Show HN: Bankrank.io – Search hundreds of bank accounts to find the best rates | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bankrank.io – Search hundreds of bank accounts to find the best rates

bankrank.io

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This is interesting but I wish it filtered out options that had laughably low max balances.

I entered $50,000 and DCU pops up with 6.17%, that's great, oh wait, it's only for up to $1K.

Also this tool appears to be missing the 2 options I personally use that beat almost all these rates.

* HMBradley Savings: 3% (a number of hoops to jump through but I've automated it all) up to $100K

* One Finance: 3% (no hoops) up to $25K

OF is my "main bank" where I keep up to $25K in that 3% savings accounts as my "semi-hot wallet" (after the checking account) and then HMB is my "cold storage" since there are some hoops to jump through to withdraw money while maintaining the rate. I have my HMB set up to always be draining via their CC (doesn't affect savings rate you must maintain to get 3%) so I can always pull $1-3K out a month on top of the 80% you can withdraw without issue (which gets ACH'd to my main bank automatically after the DD lands). This means I only "lock up" $1200/mo but the CC drains that and then some without issue. I can always ACH more into the savings account from my main bank if I'm close to the $25K limit on that savings account.

Thanks for the feedback! To be fair, we're definitely not capturing a sizeable portion of the banks/credit unions that are actually "good". We prioritized the larger banks, but we definitely intend to capture every bank/cu down the road.

As far as the results go, we figured that users would want to see how they can break up their deposits across multiple accounts to maximize the yield of all their deposits. So putting 1k in DCU may be pretty nice for someone with 3k, since that 6% is a massive return on what's effectively a risk-free product. For someone with more savings, I could see how that drop in the bucket is pretty insignificant, and could probably be filtered out.

A common theme of the early feedback we've gotten has been "add more filtering," so it seems like it'd be good to have a way to limit the results to only the best single account that could take the entire balance. We'll work on that.

Also, thanks for the heads up about HMB and OF. We'll add those later this week!

I used to churn quite a bit to get max rates. Few things I have learnt

- The banks giving the high initial rates at first are also to lower immediately when interest rates fall. It might not be a big deal in current economic climate, but its not worth the hassle to chase the extra 0.2% to keep moving $$$ around.

- Many of the banks with higher % also expect you do other things with your account like maintaining direct deposit or having X no of debit card transactions. Again, might be fun early on. But eventually it wears out.

- Actually verify if your savings in that bank is FDIC insured. Check from fdic website https://banks.data.fdic.gov/bankfind-suite/bankfind and not in their webpage.

Not giving any financial advice, but I do save my emergency fund in money market account, its better interest rate than big banks. But at the same time, I wouldn't jump to any arbitrary bank without doing my due diligence. Its not worth the effort in the long run.

I think you’re right that below a certain threshold, moving money between accounts just isn’t worth it. But from our research, it looks like people can actually stand to gain 100x on their deposit accounts, and I think that’s more compelling than an extra one-tenth of a percent. The bulk of consumers use the big banks that offer 0.01%, so getting even 1% on their deposits becomes significantly more compelling.

What do you think about a fully managed service that moves the funds automatically behind the scenes. You’d only have a single account/app which you’d use to withdraw your funds, but whenever rates change, the funds get moved. You’d always be getting the best rates (and the best distribution of rates) but not have any of the overhead of moving the funds. Would that be worth paying, say, 5% of the total interest earned?

Sign me up, if you can get my 5% returns with same liquidity as money market funds.

If you'd like, I'll send you an update when we go live. Feel free to shoot me an email: bankrank.alpha@gmail.com

> What do you think about a fully managed service that moves the funds automatically behind the scenes

I'm interested as long as this service works with YNAB/Plaid.

That could work! Are there any specific integrations you'd want to see which we could prioritize?

Couldn't help but notice DCU at the top.

DCU was chartered in 1979 for employees of Digital Equipment Corporation following complaints to CEO Ken Olson that employees were having difficulties securing mortgages.

