We’re doing an alpha launch in Q1 2026, and if you’re interested, sign up at bankrank.io/waitlist or email bankrank.alpha@gmail.com

Behind the scenes, our system tracks thousands of deposit products across U.S. banks and credit unions and automatically redistributes your money whenever you deposit or withdraw money, or in response to product changes. No matter where your funds are, you'll have complete access through a single Bank Rank app.

We’re launching an Alpha test of our premium, fully-managed accounts in Q1 2026, and signups are open now. You can join by emailing us at bankrank.alpha@gmail.com or submitting your email on this form: https://bankrank.io/waitlist

We’re also launching a free tier of the product towards the end of November for users who want to manage their own finances. It will be an installable, cross-platform tool that lets you run queries and receive proactive notifications when products change that meet your criteria — no login or account required. Send us an email if you want to get notified when this releases.

In the meantime, I’ll be around for the next few hours to answer questions or discuss suggestions. You can also try a demo at bankrank.io or reach out anytime at bankrank.alpha@gmail.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45825742

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

1. If the government is in charge of deciding the tax policy and collecting the taxes, it creates a potential conflict of interest if they are also in charge of telling you how much you owe. In theory, they could charge you more than they're legally allowed to, but how would you know unless you (or someone else) also calculated your taxes? A common suggestion to this is to have the government give a return that shows what they _think_ is owed, but this creates a conflict if the government accidentally underbills you, since you're not likely to correct the mistake. In order to ensure compliance on both sides, both the government and individual need to prepare the tax return. Otherwise, one party risks being overcharged/underpaid.

2. Tax evasion is an effective law enforcement tool for catching criminals, so by putting the burden on the individual to report taxes, you add another tool in the law enforcement toolkit. From the state's perspective, it is more compelling to tell a jury "this person owed $5 but only paid $1" than "this person owed $5, but only paid $1 because we told them they only owed $1." Tax evasion is how famous gangsters like Al Capone and other shady-characters have historically been caught[0]

The tax prep industry is lucrative largely because of lobbying and consumer ignorance. There are plenty of free-file options for folks below certain income thresholds, as well as non-profits who will do your taxes for free. There are also lots of free tax-prep sites, but they are being drowned out by the advertising and lobbying of the for-profit tax-prep industry.

To add my own 2-cents: if your income comes from investments, 1099, or W2, you likely can do your own taxes in about an hour. I personally use TaxHawk [1] since it's free for federal and $16 per state return, and has the same kind of interface as turbotax and the like. If you want to save on that $16, you could use TaxSlayer [2] instead -- I've used all of them, and personally prefer TaxHawk. Just remember to decline any of the upselling they do just before you submit your refund. You probably don't need the premium service, a dedicated tax pro, nor audit protection.

Source: am a CPA

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone#Tax_evasion

[1] https://www.taxhawk.com/software/

[2] https://www.taxslayer.com/#sf_qualify

1. How did you find your first customers?

2. How did you determine a price?

3. What are the payment plans based on? Usage? Flat rate? Something else?

4. How much are you currently earning MRR and what are your costs like?

Accounting actually is more of a trade, and I felt like the majority of classes they taught helped me on-the-job as an accountant. People who like systems engineering would enjoy accounting, because it's getting to the nuts-and-bolts of our financial system and understanding both the how and the why. Whether you're international conglomerate Apple, Inc or software engineer calderarrow working a day job, the laws of accounting still apply.

But I would not recommend paying more than you need to for an Accounting Degree. The Big 4 will recruit anyone from anywhere, and as long as you have a degree (which is usually required for the CPA License) and a 3.3+ GPA, you can get a job in any major city. Assets + Liabilities = Equity whether you're at community college or Harvard, so get the cheapest degree you can get.

Also, try to squeeze 150 credits into your undergrad curiculum, as some CPA licenses require 150 credit hours. This is typically 4 years of undergrad (120) + 1 year of a master's (30). The added cost of tuition for those classes isn't that much, but being able to get out and start working a year sooner is a ~$60k decision that is worth it if you can do it.

As for why I left accounting: I started learning Python to help me automate some of the boring parts of my job [0] and fell in love with software. It just clicked for me in the same way that accounting did, and now I work in fintech, where I'm able to blend the two.

[0] https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891675

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

I’m curious though: is there an error rate where you would feel like capital punishment would be off the table? For instance, if 90% of people executed were innocent, would you still want it for the 10% who deserve it? I admit that if we had a 100% success rate, I would be open to capital punishment, so we may actually agree that there’s a threshold where the system shouldn’t be allowed to use that as a form of punishment, and only disagree about about the percentage.

