Sticker Shock
Your shopping cart has a trade policy problem. We put a dollar figure on it.
Consumer-facing tariff price intelligence — an automated, opinionated site that turns tariff schedules, executive orders, import data, and price indices into brutally clear product-category scorecards, “what just got more expensive” alerts, brand-adjacent buying guides, and weekly dispatches explaining how trade policy is hitting actual households, carts, and small businesses.
Niche Explored
Consumer-facing tariff price-impact intelligence — translating complex HTS tariff schedules, executive orders, trade data, and BLS price indices into plain-language “what’s getting more expensive and why” content for American shoppers and small businesses.
Existing Competition
- Yale Budget Lab — excellent academic research, but dense PDF-style reports for policy wonks, not consumers. Published tariff trackers through 2025-2026 showing effective rate hit 27%, now at 13.7% post-Supreme Court ruling.
- Peterson Institute (PIIE) — tariff tracker, again academic/policy audience. Not consumer-facing.
- Tax Foundation — tariff modeling but focused on tax policy audience.
- Reuters/Bloomberg — breaking news coverage but no persistent, product-level tracking for consumers.
- NerdWallet / Wirecutter — occasional “how tariffs affect you” articles, not automated or continuous.
- Nobody is building an automated, continuously-updated, product-category-level tariff cost tracker that tells a normal human “your new washing machine costs $327 more because of this specific tariff.”
Data Sources Found
- USITC Harmonized Tariff Schedule API —
hts.usitc.gov— Free, JSON. Complete HTS with tariff rates by product code. Updated when tariff changes are enacted. - Census Bureau Trade Data API —
api.census.gov— Free (API key). Import/export data by HS code, country, value. 1,775+ datasets. Monthly updates. - BLS Public Data API v2 —
api.bls.gov/publicAPI/v2/timeseries/data/— Free (registration key for higher limits). Consumer Price Index (CPI) data by category. Import Price Index. Producer Price Index. Monthly. - Federal Register API —
federalregister.gov/api/v1— Free. Executive orders, tariff proclamations, USTR notices. Real-time updates. - FRED API (St. Louis Fed) —
api.stlouisfed.org— Free (API key). Economic indicators: inflation, trade balance, import prices, consumer sentiment. 816,000+ time series. - USA Trade Online —
usatrade.census.gov— Census import/export data portal, HS-code granular. - World Bank WITS — Trade and tariff data, free API.
- WTO Tariff Profiles — Annual bound/applied tariff rates by country.
SEO Analysis
- Keywords: “tariff impact on prices” (search spike since Liberation Day, April 2025), “how tariffs affect consumers,” “tariff calculator,” “which products have tariffs,” “tariff cost increase”
- Massive search spikes around every tariff announcement (Liberation Day, Section 232 expansions, IEEPA rulings)
- Very thin content in results — mostly news articles that go stale within days, no persistent calculator or tracker
- Long-tail goldmine: “tariff on [specific product]”, “tariff on cars from Japan,” “tariff on electronics from China”
- The Supreme Court IEEPA ruling (Feb 2026) and $166B refund process create a second wave of consumer search demand
Communities
- r/personalfinance (18M+ members) — tariff discussion threads regularly hit thousands of upvotes
- r/frugal (3M+) — cost-impact obsessed
- r/smallbusiness (1.2M) — import-dependent businesses desperate for clarity
- r/economics (3.6M) — academic discussions
- Twitter/X trade policy accounts — huge engagement
- Facebook buy-nothing / deal-hunting groups — price sensitivity audience
- Small business owner forums, Amazon seller communities
Image/Graphic Feasibility
- Excellent for automation. Charts (price trend lines, tariff rate comparison bars), product-category heatmaps, country-of-origin flow diagrams, “before/after tariff” price cards — all can be auto-generated from the data APIs with Chart.js, D3, or similar.
- Product category icons/illustrations via AI image generation.
- Interactive tariff calculator widgets are buildable in TypeScript.
- Shareable “tariff receipt” cards (like a grocery receipt showing the tariff surcharge on everyday items).
Key Context (April 2026)
- Effective US tariff rate: 13.7% (down from 27% peak after SCOTUS IEEPA ruling)
- Section 122 global 10% tariff active until July 24, 2026
- Trump threatening 15% increase
- Section 232 tariffs on cars (25%), steel (25%), aluminum (25%), copper (25%) still active
- $166B in IEEPA tariff refunds being processed
- States suing to block remaining tariffs
- Consumer price sensitivity at multi-year high
- Corporate bankruptcies at highest since 2010