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.
This is absolutely fantastic. I wish this included commercial loans like DSCRs...
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!
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.
> No signup, no ads, no referral fees.
Nice
"Rates" dropdown doesn't seem to work. I'm using uBlock Origin.
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)