RealWorth.io

The plan was always bigger than a calculator. I wanted to build a place that makes money make sense, where the abstract numbers that run our lives turn into something you can actually see and feel. But you can't launch a "hub." Nobody shows up for a vision. You need one solid, useful thing first, so I started with the piece that stood on its own: an inflation calculator that shows what old money was actually worth. Not just "$100 in 1920 = $1,636 today," but that it was about nine weeks of a factory wage, two months of rent, a few hundred loaves of bread. That's the part every other calculator skips, and it was the right place to begin.

Then it kept growing, one idea pulling the next one out of me. Each tool answered a question I couldn't stop thinking about.

I kept staring at big numbers and realizing I couldn't actually picture them. A billion dollars means nothing in your head. So I built How Big Is a Billion Dollars, where every tile on the screen is a single $100 bill, laid end to end into a road you scroll down until you give up. That one taught me more about the constraints of the web than anything else I've made.

Working with all that historical data got me wondering where money itself even came from. So I built The Story of Money, an interactive walk that follows a single coin through 5,000 years, from cowrie shells to paper dollars.

Then I wanted to see money in motion, not just money over time. That became the Money Flow Map: the world's biggest remittance corridors, with a live counter ticking up the roughly $28,000 that migrant workers send home every second. Watching that number climb hits differently than reading "$905 billion a year."

Two more came from the same itch. I wanted to know where I'd have stood in another era, so I built the Rich-O-Meter, which ranks any salary against historical income levels. Then I wanted the same answer across space instead of time, so I built the WealthMap. It compares your income to today's global medians, so you can see where in the world you'd count as rich.

Here's the lesson that surprised me. Scope creep is usually a warning sign. But when every new piece comes from a question you genuinely want answered, not from a feature list, that's how a tool quietly turns into a destination. The calculator is what gets people in the door. The visual pieces are why they stay, and why they share.

And that's the direction now. I've stopped thinking of RealWorth.io as "an inflation calculator" and started building it as a visual hub for understanding money and economics. The calculator is still the anchor, but the goal is bigger. Take the abstract numbers that run our lives, and make them something you can actually see and feel. More visual tools are coming, more original data pieces, and a blog to tie the whole thing together.

It's a solo project, built in the evenings, around five hours a week. Free, no signup, no paywall. I'd rather people share it than pay for it.

Now the honest tension. My homepage still says "inflation calculator," because that's what people search for and what I actually rank for. But the product has outgrown that line. If you've repositioned something past its original one-liner without losing the audience that already knows you for it, I'd like to hear how you did it.

A few months ago my project RealWorth.io (historical inflation + purchasing power, 6 countries back to 1750) was sitting at ~6,500 indexed pages. Then I made a classic mistake: I changed my sitemap twice in one week and hit "Validate Fix" in Search Console before I'd actually fixed anything. Google's indexed count collapsed to 19. Not a penalty — just a total loss of trust in a low-authority programmatic site.

Here's what I've learned climbing back out, in case it saves someone the same hole:

The crash was self-inflicted, and the fix was mostly deleting things. I had ~5,500 programmatic pages, and a big chunk were junk: "$1 in 2021 → $1," pages with "0 weeks of wages" showing up in the actual search snippet. I cut the sitemap from 5,500 to ~4,600 real pages and hard-404'd about 2,600 "ghost" URLs I'd accidentally left crawlable. Fewer, better pages beat more pages every time.

Technical recovery ≠ ranking recovery. My site scores 100 on PageSpeed, has clean schema, 168ms response. Google still won't re-index it. The bottleneck was never technical — it's that a DR 0 domain has no reason for Google to trust it. Fixing the tech just stops you from actively losing; it doesn't win anything back.

The surprise winner: AI search. While Google sat frozen, Bing indexed everything, and Microsoft Copilot citations went from near-zero to 8,000 in last three months. ChatGPT now sends real visitors. If you're starting fresh with no authority, Bing/AI visibility comes way faster than Google.

Still climbing. The next phase is the boring truth everyone avoids: I need actual backlinks, not more tech tweaks. Publishing original data research, one study a month, and doing the outreach I kept putting off.

Happy to answer anything about the deindexation, the recovery, or the programmatic SEO setup. What would you dig into first with a domain that has 5 hours a week and no budget?