RatesBazar
About the floor

We built a marketplace,
not a banner farm.

RatesBazar is an independent rate marketplace. We track every rate that matters in a household — savings, CDs, mortgages, refinance, auto loans, personal loans, credit cards, and HELOCs — then rank the lenders worth your time. No placement fees. No rate-quote spam.

Editorial office
Origin

A bazaar, not a billboard.

RatesBazar started in early 2025 with a frustration shared by every household in America: the rate you Googled was never the rate you actually got. Banner-ad comparison tables ranked lenders by who paid the most, not by who offered the most. Aggregators padded their pages with "rates" that were six months old. And none of them tracked the entire household stack — savings, CDs, mortgages, auto, cards, HELOCs — in one place.

So we built the marketplace we wanted. Eight stalls. One Monday-morning newsletter. Editors who used to work the rate desk at banks, brokerages, and credit unions — and who had walked away because they wanted to write the truth without the compliance department softening it.

Today RatesBazar tracks 800+ rates across eight categories every week, and ranks them with no placement fees, no rate-quote spam, and no "verified by our trusted partners" wink-wink seal. If a lender's rate is good, we say so. If it's bad, we tell you which lender to walk past.

Editorial standards

Five rules of the floor.

  • 01

    We don't accept payment for placement.

    Lenders cannot pay to be ranked higher, featured, or excluded. They cannot pay us to soften a review. They can buy display advertising, like at any newspaper — and that buy gets them an ad slot, not a star.

  • 02

    Affiliate disclosure is at the top.

    When a review contains an affiliate link, we say so on the page itself, not in 6-pt type at the bottom. The link is the same whether we earn a commission or not.

  • 03

    Rates are dated.

    Every rate on RatesBazar is stamped with the day we pulled it. We re-pull every Sunday night. If a rate is older than two weeks we mark it stale.

  • 04

    We publish takedowns.

    When a lender we previously ranked changes its terms, vanishes a teaser, or starts denying customers it used to approve, we publish a 'removed from the floor' note explaining why.

  • 05

    Corrections live forever.

    If we get a number wrong, we leave a clearly labeled correction at the bottom of the article. We don't quietly edit posts.

The desk

Who's writing.

A small editorial team. Each editor owns one or two rate categories and signs every review they publish. We rotate categories yearly so no one gets too cozy with any single bank.

Editor-in-chief

Maren Castillo

Twelve years on the rate desk before founding RatesBazar. Specialty: deposit products, CD ladders, and the difference between an APY footnote and a teaser.

Mortgages & HELOC editor

Theo Whitcomb

Former mortgage broker. Now writes about lock fees, rate buy-downs, and break-even math the way he wishes lenders did.

Cards & personal loans editor

Priya Anand-Hill

Loves a 0% APR transfer window. Hates a deferred-interest financing trap. Files most of our consumer-credit pieces.

Auto desk

Reggie Okafor

Drove every car review on the auto-loan beat for two decades. Knows which credit unions still cap dealer markup and which don't.

Want the floor in your inbox?

The Weekly Rate Floor lands every Monday. Three rates worth your time, one to skip, and the loan window we think is closing. Free.

Contact

Editorial: editors@ratesbazar.com
Privacy: privacy@ratesbazar.com

Or browse every rate on the floor.