Put a bit more personally: would you support capital punishment if you had to pull the trigger, and you would be killed if you executed an innocent inmate? Most people I speak with would be fine pulling the trigger, but no one I’ve talked with would be okay with taking responsibility for mistakes.

https://cty.jhu.edu/

It’s approximately 5000 calories per pound of weight that you want to lose. 30 pounds * 5000 calories = 150k calories to lose 30 pounds. That’s pretty close to $100k Pay yourself to count calories, $1 per calorie. Track everything. Every meal, every snack, everything you put into your body. Every week, add up the total calories consumed and subtract the total amount from your weekly “maintainence” calories. To calculate that, multiply your current body weight by 16 or 18, depending whether you exercised that day. For instance, if you weigh 200 pounds, you should eat about 3200-3600 calories daily to maintain that weight, closer to 3200 if you don’t exercise, 3600 if you do. Every week, pay yourself $1 for every calorie you burned, re-weigh yourself, and repeat.

No exercise needed, but that will definitely accelerate the process, but only so much. It took months to get you here, so expect to spend months to get you out.

I've been working on an open sourced tool called Bank Rank to track bank account fees, rates, and balance requirements in the United States. For a quick primer, there are 4 broad categories of insured deposit accounts in the U.S.: Checking, Savings, Money Market, and Time Deposit. Banks oftentimes offer multiple tiers of each account, and with over 9,200 banks and credit unions, some quick back-of-the-napkin math means that there are over 70,000 accounts competing for consumers, with rates and fees that can change daily.

I've personally grown frustrated with a number of problems[0] that existing tools have in trying to make finding the "best" deposit account easier for consumers, such as black-box methodologies, SEO/affiliate spam, and incomplete data, which is what inspired me to start this project.

While banks may change rates and fees often, the overall structure of their product sites remains much more consistent, providing an opportunity for a scraping engine to monitor and track this data on behalf of users.

Bank Rank is open-sourced because I can't build all 70k scraping templates by myself, and I would love to see a community come together to expand the reach of this project and make the data more accessible to consumers so they can truly choose the best product for their personal situation without affiliate links, SEO spam, or other biases.

As far as the tech stack goes, the core engine runs on top of playwright and the entire project is built with Typescript. If you're interested in contributing, there's a contribution guide[1] I've written up, and I'm currently working on video guides to make it easier to get started.

I originally started working on this project about a year ago, but wrote the scripts with puppeteer. I have around 700 product scripts which I'm currently migrating to Playwright because I'm more optimistic about the broader support for languages and browsers. Currently, you can pull down the repo and get started tracking products locally[2]. There are only 3 products tracked at the moment, but once I finish migrating those 700 others, I'll be about 1% of the way to total market coverage. I hope that with some additional contributors, we can get close to 100% coverage much sooner than if I keep working on this alone.

I'd love to answer any questions and would gladly appreciate any and all critiques, feedback, or other suggestions. Feel free to drop a note in HN, Github, or send an email to project.bankrank@Gmail.com

Cheers

Links:

[0] https://github.com/project-bankrank/bankrank/tree/main?tab=r...

[1] https://github.com/project-bankrank/bankrank/blob/main/docs/...

[2] https://github.com/project-bankrank/bankrank/tree/main?tab=r...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39434016

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

Project: Bank Rank

Description: Crowdsourcing templates to monitor deposit account rates and fees across the 8500+ banks and credit unions in the U.S.

Tech Stack: Vanilla Javascript (Playwright/Puppeteer)

Github: https://github.com/project-bankrank/bankrank

I was going to make a separate post about this in a few days once I finished up the documentation, but I'll post it early even though the Github repo is not in a completed state. The general idea is to build a tool that can scrape bank account information whenever it is executed, to enable more transparency when shopping for financial products like savings accounts. I've started working on the engine and templates, and currently have the logic built out for several hundred products at ~70 financial institutions.

The best way you can help is by creating "templates" of various product information by recording or manually writing puppeteer/playwright scripts to extract specific information about various bank products. This is a simple task, but due to each bank having multiple product offerings (checking, savings, money market, certificate of deposit) and multiple tiers of each product, the actual market for a "savings accounts" is in the tens of thousands. Banks change rates and fees a lot more frequently than they change their websites, so even though this is a brute-force method of aggregating data, it will be sufficient for most consumers.

If you're interested in learning more, shoot me an email: project.bankrank@gmail.com

1. Congress delegates some of its authority to issue/handle student loans to the executive branch via the US dept of education and some legislation passed in the past.

2. As President and leader of the executive branch, Biden wants to utilize the authority granted to him to modify the terms of the loans due to the impact of the COVID 19 national emergency. [0].

3. As part of his loan modifications, he wants to forgive a certain portion of the loans altogether, for which he was sued.

4. The Supreme Court ruled that the modifications of the loan forgiveness were ultimately unconstitutional due to the major questions doctrine, implying that while Congress may have delegated some authority to the executive branch for managing loans, outright forgiveness on such a scale would be considered economically significant, and therefore would be presumed not to be delegated. [1].

Am I missing something?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden_v._Nebraska.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine