FinexisEdu

A web calculator for the total university fees, in Singapore dollars, of a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Singapore and in nine of the countries where Singaporeans most often study: Australia, the UK, the US, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, Japan and Ireland (ranked by UNESCO's counts of Singaporean students abroad). It is built for Singaporean students and families.

It covers tuition plus compulsory university fees (student services fees, Japanese admission fees, and so on), and optionally living costs for studying abroad. Visas, flights and health insurance are out of scope.

How it works

             monthly GitHub Action                       every request (cached 24h)
 university ──► scrapers/ (Python) ──► PR with data/ ──► Next.js site ◄── ECB daily rates
 fee pages                             changes, reviewed    (Vercel)        + Frankfurter or IMF
                                       by a human

Data	Where it comes from	How it stays current
Tuition and compulsory fees, per university, level and field	Each university's published fee page (HTML, PDF or JavaScript page)	scrapers/ re-reads the pages monthly and publishes the result when every check passes, otherwise holds it for review
Exchange rates to SGD	European Central Bank daily reference rates (about 30 currencies, read from the ECB's own file, or Frankfurter's copy if that fails). For any currency the ECB lacks, the source chosen in Site settings (otherExchangeRates): Frankfurter central-bank rates (MAS, Bank of England, Bank of Canada, RBA or IMF daily, else the currency's own central bank; at most a week old and within 2% of a second bank where one exists), or the IMF data API month-end rates. All free, no key	Fetched live and cached for an hour, with a daily visit after the ECB publishes (refresh-rates.yml); data/fx-fallback.json is used if the API is down
Yearly fee increase used for future years	Each university's own rate: the median compound yearly rise across its programmes' published fee histories (per residency tier in Singapore), computed in lib/increase.ts. A per-country default in data/countries/ is used where a university has fewer than two programmes with history	Country defaults are set by hand (the monthly run's summary suggests a new one when the fee history points elsewhere); university rates follow the data

There is no public API for university tuition anywhere, so fees are scraped from each university's own pages. Pages change layout from time to time, so the monthly run (refresh-data.yml) only publishes a refresh by itself when every check passes: the website's lint, type checks, tests and build, the scraper tests, and the safety checks in scrapers/guard.py. Those allow only fee, fee-year, history, living-cost, default-increase and fallback-rate changes, each fee moving by at most 25% (never to or from zero), exchange rates by at most 10%, and no change at all to a fee entered by hand. A passing refresh is committed straight to main and Vercel publishes it; anything else stays on the data/refresh branch as a pull request (or, if GitHub doesn't let Actions open one, an issue linking to it) and the run is marked failed so GitHub emails you. In the scrape itself:

• tuition is only read from the page a programme cites; a rule that names no programme leaves partner programmes (NIE, SIM partners) alone, and no rule changes a programme whose source is a manual: true page unless its source lists that page under also_covers;
• changes over 25% are flagged at the top of the summary;
• a page that fails to scrape keeps its old value and is listed in the summary, and the workflow run is marked failed so GitHub notifies you;
• entries not verified for 11 months are listed as needing a manual check;
• the website shows a "Data may be outdated" badge on entries older than a year, and an "Unofficial source" badge on figures not taken from the university itself.

Coverage (checked 8 Oct 2026)

114 universities, 1,537 programmes: five to sixteen universities in each of the 10 countries, plus SIM Global Education in Singapore, across nine fields (engineering, computing, business, sciences, arts and humanities, law, medicine, psychology, nursing). Business includes a dedicated accountancy degree (one bachelor's and one master's at most) wherever a university teaches one in English; where accounting is only a major inside a general commerce degree, that degree is listed once. Psychology covers the main bachelor's and one taught master's at every university that offers them (Imperial, SIT, TUM, ETH, EPFL and St. Gallen have none; most US universities and several others teach psychology master's only as research degrees, so they have the bachelor's only). MIT is listed with Brain and Cognitive Sciences, its nearest equivalent. Law and medicine are included wherever a shortlisted university teaches them; every law or medicine programme is labelled "SILE listed" or "Not on SILE list" (Singapore Institute of Legal Education approved universities) and "SMC listed" or "Not on SMC list" (Singapore Medical Council registrable qualifications), from sgRecognition in the data, so a reader can see at once whether the degree leads to practice in Singapore. Undergraduate-entry degrees (LLB, MBBS) sit under Bachelor's and graduate-entry ones (JD, LLM, graduate-entry MD) under Master's. Where later years of a programme cost more (the clinical years of medicine, say), each year is priced at its own published fee (laterYears in the data; see data/SCHEMA.md). Every current figure was checked against the university's own fee page or PDF where the page is readable, and 2024/2025 figures come from the universities' published fee tables for those years.

