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Show HN: I built a dashboard to compare mortgage rates across 120 credit unions

34 pointsby mhashemitoday at 8:35 PM15 commentsview on 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.


Comments

bluGilltoday at 10:04 PM

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)

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aliljettoday at 9:57 PM

This is absolutely fantastic. I wish this included commercial loans like DSCRs...

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latortugatoday at 10:11 PM

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!

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msuniverse2026today at 9:44 PM

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.

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xnxtoday at 10:04 PM

> No signup, no ads, no referral fees.

Nice

ambicaptertoday at 9:58 PM

"Rates" dropdown doesn't seem to work. I'm using uBlock Origin.

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