Paisa Reality

Free, ad-supported financial information platform for India. Four pillars: daily prices (gold, silver, petrol, diesel, LPG) across 50+ Indian cities, a profile-based government scheme matcher, 10+ financial calculators, and bank rate comparison across 50+ banks. Bilingual English and Hindi, markdown blog, admin CMS, Razorpay-billed paid tier.

Personal finance information in India is fragmented across regulator PDFs, scattered news sites, and pay-walled portals. A first-time saver or small business owner has no single place to check today’s petrol price in their city, compare bank FD rates, and discover the right central or state scheme they qualify for.

• Next.js 16 App Router with React Server Components for SEO-critical price/rate pages.
• MySQL via mysql2 with prepared statements; scrapers run as scheduled jobs and write into normalised tables.
• JWT auth with bcrypt, per-IP rate limiting on auth, match, payment, and scraper endpoints.
• Razorpay signature verification on payment callbacks; Resend transactional email for receipts and OTPs.
• PDF reports via @react-pdf/renderer; dynamic sitemap, JSON-LD, AdSense monetisation.

• Next.js 16 App Router with React Server Components, strict TypeScript, MySQL via mysql2.
• JWT auth with bcrypt, per-IP rate limiting on auth, match, payment, and scraper routes.
• Razorpay signature verification on payment callback, Resend transactional mail.
• PDF report generation for scheme matches and calculator outputs via @react-pdf/renderer.
• Dynamic sitemap, JSON-LD WebSite and Organization, AdSense monetization.

• Cache scraped data aggressively at the edge — origin requests for FD rate tables were the single biggest cost.
• Bilingual content adds 30% to the editorial load. Build the EN → HI translation pipeline early, not late.
• Razorpay test mode lies in subtle ways. Always test the full signature verification path against live keys in staging.

• Start with pgvector + Postgres instead of MySQL so semantic search over scheme descriptions is native, not bolted on.
• Treat the scraper layer as its own service from day one rather than embedding it in the Next.js app.