Country	Universities	Scraped automatically
Singapore	NUS, NTU, SMU, SIT, SUSS, SIM (9 partner universities)	NUS, NTU, SIT; SMU, SUSS and SIM are manual
Australia	ANU, Melbourne, Monash, UNSW, Sydney, RMIT, Deakin, Queensland, Adelaide University	ANU, UNSW, Sydney; Melbourne and Monash are manual (Cloudflare); RMIT, Deakin, Queensland and Adelaide University are manual
UK	Cambridge (MBA), Imperial, LSE, Oxford, UCL, Glasgow, Manchester, Warwick, Hertfordshire, Coventry, East London, King's College London, Bristol, Birmingham	Cambridge, Imperial, LSE, UCL; Oxford is manual; the last nine are manual
US	Berkeley, CMU, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, ASU, UIUC, Purdue, Northeastern, USC, UCLA, Columbia, NYU, Boston University, Johns Hopkins, North Texas	First five: all; the other eleven are manual
Germany	TUM, LMU Munich, Heidelberg, RWTH Aachen, HU Berlin, TU Darmstadt, Duisburg-Essen, Bonn, Goethe Frankfurt, FU Berlin, OVGU Magdeburg	TUM, LMU Munich, Heidelberg and RWTH Aachen; HU Berlin (semester-fee page blocks bots) and the six newer universities are checked by hand
Canada	McGill, McMaster, Toronto, UBC, Waterloo, York, Concordia, Simon Fraser, Alberta, Western	First five: all (McMaster's tuition spreadsheet and UBC compulsory fees are manual); the other five are manual
New Zealand	Auckland, Canterbury, Massey, Otago, Victoria Wellington, Waikato, Lincoln, EIT, Unitec	All except Otago (bot-protected); Waikato, Lincoln, EIT and Unitec are manual
Switzerland	ETH Zurich, EPFL, Zurich, Geneva, St. Gallen, Lausanne, Basel, Bern, Neuchâtel, Fribourg, USI	All of the first five; Lausanne, Basel, Bern, Neuchâtel, Fribourg and USI are manual
Japan	Keio, Kyoto, Osaka, UTokyo, Waseda, APU, Ritsumeikan, Sophia, Kyushu, Nagoya, Tohoku, Institute of Science Tokyo, Tsukuba	First five: all (Waseda's lab/health fee is manual); the other eight are manual
Ireland	Trinity College Dublin, UCD, UCC, Galway, DCU, TU Dublin, Limerick, Maynooth, RCSI, Griffith College	First five: all (UCD's living-cost page is manual); TU Dublin, Limerick, Maynooth, RCSI and Griffith are manual

Why these countries: Singapore's MOE does not track students who study overseas, so the list follows the host countries' own counts of Singaporean students as compiled by UNESCO UIS (2023–24): Australia ~6,800, UK ~6,100, US ~3,800, then Germany, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland, Japan and Ireland at 250–650 each. Malaysia (about 550) is left out because most Singaporeans there take Singapore-delivered or branch-campus degrees.

Manual sources are listed in scrapers/registry.yaml and scrapers/registry.d/*.yaml with the reason. They are pages that block automated access (SMU, SUSS, Oxford, Melbourne, Monash, Otago, UCL's central site, some NUS programme sites) or that show a fee spread across rows. Figures from those sites carry an "Unofficial source" badge where the university's own page could not be read.

