Problem with these small things is that they don't scale thus can't exit. It means you will have to just milk them for profit over many years and they never get big.
If a SaaS has a 6x revenue multiple as it does now, it doesn't mean that you can sell a thing that fetches 5K per month for 400K. You can only keep milking it. A thing that fetches 5M per month, for 400M? sure, but it will never get there.
Hey HN! I built this over the weekend after getting frustrated with poor exchange rates.
The core idea: instead of converting USD→EUR directly, sometimes USD→GBP→EUR gives you more money due to rate inefficiencies between currency pairs.
Technical approach:
- Scrapes live rates from multiple sources every 60 seconds
- Builds a graph of all possible 2-hop paths (source→intermediate→target)
- Calculates final conversion amounts and sorts by best value
- Redis caching for sub-second response times
Real example from this morning:
- $10,000 USD → INR direct: ₹873,831 (rate: 87.38)
- Best route USD → TZS → INR: ₹881,876 (rate: 88.19)
- Extra money: ₹8,045 (~$92 or +1.49%)
The math: USD→TZS at 2520.55, then TZS→INR at 0.035 = effective rate of 88.19
Surprisingly, this works for many currency pairs. I've seen savings of 2-5% on EUR, GBP, AUD conversions.
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