RealWorth.io

I wanted to build one small page. It answers a question a child could ask: how big is a billion dollars, physically, if you printed it all in $100 bills?

The funny part is the answer really is simple. One billion dollars is 10 million $100 bills. They weigh about 10 tonnes and cover roughly 103,000 square metres laid flat. If I only wanted the number, I could have shipped it in an hour. But a number on a screen is boring. "10 million banknotes" means nothing to anyone, including me. I wanted a person to actually feel the size. And the moment you try to make a number felt instead of stated, you stop building a calculator and start building something much bigger than you planned.

The whole page rests on four measurements from the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing: a bill is about 156 by 66 millimetres, about 0.1 millimetres thick, and weighs about a gram. Every figure on the page is just those numbers multiplied by how many notes you have. My first bug was copying a slightly different thickness into two places, then losing an hour to why two numbers disagreed. A mistake that took ten seconds to make. That is side projects in one sentence.

Then I decided you should be able to drive on it. Every tile on the road is one $100 bill. You pick a vehicle, a tractor, a sports car, a fighter jet, and drive along the money with the arrow keys. To reach the trillion-dollar marker you would drive for months without stopping. You cannot put 10 million things on a screen and expect a browser to survive, so the road is a trick: you only ever render a short stretch and recycle the same scenery as you move, like a treadmill. It feels endless. It is a few objects reused forever.

The jet was the part nobody asked for. It hovers above the road instead of driving, because a fighter jet rolling down a paper highway looked ridiculous and a flying one looked right. That cost me an evening. I did it anyway, which is another thing side projects are made of.

Then there was the boring lesson I want to actually pass on. The page switches between metric and imperial. The naive way is to store what you show and convert it back and forth, but every conversion loses a little precision, and after enough flips the numbers visibly drift. The fix is dull and worth it: store one true value, convert only at the last second when you draw it, never write the converted number back. It quietly prevents a whole family of "why is this slightly wrong now" bugs that are almost impossible to reproduce on purpose.

The tension that actually matters for the project is different, though. The interesting part lives in the browser's graphics layer, but a search engine cannot drive a car or read pixels off a canvas. To a crawler, my interactive road can look like a blank rectangle. So the page is two layers. Every real answer, all the numbers and tables and plain explanations, loads as ordinary text before any of the fancy stuff runs. The road layers on top for people who can enjoy it. If the fancy layer never loads, you still get a complete, correct page.

If I could tell my earlier self one thing about building visual things on the web, it is that the impressive layer is the topping, not the cake. Build the plain, complete version first, then make it fun on top. The other way around leaves you invisible to half the internet, which for a project that lives or dies on being found is not a small problem.

Strip it all back and the thing underneath is embarrassingly simple. Four constants and a pile of multiplication, compared against things people already know the size of. The engineering was never in the math. It was in making the math felt, and in making sure a machine that cannot see any of it still walks away with the full answer. That gap is where most of my weekends went, and honestly it is the part I enjoy.

This is the first project I have put out in public. Before this, the only audience for my side projects was me, and my fish. So if you have built something similar and know a better way than the ones I stumbled into, or you just want to tell me the whole thing is over-engineered, I would like to hear it.

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?