Just like with all sorts of other things (CPU architecture, OS kernels, etc.), DEC never really died.

I actually never heard of them until we started working on this project. I was surprised to see their rates of like 6%.

It’s only on the first $1000 or something, so it seems like a promotion to get them listed on those “top 20 bank” listicles. Regardless, I plan on opening a savings account with them because that’s ridiculously good for a risk free product

Oh it definitely is, and their customer service is a far cry from what it used to be as well (especially compared to say, PenFed and Alliant). That aside though, they still are a decent CU that's probably never going away unless their old school levels of bank rudeness start to really bite them.

DCU definitely was more reliable and had better customer service before COVID. Most of my issues is with how they handle wires and ACH payments now. Before it would post at 5AM now randomly throughout the day. One of my last one came in at 4:30 pm and have had some post as late as 7:30pm (all times eastern).

Cool. It's missing Redneck Bank's 2.60% APY https://redneck.bank/

Another interesting one that's missing is Yotta (https://www.withyotta.com/), which was one of the earlier prize-linked savings account programs to launch after the "American Savings Promotion Act" passed a while back.

The core rate is only 0.2% or 0.4% APY, but the average effective APY is ~2%, and with good variance can be much higher. I've been tracking at ~2.32% since my account opened years ago.

Thank you! That’s a particularly good rate, so we’ll prioritize those this week

Is this for US-based banks? There is no mention of the locale anywhere on the site .

Hey HN!

I’m the main developer of bankrank.io, but I’m part of a passionate team of financial-techies. We were inspired by credit card churning, which is when people cycle through credit cards to optimize their rewards [0]. We wanted to apply a similar approach to checking and savings accounts so consumers could maximize their interest rates and minimize fees. There are approximately 10,000 banks and credit unions in the US that offer deposit accounts, and since banks can change rates and fees on a daily basis, there’s huge variance what constitutes the “best” account at any given time.

Additionally, we noticed that most existing financial blogs/tools don’t provide a wide view of the market. Sites like nerd wallet, bank rate, or businessweek cherry pick a list of products that partner with them to provide kickbacks, referrals, or pay for exclusivity, which is why you’ll often see “Advertiser disclosures” at the top of their articles [1, 2]. We wanted to build a tool that enables users to query as much data as possible, and make an informed decision without bias. We currently monitor hundreds of products, and we’re adding more to our catalogue each day. To that end, we don’t serve ads, monetize user data, or allow banks to pay for sponsorships or preferred placement. Instead, we plan on monetizing premium features which offer convenience to users, kind of like “managed deposit accounts as a service.”

We also exclude products and tiers which require activity such as setting up direct deposits and spending thresholds, or products that do not offer interest rates on account balances. Your money gets loaned out to other people who pay interest to the banks, and we think you deserve a portion of that without having to jump through hoops.

Along those lines, we show the minimum and maximum balance range that earns the listed APY for each account. If a product has multiple tiers, each gets listed separately. We also set the minimum balance to whatever is required to both earn the advertised interest rate and avoid monthly fees. We found that many banks allow you to open an account with lower balances, but will charge you a recurring fee until your balance reaches a threshold. We consider this a “dark pattern” in banking, so if the balance listed on our site is higher than the bank’s, it’s probably because the bank is charging hidden fees.

We’d love to get the community’s feedback on our proof-of-concept. There are 3 pages you can visit:

- bankrank.io, where you can see a demo gif and read about some features.

- bankrank.io/search, where you can search and compare products.

- bankrank.io/waitlist, where you can read more about the premium product we’re building, and signup to join the alpha version when it launches (u can also access it via the “coming soon!” tags on the landing page).

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/wiki/index/.

[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/best/banking/best-online-banks-of....

[2] https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/rates/.

Hey I think this is great, congratulations! I've been trying to get something similar going for UK banks, would you be interested in taking a look at the MVP? I took a slightly different approach, but also didn't have the technical chops to build the nice filter system you guys have.

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