Simple Web Services are Too Hard to Find

So I'm building some software to use as a System Under Test for my thesis experiment, and found several seminal examples in Paul Jorgensen's "Software Testing". Since I had already implemented the Simple ATM problem (well, a variant of it, without any GUI), and the Triangle problem, I decided that the Currency Exchange problem might fit well in between these two, in terms of complexity and size of code. Basically, the program takes in a value and source currency, and converts it to a destination currency of your choice (4 options in Jorgensen's text). This seemed a bit outdated to me, as it relies on the programmer hard-coding the exchange rates by hand. Boo-urns, I say! So, I figured I'd use some benevolent, free web service to pull down live exchange rates and use them in my program. This should be simple, I imagine, because a) this is the type of service presented in every tutorial on making web services, and b) it provides exactly the type of functionality for which web services are suited: some mysterious online entity that has a little glob of information that I want to use in my application. Google searching for such a web service turned up a disappointing lack of results. There are several online currency converters, of which I'm sure the reader is aware, but none of those are particularly machine friendly - I would have to hack up and throw away a bunch of HTML to get a single number out of the page. I encountered one service that was designed to be machine readable, but it used the bloated WS* XML web service stack, requiring me to auto-generate hundreds of lines of code, all so that I can read a single number (this is not an option for me, because I don't want my subjects attempting to write tests for a bunch of machine created JAX-WS goop). If that wasn't enough, I also had to apply for a Trial API Key which would allow me to access the single number I needed for a period of two weeks, after which I would need to purchase a commercial API license. Grrrrrrr! A subsequent search of "REST currency exchange web service" turned up bupkiss. Why is this so hard? There should be dozens of services like this. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right place.