I started NZ Pathway because I was annoyed. That’s honestly the best motivation for building anything.
I was going through New Zealand’s Skilled Migrant Category process — the 6-point system, the green list, the English test requirements. Every time I needed to check something, I hit the same wall: a government PDF, a broker site asking for my email, or a blog post written by someone who’d clearly never filed an EOI.
The information was out there. It was just buried under ads and gated behind lead-gen forms. I figured if I was frustrated, thousands of other people were too.
What It Became
Six tools, 28 guides, 313 pages. All free, no signup, no tracking.
The calculators:
- SMC Points Calculator — punch in your qualification, income, or registration, get your points. If you’re short, it tells you exactly how to close the gap.
- Green List Checker — fuzzy search through INZ’s green list occupations. Type “software engineer” or just “2613” and it works.
- PTE/IELTS/TOEFL Score Converter — three-way conversion plus a yes/no on whether you clear the SMC English threshold.
- NZD Currency Converter — live rates from ECB (with offline fallback) for CNY, USD, AUD, HKD, SGD, INR.
- Cost of Living Calculator — six cities, four housing types, realistic budgets anchored to MBIE rental data and Stats NZ surveys.
- Take-Home Pay Calculator — IRD tax brackets, ACC, student loan, KiwiSaver. $91k → ~$69.5k after tax, verified against official numbers.
The guides: organized into five categories — SMC migration, green list & work visas, English tests, life in NZ, and studying in NZ.
Everything is bilingual (English + Chinese) because the people who need this most aren’t always native English speakers.
Tech Stack
Same stack I use for everything now: Astro 4, Tailwind, static HTML. No database, no server costs. Cloudflare Pages hosts it for free. If INZ changes a threshold, I edit a JSON file and redeploy. The whole site rebuilds in under a minute.
The 28 guides are written as Markdown. The 276 combination pages for the checker are generated at build time from a 12×12 model×GPU matrix (wait, wrong project — that’s GPU Fits). For NZ Pathway, the combination pages are the 28 guide articles plus the calculator result pages with shareable URLs.
What’s Different
Most immigration sites want to sell you something. NZ Pathway wants to answer your question and let you go. The about page says who I am: just another applicant who got tired of bad websites. Every page has a disclaimer. Every number has a source.
Monetization is there but muted — AdSense slots are reserved, affiliate links are labeled. The priority is: tools first, trust second, revenue third.
Where It Is Now
Live at nz-pathway.com. Still adding tools when people ask for them. The salary calculator only existed because someone DM’d me saying “okay, but what do I actually earn?” That’s how features get added — when enough people ask the same question.
If you’re navigating the NZ immigration maze yourself, I hope it saves you a few hours.