Hey!
I made (yet another) currency conversion app. It has some extra features I find useful for my traveling.<p>Currently it's iOS only (I've ended up going with SwiftUI and focusing on Apple's eco-system, mostly because their locale API was great with currencies and their reverse geolocation is simple and reliable)<p>Features:
- I uses device locale to try and set your "home" currency.
- When abroad (home != foreign), it uses location to set the "foreign" currency.<p>- Tax: Living outside of north-america, I find "tax exclusive" tricky. So, it provides rough estimation of sale taxes based on your location. (I expect this feature to require more tweaking in the US with counties name might differ between geolocation services and my json database)<p>- Tipping: based on many sources I've composed a simplified global tipping customs json. I guess it's a mixed bag but it should be in the ballpark for the most common scenarios (dining, taxing, staying).<p>Monetization:
- It's free with banner ads on currency/country selection views and a interstitial ad every N clicks.
- It has a yearly subscription for 1.99$
- I plan adding more "premium" features such as an Apple Watch app that'll be premium exclusive.<p>HN Technical:<p>- From my limited app dev experience, I've yet to see any of my apps profitable (for iOS, this is my first ad/subscription-supported). So it's nice there are free tiers for services that allows you to make simple backends and websites.<p>- The app data is open-source repo I've made on GitHub [1]
- Tax: global tax database fused with scrapped US sale tax for state and counties.
- Currency: I use a free tier to hourly 'cache' on the repo, latest rates based on <a href="https://exchangeratesapi.io" rel="nofollow">https://exchangeratesapi.io</a> [2] (for basic traveler's currency I find this a reasonable balance)<p>- The landing page website [3] is made with SvelteKit, Tailwind and uses Cloudflare Pages.<p>- I hope getting an Android app also, but still confused about the best stack. (CapacitorJS, Kotlin)<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/talaviram/currency_utils">https://github.com/talaviram/currency_utils</a>
[2] <a href="https://exchangeratesapi.io" rel="nofollow">https://exchangeratesapi.io</a>
[3] <a href="https://www.smartercurrency.app" rel="nofollow">https://www.smartercurrency.app</a>