Money & currencies¶
Every amount in FigureCollector — purchase price, shipping, deposit, MSRP, manual valuation, wishlist target — is stored in its own currency and never mutated. What changed in v0.23 is the reading side: the app now shows everything in one display currency of your choosing, converted on the fly, with the original always one hover away.
The supported currencies¶
EUR · USD · JPY · GBP · CHF · CAD
The list lives server-side (GET /api/currencies) and is enforced as a
whitelist on every money write — price, valuation, MSRP, wishlist target,
pre-order. Junk codes (BTC, XXX, lowercase) are rejected with a 400, so
un-convertible amounts can't sneak into your data. Every currency picker in
the SPA is fed from this single endpoint; ECB publishes rates for all six, so
anything you can select is convertible.
One display currency¶
Your default currency (Settings → Devise) plays a double role:
- the currency pre-selected in every price form, and
- the display currency every other amount converts into.
Conversion is on by default — set a default currency and the whole app reads in it. A single toggle underneath flips the behaviour:
| Toggle | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Tout afficher dans ma devise (default) | Amounts in another currency are converted at today's ECB rate, marked ≈. |
| Garder les devises d'origine | Every amount stays in its own currency, exactly as recorded. |
No default currency set → nothing converts; amounts render natively. There is no separate "display currency" picker and no manual rate table to maintain — both were removed in the v0.23 refonte.
The ≈ marker¶
A converted amount is whisper-quiet about it: a small gold ≈ prefix and a
dotted underline. Hover it and the original appears (≈ 47,67 € →
55 $US). Summed totals that merge several currencies carry the ≈ without a
hover original (there isn't a single one to show).
Formatting follows each currency's real minor units via Intl — yen render
with no decimals (8 981 JPY, not 8 980,50 JPY), euros with at most two.
Rates¶
- Source: European Central Bank reference rates via frankfurter.dev — free, keyless, HTTPS (Rustls).
- Fetched EUR-anchored (one table covers every pair), cached 12 h
server-side in
external_lookups, refreshed daily by the ECB. - The rate table's date is shown next to converted totals (approx · converti · 2026-06-11).
- Rates unavailable? Amounts simply render natively — conversion is a reading layer, never a dependency.
Frozen at purchase — the drift-free plus-value¶
Converting everything at today's rate has a trap: your cost would drift with the market. A ¥20,000 figure bought when the yen was strong "cost" you more euros than the same ¥20,000 converted today — and a naive conversion would silently inflate your apparent gain.
So since v0.23, cost freezes its exchange rate at save time:
- Recording a price on an owned piece or a pre-order captures the current
currency → EUR rate into the row (
price_fx_rate). One rate covers the row's price + shipping (and a pre-order's deposit + refund, which share its currency). - Editing other fields never re-freezes the rate; only an actual currency change does.
- Rows that predate v0.23 have no frozen rate and gracefully fall back to today's rate.
The server then normalises everything to EUR (/api/me/stats → eur block):
| Figure | Rate used |
|---|---|
| Cost (figure price, MSRP fallback — shipping excluded) | the rate frozen at purchase (today's as fallback) |
| Value (manual cote › market price › MSRP) | today's rate |
| Plus-value | value − cost, both in EUR — shipping is a sunk cost kept out (a resale recovers the figure's value, not the postage), and no FX drift on the cost side |
The full outlay (price + shipping) is reported separately as the stats spend ledger total — it's what left your wallet, distinct from the figure cost the plus-value is measured against.
The result feeds the headline figures on La Cote and the toutes devises confondues total on the stats page. If some amount ever can't be converted (its currency missing from the rate table), the total is flagged partiel rather than silently wrong.
Reading layer, honest data
Conversion never rewrites your rows. Exports, the API, and the per-piece detail always carry the original amount + currency; the frozen rate is an extra column, not a replacement.
Scraped prices — the import rule¶
Prices arriving from outside (URL import, the wishlist bulk import, the market-price sweep) may be in any currency a shop uses. They are normalised before anything is saved or pre-filled, so only supported currencies ever enter your data:
- a supported currency is kept as-is;
- a real but unsupported one (HKD, CNY, KRW…) is converted to USD at
today's ECB rate — the price picker keeps the shop price as provenance
(
≈ $63.53 · HK$500); - a missing or unparseable currency is assumed to be USD (the most common case for international boutiques), amount unchanged;
- an unconvertible one (absent from the ECB table, e.g. TWD) is dropped — a wrong amount is worse than no amount.
The exact contract a scraping proxy must follow is documented in URL import → Currencies.
Where it applies¶
Every price surface converts: La Cote (hero, KPIs, rows), the stats spend ledger, collection & vitrine values, wishlist budget + targets, pre-order deposits, the figure page (paid / value / gain and the price-breakdown popover), public collector profiles, and the year-in-review.
Two things intentionally stay native:
- Market-price history charts — a historical series converted at today's rate would misrepresent what the figure was worth at the time.
- MSRP hints next to price inputs — they pre-fill the form in the figure's own currency; showing them converted would mismatch what the click inserts.