dropping, it's worth tuning in. But there is a voice of doubt: I'll probably hear about lower mortgage rates in a news headline or my original broker might even reach out.
Id say: There are definetly some persons out there who are willing to pay, and since its once a year usually they forget about their subscription :-D
I do not know about the US market: In the EU, mortgage markets are highly fragmented and its possible to live in one area and get a loan from a bank in another area
1 reply →
Do you do daily scraping to get fresh data? or use services like firecrawler or something?
Yeah, it's partially automated. It doesn't use firecrawler or any other services (other than Render for hosting).
"Rates" dropdown doesn't seem to work. I'm using uBlock Origin.
Pushing a fix to this now. Assuming we're seeing the same thing: clicking the checkbox doesn't work, but clicking the label should. Should be right as rain shortly. Thanks!
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.
Real talk, it's so hard to find TOTP 2FA in banking.
> No signup, no ads, no referral fees.
Nice
Love it! Where do you get the data?
nice, more people should do stuff like this
Nice job!
Awesome
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!
ccc