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What Does the Fed(eral Reserve) say?

A simple Rest API that provides the current effective interest rate, as provided by the federal reserve here: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h15/

The values for the API are updated as the federal reserve updates.

Github Repo

How to use

From either a browser, or a Rest API client like Postman, goto http://whatdoesthefedsay.com/rate.

This will provide a JSON body between 700-800 bytes in size.

{ 
    "rate": "5.33", 
    "seed": 442595821, 
    "date": "2024-Jun-7", 
    "source": "https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h15/" 
}

There is no authentication or token needed to access.

Keep in mind a few things as you use this:

  • The rate provided is from the last business day.
  • Effective rate is not the same as the average interest rate a loan will have. That rate will usually be higher.

Any issues?

Open an issue on this repo!

How I built this API for (almost) free

To build this API, I used a combination of Powershell, the Github Rest API, Github Pages.

Powershell Script (getrate.ps1)

  1. Pulls the current current interest rate from the fed.
  2. Parses HTML for the required values.
  3. Used the Github API to create a branch on top of the Main branch to this repo.
  4. Pushes the new rate into the rate.html file.

This script runs as a cronjob using Powershell Core. However, it could also be ran from an Azure Function for the same cost. Just so long as you keep it under 1,000,000 runs per month.

Github Pages

Pages feature in Github is a great way to host a blog. However, I'm using the static website functionality of pages to be the backend of my Rest API.

This ensures I do not incurr any compute costs or scaling for the incomming requests. The last thing I want to do is expose a VM to the internet.

This also provides free DDOS attack protection, and any other protections that are native to Github.

The Money Part

I used my domain provider IONOS to purchase the domain whatdoesthefedsay.com for $10 a year. Feels like a good cost all-in-all.