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I created Open Exchange Rates[0] as an open source project four years ago, publishing free currency data into a GitHub repository. It was launched alongside mo
by josscrowcroft 11y ago
I created Open Exchange Rates[0] as an open source project four years ago, publishing free currency data into a GitHub repository.
It was launched alongside money.js[1] (a minimal JavaScript currency conversion library), designed to work seamlessly together and both found a brilliant response and grew an organic community.
Hundreds of tutorials and thousands of posts and mentions later, GitHub eventually contacted me and politely asked me to take down the exchange rates repository, because they were being hammered by people requesting the data - only at this point did it occur to me that I'd created something of genuine value, and (6 months of fretting and tail-chasing later) I opened up a paid option.
For me the key thing was: I never intended to create a business. It was (and is) a labour of love. We've since grown to be the industry-leader for our area - "good enough data" for the startup and SME market - and count Etsy, KickStarter, WordPress and Lonely Planet among our clients.
Although it's no longer truly open source, 98% of our users are still on the Free plan, which will very soon be expanding to include all features (so, no more limiting by price tiers) - this is how I still feel so passionate about it.
I can't wait to publish the next steps in our journey - where we're opening everything up to the community and marketplace. I don't like where the industry is heading (competitive, closed, secretive) and we've chosen to move towards transparency and sharing.
I like businesses built on a core of open source community, because they're in service to the people who are actually building the products, rather than those in the traditional 'upper levels'. This means there's really no "sales process" (which I'm massively allergic to) - apart from the occasional grilling from the accounting department, who may find it hard to trust a business based on open source principles.
Good luck!
[0] https://openexchangerates.org https://openexchangerates.org
[1] https://github.com/openexchangerates/money.js https://github.com/openexchangerates/money.js
- jakobegger 11y agoI'd like to thank you for creating your API, and for the generous terms on the free plan. I'm using your API to estimate my weekly revenue (internal reporting). A suggestion: It would be awesome if it was possible to download historic data in batch format (eg. CSV) which would make it easy to copy the data into my reporting database. When I started working on my own reporting solution, I'd have paid $100 just to download a CSV file with 5 years of exchange rates, even though the data is available for free on a bunch of websites, since it's such a hassle to collect.
- justincormack 11y agoThe Bank of Canada have downloads (CSV, RSS) for historical rates http://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/exchange/ http://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/exchange/ - you may need to convert to eg USD rates but the data is easily accessible.
- josscrowcroft 11y agoWelcome! We do have a time-series bulk download, but it's still in JSON format and currently limited to 1 month of data. This will be redesigned soon and looking to include CSV downloads as an option.
- josscrowcroft 11y agoThanks and you're welcome! We do have a time-series bulk download, but it's still in JSON format and currently limited to 1 month of data. This will be redesigned soon and looking to include CSV downloads as an option.
- edpichler 11y agoWow, I was looking for something like your project for months!
- bshimmin 11y agoReally interested by the pricing on your signup page (https://openexchangerates.org/signup https://openexchangerates.org/signup), where you have the prices from most expensive on the left to cheapest on the right. I have mostly seen (and always built) these the opposite way around. Is there a particular reason why you did this? Did you A/B test it?
- jbeales 11y agoI've done this before. When I did it it was a conscious design decision to use price framing[1], so the site has a very expensive product, two mid-priced products, and a free product. It's nice when the very expensive product sells, but it's mostly there to make the two non-free products look like reasonable purchases. I haven't A/B tested it, that's something I should do. [1]https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-decision-lab/201109/pricing-and-framing-when-are-we-likely-pay-more-products https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-decision-lab/201109...
- josscrowcroft 11y agoGood question. Never A/B tested (!) but there was some intuition about leading with the most expensive option. Perhaps to make the others seem more reasonable in comparison. In any case, we're changing this very soon to list from left to right including the Free plan in the table (I don't like that it's hidden beneath the paid options).
- pwim 11y agoAre your top customers really only paying you $97/month? Seems like you could charge them substantially more money.
- Mahn 11y agoIsn't that stretching it a bit too much? It's a service that can be replicated for free with the Yahoo! Finance APIs and a couple hours of your time.
- harel 11y agoGithub asked you to take down a hosted repo because it was too popular? I'm slightly shocked at that (just a tiny bit)
- sean-duffy 11y agoIt isn't shocking at all in this context - GitHub is for hosting code (and other code-like things), it isn't a content delivery network.
- jakejake 11y agoI would guess because Github was not being used as a code repo, but was essentially being used as free CDN for the data file. I've seen direct linking to Github raw files like that before and wondered if it was something they condone.
- josscrowcroft 11y agoYep. GitHub were cool about it, explained that some people were making thousands of requests per second for no reason at all and it was impacting others users on the network. It's not the intended use of GitHub at all and I genuinely had no idea it would become popular.
- meir_yanovich 11y agoGreat Saas , can you tell from where you poll the currency data ?