SIM Global Education teaches 86 bachelor's and master's degrees awarded by University of London, University at Buffalo, Birmingham, Wollongong, RMIT, Stirling, Cardiff, Sydney and Alberta. Its fees appear only on each programme page (GST-inclusive, Singaporeans & PRs vs international), so every page is a manual source; 2024 to 2026 figures come from archived copies of those pages, and programmes with no archived copy say so in their notes.

A few earlier-year figures are an official per-credit or per-course rate multiplied by a standard full-time load (UNSW, UBC, Auckland), the same way the current figures are built; their notes say so.

Comparing up to three universities

The sidebar on the left holds the student settings (level, residency, start year, fee increase, living costs) and the comparison slots. One university is shown at first; "Compare another university" adds a second and a third slot, each with a "remove" link. Each slot has a country dropdown, then a dropdown of that country's universities, then the field of study offered at that university (and a programme dropdown where it has more than one in that field). SIM Global Education teaches degrees awarded by partner universities, so for SIM a "Partner university" dropdown (University of London, Buffalo, Birmingham and so on) comes between the university and the field, and the partner is named on the tile, chart and details. Because the field is chosen per slot, the same university can be compared across two of its own courses, or two universities across different courses. The results show a headline tile for each selection (programme, total in SGD and how much more it costs than the cheapest), then vertical bars on a common baseline. "Compare" switches the bars between the total and one part of it (tuition, other fees, one-off fees, living costs); the total is stacked by part. The year-by-year fees, living-cost breakdown, badges and source links for each university sit in the details panel below the chart, all converted to SGD, with the local-currency figure shown once in the heading.

Every university name is a link to its website; hovering (or tapping) it shows a short description and why the university is in the calculator (description and whyIncluded in its data file). For Singapore universities the details also list the Citizen, PR and international fee per year side by side.

Living costs (optional)

Switch on "Include living costs" to add each overseas university's own published estimate of a student's living costs (housing, food, transport and personal/books), stored as monthly amounts in livingCosts in its data file. Every university outside Singapore has one. Where the university publishes no itemised budget, the entry uses its single stated total, or failing that the national visa authority's living-cost requirement (marked as an unofficial source), split into the four categories using the average shares of that country's other universities; each entry's notes say which.

• Lifestyle: Moderate is the university's estimate; Frugal is 20% less and Comfortable 30% more. Each university's details section also has "Customise this budget" to enter your own monthly amounts.
• Months: the estimate covers the months the university states (e.g. 9 for a US academic year, 12 for Australia), charged pro rata for part years.
• Later years grow by the country's latest official CPI inflation (livingCostIncrease in data/countries/).
• Not included for Singapore universities. Melbourne's figure is the Australian student-visa minimum (its own pages block automated access). Kyoto and Waseda use JASSO's official student survey. UCL's figure is its US-loan budget. The details say which source is used.
• The monthly scraper keeps these estimates updated like the fees.

On phones

The site is responsive and can be installed as an app. In Safari, choose Share → Add to Home Screen; in Chrome on Android, ⋮ → Install app. It then opens full-screen with its own icon (app/manifest.ts, public/icons/). On small screens a bottom bar links from the options to the results, chart bars open their breakdown on tap, and form fields are sized so iOS doesn't zoom in.

The calculation

The start year is typed in and must be 2026 or later; earlier years are refused with a prompt saying so. For each year of study:

• Years up to the latest published fee year use published figures only: the current fee, or for earlier years the programme's feeHistory. If a needed year has no published figure, the programme is shown as "No published fee on file"; the past is never estimated. Earlier years' fees (2024, 2025) stay in the data because the per-university increase is computed from them.

• Later years are projected:

  fee(year) = (annual tuition + annual compulsory fees) × (1 + yearly increase) ^ (years after the published fee year)
  

One-off fees are added in the first year, and everything is converted to SGD at the latest rate.

The yearly increase is automatic and specific to the university chosen. The sidebar box "Rates based on … figures" names the published fee year the projections start from, takes the start year, and lists each selected university's "% inflation": the median compound rise across that university's programmes between their earliest and latest published fees, per residency tier in Singapore. A university with fewer than two programmes carrying history falls back to its country's typical rate, and the box says so. "Use my own rate instead" applies one rate to every university.

