ARBITORIA
A personal-finance transparency platform for Belgium and France. Salary, housing, utilities, insurance, loans, investing — all built on official, citable data. Deliberately review-free. Currently serving about 300 daily visitors, verified through Cloudflare analytics, with no paid acquisition.
The problem
Most financial decisions ordinary households make in Belgium and France happen under information asymmetry that doesn't need to exist. Salary norms are buried in collective agreements. Energy tariffs change every quarter and comparison tools are sponsored. Insurance products are deliberately complex. Mortgage and loan terms vary by canton, region, and bank in ways no individual tracks. The data exists — but it sits in scattered government portals, regulator filings, and PDFs nobody reads.
The premise of ARBITORIA is simple: a household should be able to see their own country's real numbers, on their own terms, without sponsored content interfering.
What it does
- Salary — gross-to-net by region, sector, and contract type, with real percentile data.
- Housing — rent and purchase price ranges by commune, transaction tax simulation, mortgage scenario builder.
- Utilities — electricity, gas, internet, mobile — current tariffs from regulator filings, not affiliate-paid comparison sites.
- Insurance — typology of common products, regulatory baseline coverage, and the questions to ask before signing.
- Loans & investing — TAEG ranges by product, tax-advantaged instruments, country-specific structures.
What it deliberately doesn't do
No reviews. No affiliate links. No sponsored placements. No "best of" rankings. The position is that any platform mixing transparency with paid placement compromises the transparency. A 4.7-star rating means nothing if the rating is a side-effect of who paid more.
The platform doesn't tell users what to do. It shows them what's actually true, and lets them decide.
Why it works in two countries
Belgium and France share regulatory roots but differ on tax brackets, social charges, regional housing rules, and product naming conventions. Every category has to be implemented country-aware: a salary calculation in Wallonia is not the same as in Île-de-France, and a mortgage simulation in Flanders has different transaction taxes than in Brussels-Capital.
The architecture treats country as a first-class parameter everywhere — schema, computation, copy, and presentation. This is the same pattern that makes the platform extensible to new countries, which is what Salaire-Plus did first for the salary vertical.
What I learned building it
- Official data is harder to ingest than scraped data. Government portals change formats. PDFs from regulators get reissued mid-year. The boring work of source monitoring is the work.
- Trust is built by what you refuse to do. Every "no — we won't take that affiliate revenue" is more credibility than another feature.
- Multi-country is not multiplicative complexity, it's structural. Either the architecture treats country as a primary axis, or every feature gets re-implemented per country.
- SEO from utility, not from content. Almost all traffic comes from people searching specific calculations ("salaire net Belgique 2026", "TVA réduite logement"). The content earns its rank by actually answering the question.
Numbers
- ~300 daily visitors — Cloudflare-verified, no paid acquisition.
- 2 countries — Belgium, France, both fully covered.
- 3 languages — French, Dutch, English.
- 0 affiliate links — by design, permanently.
Why this matters for the next role
ARBITORIA is the smallest version of the work I want to do next: cross-border consumer products where regulatory nuance and language depth both matter. The skills it required — country-aware schema design, multi-locale frontend, regulatory research, and deliberate product restraint — are the same skills any team building cross-border fintech or insurance tools needs.
Live at arbitoria.com.