fuckCustoms

final devlog!!
i’m probably gonna go ship! (and go to bed, as it is midnight here).
i’ve finished making the readme, and tailoring the last stuff i wanted to do! the readme puts a real emphasis on the project’s ideas and story, but also on the open source contribution part with a guidance on how to edit country information from the JSON side with a detail of what variable does what, and guidance on doing a pull request. i hope everyone who eventually uses this enjoys it and finds reliable data across the site! (and sorry in advance if it’s not!!!)
and i also credited all the due APIs and tools i used, such as lucide icons or even the exchangerate API.

ANOTHER ONE
this time i added the last feature i truely wanted to add which is breaking down the actual calculation, because the calculation isn’t that hard to explain in itself, so now if you click the estimate you can see a little breakdown of how the estimate has been calculated! you do have to keep in mind that the handling fees are not insanely precise but should give you a rough estimate tho.
and for this well this was pretty easy to make since in the JS we were already calculating both the vat, duty, and handling so i just converted these to the actual correct currency and displayed those with a click event listener!

WOOHOO THE BACKEND IS FINALLY ALIVE!!!!
i think i’ve done the hardest part of the project so far, actually finding out how to calculate the custom fees! (this include the handling fee from the courier, the possible duty rates if it exceeds the certain local thresholds, and the VAT of the country).
the way I’ve did this is thanks to the JSON list of countries I found earlier, i made another JSON list with every single country on my list (that has obtainable data), and in this list i compiled the VAT rate, the duty rates and thresholds, and the local handling fees. all of the information about the rates has been found thanks to Google Gemini, because finding exchange rates for like 194 countries wouldn’t have been coding and would have just been a waste of time. the data is quite pretty precise tho!
after that, the data is loaded into the browser and after all calculations, we come up to the conclusion of “total = VAT + duty fees (if applicable) + handling fees.”. this variable is then converted into the user’s country’s currency, and badaam done!

sorry for the long devlog, but a lot of stuff to say!
i also removed the origin country (which originally contained selectors for UK/US since stuff on flavortown can be shipped from UK), but turns out it does no difference, so I ended up removing it altogether.
and also did a couple of quick UI edits there and there, and yay!!!!

another devlog!
i just finished to do all the front end, which means all the actual interface the end user will see. the remaining stuff to do will be the backend, which will be all the math rules per country for calculation of the fees and duty. i’m pretty happy of how i got the country selector to work, i managed to do it thanks to a github gist, here the one by @keeguon made 14 years ago, with the list of countries in JSON. then, I put all this in a tag and made it cleaner using the ‘choices’ JS library, to have a search field, and i would say i’m pretty happy of the end result!
i hope making the actual backend won’t be too hard, and another devlog soon I hope!

first devlog!
i almost finished the main static interface of the tool, based on a very dark-ish color palette. The point will be to make a very sober and simple looking tool to calculate customs, something that’s in theory a bit more difficult to do. (so altogether: simple ui => to do hard stuff ig)
the project will eventually allow people to calculate their customs for any country, and for any package they are recieving via hackclub, so i hope this will turn out good!
(the app will be entirely revolving around HTML, CSS, and JS, no fancy frameworks or stuff like that)