LiveRates Launches Free Currency Converter: 20+ Currencies, Metals & Crypto at Mid-Market Rates
A new browser-based converter powered by the same real-time feed behind the LiveRates API — no signup, no ads, no spreads.
LiveRates has rolled out a free Currency Converter at live-rates.com, giving traders, developers, and finance teams instant access to the same mid-market pricing that powers the LiveRates API. The tool converts arbitrary amounts across more than 20 fiat currencies, precious metals such as gold (XAU) and silver (XAG), and major cryptocurrencies — all without a signup wall, tracking pop-up, or hidden spread.
Why another currency converter?
Most public converters online quote rates that lag the interbank market by hours, or bundle a hidden margin of 200 to 500 basis points into the displayed price. That gap matters. On a routine EUR to USD trip, a traveler moving 1,000 EUR at a 3% marked-up rate loses roughly 30 EUR before the transaction even settles. For finance teams reconciling multi-currency invoices, that margin distorts monthly reporting.
The LiveRates converter sidesteps the problem by publishing mid-market quotes — the midpoint of bid and ask on the same feed that streams into the paid API. The homepage widget already demonstrates the pattern: enter 1,000 EUR and receive 1,141.67 USD at a live 1 EUR = 1.1417 USD quote, with a one-click deep link into the EUR/USD live chart.
What the tool covers
The converter ships with three asset classes on day one:
- Fiat currencies — 20+ pairs including the majors (EUR, USD, GBP, JPY, CHF, AUD, CAD), Asia-Pacific (INR, PHP, CNY, SGD), Latin America (BRL, MXN), and Africa (NGN, ZAR).
- Precious metals — Gold (XAU) and silver (XAG) quoted per troy ounce against USD and other majors.
- Cryptocurrencies — BTC, ETH, and other liquid tokens priced against fiat.
A Popular Conversions panel exposes the routes users search for most often — EUR to USD, GBP to USD, USD to JPY, USD to INR, USD to PHP, USD to CAD, AUD to USD, USD to MXN, USD to BRL, EUR to GBP, USD to NGN, and GBP to INR — as pre-filled shortcuts. Each shortcut lands on a dedicated page optimized for the specific pair, complete with a live chart snapshot and the last seven days of movement.
How the pricing works under the hood
The converter is a thin front-end over the same infrastructure documented at /api/rates. A background worker aggregates ticks from Google Sheets (USD-base majors), FXCM RatesXML (cross pairs), and CurrencyAPI (emerging markets such as BRL) roughly every second, upserts them into the newforexes table, and publishes deltas over Redis pub/sub. When a visitor loads the converter, the browser pulls the latest snapshot and multiplies through the requested base and quote — no artificial spread is added on the client side.
Because the feed is the same one powering paying API customers, the numbers a casual visitor sees on the converter match — to five decimal places — the numbers a hedge fund would ingest via HTTP.
Latency and refresh
The homepage widget refreshes on a short poll interval, keeping the quoted mid within a second or two of the underlying tick. That is close enough for treasury reporting, invoice pricing, and analyst dashboards, though sub-second execution use cases should still connect directly to the streaming API.
Built for developers, not just tourists
The pages are designed to be embeddable, screenshottable, and SEO-friendly. Each popular conversion page carries clean OpenGraph metadata, JSON-LD structured data, and a canonical URL that survives sharing across Slack, X, and email. Developers evaluating the LiveRates API can use the converter as a live sanity check: pick a pair, note the quote, then hit the same endpoint through their language of choice and confirm the numbers match.
The converter is intentionally free and unauthenticated. It exists so anyone considering the LiveRates API can validate the data quality before writing a single line of code.
Roadmap
The next iteration will add historical conversion — what was 500 GBP worth in JPY on 3 March 2024? — powered by the existing Daily snapshot table, plus a batch mode that accepts a CSV of amounts and pairs. Support for additional metals (platinum, palladium) and expanded crypto coverage is already scheduled.
Try it now
The converter is live and free to use with no signup. Developers who need the same data streaming into their own applications can spin up an API key in under a minute. Visit live-rates.com to try the Currency Converter and grab a free API key.