How we calculate cost

What “Total Cost %” means

The percentage of your money that fees and exchange-rate markup eat, compared to the true mid-market rate — the rate banks trade at with each other, the same one you’d see on Google or xe.com. It’s not what any single provider “charges” in isolation; it’s the honest total gap between what you send and what actually lands.

The formula

Total Cost % = 1 − (amount actually received ÷ amount you’d receive at the true mid-market rate, with no fees).

This is the same methodology the World Bank’s Remittance Prices Worldwide database uses — it’s a standard, not something we invented to make the numbers look a certain way.

Where the numbers come from

The mid-market exchange rate is pulled live, at the moment you search. Provider fees and markup are checked by hand, directly from each provider’s own calculator, about once a week — that data isn’t available through any public API, and building scrapers for six providers wasn’t worth the tradeoff against a number that only needs to be a few days fresh. Every row shows the date it was last checked.

A note on rate integrity

Several providers show a better “first-time” or “welcome” rate to new customers — a one-time promotional number, not what you’d actually get on your second transfer or your tenth. We deliberately exclude those and use each provider’s standard, repeat-customer rate. If a comparison tool used promotional rates, it would systematically favor whichever provider has the most aggressive new-user marketing, not whichever provider is actually cheapest to use.

Why two amount tiers, not any amount

This isn’t a live quote engine — the fee and markup data behind it is manually verified, not computed on the fly. Supporting every possible amount would mean pretending to have precision we don’t actually have. Two tiers (a small “everyday” send and a larger “big” send) still show how a provider’s pricing shifts with amount, without overclaiming.