Kameron Kales

I spent years building financial software at publicly traded companies—business banking systems at Jack Henry, consumer investing tools at Vanguard. Through this work, I gained visibility into a troubling pattern: families consistently overpay on their biggest financial decisions because they don't know rates are negotiable.

Most people assume the rate their bank offers is the rate they get. But mortgage rates, home insurance, car loans, HELOCs—all of it can be negotiated. The problem is information asymmetry. You can't negotiate when you don't know what rates are actually available. That data exists, but it's scattered across thousands of credit union websites, Reddit threads, and neighbor conversations—inaccessible exactly when families need it most.

I built PlanFi—a retirement calculator that helps people understand exactly when they can achieve financial independence. The tool gained traction in the FIRE community, and I started getting the same question repeatedly: “This is great, but when should I refinance my mortgage?” People would spend hours optimizing their investment allocations and withdrawal strategies, then lose tens of thousands of dollars by accepting a 6.5% mortgage rate while having no idea credit unions down the street were offering 5.875%. They had the financial sophistication to model sequence-of-returns risk in retirement but lacked access to the basic rate data needed to make their single largest financial decision well.

I realized the problem wasn't retirement planning—it was rate transparency. And if I couldn't answer “when should I refinance?” for PlanFi users without real-time rate data, neither could anyone else building financial tools.

That's why I built RateAPI. We scrape rates from 4,300+ credit unions daily, structure the data, and serve it in under 500ms—so developers can finally answer “should I refinance?” in their products. Whether it's a retirement calculator like PlanFi, a mortgage broker's client dashboard, or an AI agent advising on rate timing, the infrastructure is the same: real-time access to rates that were previously invisible to consumers.

This isn't about optimizing financial products. It's about closing the information gap that costs American families billions every year.