• Cohort-locked programmes (NUS, NTU, SMU and many UK universities) keep the fee you start with for the whole degree, so only the gap between the published year and your start year is projected.
• Singapore universities have separate Citizen / PR / international rates (MOE Tuition Grant). Abroad, Singaporeans pay international rates.
• A partial final year (e.g. a 1.5-year Master's) is charged pro rata.

The engine is lib/calc.ts, with tests in lib/calc.test.ts.

Project layout

app/, components/     Next.js site (App Router, Tailwind)
lib/                  fee engine, zod schema, data loader, exchange rates
data/                 all fee data as JSON; format described in data/SCHEMA.md
scrapers/             Python scraper pipeline
  registry.yaml       which page and regex feeds which fee figure
  registry.d/         one more registry file per newer university, merged in by run.py
  run.py              runs the registry, validates, writes data/, writes the PR summary
.github/workflows/    ci.yml (tests + build), refresh-data.yml (monthly scrape → PR)

Running locally

npm install
npm run dev          # http://localhost:3000
npm test             # fee engine + validation of every data file
npm run lint && npm run typecheck

python -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"
.venv/bin/pytest                               # scraper tests (offline fixtures)
.venv/bin/python -m scrapers.run --dry-run     # live scrape, prints the diff, writes nothing

For parser: browser sources, also run pip install -e ".[browser]" and python -m playwright install chromium.

Adding or fixing a university

1. Add or edit data/universities/<country>/<id>.json (see data/SCHEMA.md). Every programme needs a sourceUrl.
2. To keep it updated automatically, add a source to scrapers/registry.yaml with a regex whose first capture group is the amount. Test it with python -m scrapers.run --dry-run --only <id>.
3. If the page can't be scraped reliably, add it with manual: true. The monthly run's summary will remind you when it needs re-checking. A fee entered by hand from a manual page is never changed by a scraped page.

Deploying

Import this repo into Vercel with Add New → Project → Import Git Repository (not "Clone Template", which creates a separate, empty repo). Vercel detects Next.js automatically; the calculator needs no settings or secrets. Production deploys from main.

The editor at /admin (reached by the faint three-bar symbol at the top right of the header, shown on computers only) stays switched off until you add an EDITOR_PASSWORD environment variable (at least 8 characters) under Settings → Environment Variables. Everyone who edits shares that password; changing it signs everyone out.

To let the editor save, add an EDITOR_GITHUB_TOKEN as well: on GitHub go to Settings → Developer settings → Fine-grained tokens → Generate new token, choose Only select repositories with this repository, give it Contents, Pull requests and Issues set to Read and write, and Actions, Commit statuses and Deployments set to Read-only, and set an expiry date (renew it before then). If GitHub refuses a request, the editor names the permission it was missing. Each saved change becomes a pull request labelled editor-change; it goes live once it is approved on the editor's Approvals screen (the sender can approve their own change) after its checks pass. Everything one person edits between signing in and signing out (or the 12-hour limit) joins that same pull request, so a single approval covers it; once it is approved or sent back, the next edit starts a new one. Approving merges it, and Vercel then redeploys the site.

Editors can also add and remove programmes, universities and countries. A new university's fee pages go into scrapers/registry.d/<id>.yaml as pages to check by hand; removing one also drops its scraper entries and shortlist place. A new country's currency must be one the European Central Bank or the International Monetary Fund publishes, and its rate is added to data/fx-fallback.json; the list of currencies to fetch comes from the country files. The page re-renders at most hourly for fresh exchange rates (a scheduled workflow visits it daily after the ECB publishes, so it never waits for a visitor), and every merge into main (including approved data PRs) redeploys it.

The monthly fee refresh publishes by itself when its checks pass (no setting needed). To get a pull request instead of an issue when one is held for review, go to Settings → Actions → General and allow GitHub Actions to create pull requests.

Limits

Figures are estimates for planning. Scholarships, bursaries, MOE service obligations and fee changes a university hasn't published yet are not included. Always confirm with the university.