Show HN: I built a site to compare fees and rates for sending money abroad

Bottom line: they&#x27;re all kind of the same, except TransferWise is generally better... Plus they&#x27;re customer service is _awesome_. I&#x27;m not a TransferWise employee or shareholder, but been using the service since the start, and been blown away by the quality of service.<p>My story is that I made a big transfer (400k+) on the day before the Brexit vote (cause I thought that Brexit wouldn&#x27;t happen, and the pound would bounce back). Because of the trading volume on that day, TransferWise missed the deadline. So I got in touch with them, they told me that they would give me the best rate between the one that I had locked in and the live market rate the next day. Basically I didn&#x27;t lose 10k+ because they&#x27;re decent guys.

USA to HRK, only one option - transferwise.<p>Are you sure you didn&#x27;t build a transferwise clickbait? I know for a fact there are other services that do this transfer.

A few minor UI comments.<p>+ Failing to select an amount to send should raise a flag.<p>+ Entering a negative amount to send should raise a flag.<p>+ After viewing a result, if I hit `back` on my browser (say, to compare results for a different transfer amount), it resets the currencies to their defaults (for me, U.S. and Argentina). It would be nicer to remember my selections.

What inspired you to build this site? Who is your target customer?<p>I ask because I love the idea of building a search engine for payments, given how fragmented and localized the money-transfer market is.<p>Also, I&#x27;m familiar with a few sites that are similar: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.monito.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.monito.com&#x2F;</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fxcompared.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fxcompared.com&#x2F;</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.saveonsend.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.saveonsend.com&#x2F;</a><p>I&#x27;m curious about what gap in these services you&#x27;re hoping to fill.

Two issues that I see as someone who frequently sends money abroad:<p>- I live in a country where Revolut is available so I generally pay nothing for international transfers. Perhaps this could be addressed by adding &quot;country of residence&quot;?<p>- When I need to transfer money between my own accounts, I often use my Interactive Brokers account as it gives market rate conversions and a free transfer every month. It has inactivity fees but if you happen to keep a large amount of money there, it&#x27;s &quot;free&quot;.

1. You may want to invite suggestions via the website itself so that visitors don&#x27;t get the wrong impression that you&#x27;re just some affiliate for transferwise.<p>2. consider publishing a roadmap that you update with suggestions from this HN discussion.<p>3. Some way to report errors or surprises via the web site itself.<p>4. A disclaimer that you are not vouching for any agency that you are mentioning at your website.

Love this idea. I&#x27;m currently looking for a way to be sent money from Mexico (to the UK), and was disappointed that the site currently had no suggestions. On that note, it&#x27;s probably better to show an error message instead of an empty table when that happens.<p>I also have some accessibility suggestions; if you&#x27;re looking to improve things on that front hit me up.

This seems heavily weighted reliant on transferwise. I picked a combo where I&#x27;m familiar with the many options, and it only listed Transferwise. Stopping short of making unsavory correlations here, I&#x27;ll just say you should research adding more options before advertising it.

About, FAQ, Contact links are not working..

This is great !! You should target the expats from each country in US and that will help you a lot in understanding how to market. There are some sites which are popular in certain expat communities, like sulekha.com for Indian expats, where you could advertise. This is a common problem for many people and this could certainly become a must tool before every transfer. I have bookmarked it for further transfers :)

Your data for Transferwise seems to assume the worst-case scenario of fees with a wire transfer. For example, you say US$100 to GBP nets $6.85 in fees.<p>But looking right now from my dashboard, if I send with my balnace, the fee is $1.18. With ACH its&#x27; $1.73. With credit card it&#x27;s $4.81. With debit card it&#x27;s $2.27. The worst and most-cumbersom option is wire transfer, but that&#x27;s what your system defaults too?

Remitly has been a great resource for sending money abroad, I&#x27;d love to see that included but it looks like they don&#x27;t have an API

TransferWise has a dedicated team working on a pretty similar tool to compare fees and rates for sending money abroad. They have a lot of banks and other fintech companies: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;transferwise.com&#x2F;gb&#x2F;compare&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;transferwise.com&#x2F;gb&#x2F;compare&#x2F;</a><p>Are you just using their data and adding your affiliate link to it?

I would highly recommend Interactive Brokers! You trade on the spot market and avoid all the fees except a $2 flat trading fee.

There was one interesting alternative way to send money through a network of some honest man. For some I believe middle-eastern countries it at least used to be the only way. Does anyone know what that was? I got told by a film crew that found this to be the only way. It all worked out for them.

This is great! Would have definitely help me out when I moved to the US.<p>People don&#x27;t realize the fees banks charge for currency conversion is not the entire story. My bank offered me &#x27;no-fee&#x27; CAD to USD transfers but were giving me a 5% worse exchange rate than competitors. Be careful out there!

No Russia, Ukraine, Belarus in the countries list. Obviously, they have at least western union and moneygram.

Was the entire idea behind Libra (from Facebook) that the entire &quot;sending money abroad&quot; market would get revolutionized over night? (Faster, less fees, less regulations, easier to do?)

I like the concept. Looking forward to see more countries and services.

US to UK returned no results. US to ARG returned only transferwise.

Interesting concept, I was chewing on something similar a few months ago and excited to see someone put this into action. Looking forward to following your growth. - JS

Would love to see a similar listing for bank fees on transfers. Some banks have free transfers, others charge a fixed sum, others charge a percentage.

Missing a pretty substantial player: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sendwave.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sendwave.com&#x2F;</a>

Bug report: When you hit back after looking at a quote, it puts the countries back at the default of Argentina.

You should verify that the amount entered is not a negative number. Noticed that it took those in.

Is bitcoin an option worth comparing

This is a cool idea! US &gt; Pakistan doesn&#x27;t work. US &gt; India took quite a while too.

USD to INR results only two quotes.

there is a good one, cheap borderless and you don&#x27;t need a &quot;provider&quot;

Would you consider adding cryptocurrency exchanges as an option?

Add all countries that are available in the APIs you are using.

&quot;Enter amount, e.g. 2500&quot; &lt;- What currency is this?

Why are some major countries e.g. Japan not represented?

What&#x27;s the difference between this and Transferwise

Only one result for US to Mexico?<p>You should look at other companies...

I don&#x27;t see Turkey on the list :(

Please add Xendpay (for GBP to ZAR)

Please, add Bulgaria, too!

Need the hawala option!