How you can save 2-3% of revenue on FX fees (the story behind my first product)
On an $899 sale, a founder lost 6% on fees. His first thought - ‘I must change the provider’. He was asking for suggestions on Twitter.
But about 2% of those fees were completely avoidable. 2% was due to automatic currency conversion, quietly converting his USD sales into his local currency.
I replied with the fix: open an account in the currency you're paid in (Wise, Airwallex, whatever), point your payouts there, and convert only when you choose. Or never, if you also spend in that currency.
That reply got more traction than I expected, from an account with about 100 followers at the time. A week later he posted an update: he'd switched off auto-conversion and his fees dropped.
I'd seen this pattern before. Years ago, as a finance manager, I found a team quietly losing thousands to FX fees nobody had noticed. It's rarely the biggest line item. It's just invisible until someone checks.
So I looked into it more broadly. Founders who sell or spend across currencies are often losing somewhere around 2-3% of revenue this way, just from not routing their money intelligently.
My first instinct was to write a guide. Then I realised everyone's mix of currencies, revenue and spend is different, so a general rule doesn't tell you your own number. So I dropped the idea of a guide and built a calculator instead.
It’s the first product I’ve built completely from scratch. I’m a product manager, learning to code. I built it with Claude’s and Gemini's help, starting messily in React before stripping it back to a single HTML file with no backend.
It's free, no sign-up, and estimates what FX is costing you on both income and spending, plus it shows you how to fix this. Check it out at fixmyfx.com.
If you sell or spend in more than one currency, do you actually know what it's costing you? I'd love to hear how other people here handle it.
Tania Bell
The "done and dusted" assumption is the exact trap. We went through the same thing setting up pricing — defaulted to one currency because the payment processor makes it easy, then realised months later that every non-GBP customer was quietly eating a conversion fee. The fix was simple once we saw it but the seeing took embarrassingly long. Curious whether the founders you have helped mostly discovered the leak through your calculator or through a bad month that made them actually look at the line items.
glad you found the issue in the end. better late than never, right?!
as for the numbers, i don't track them - it's a free tool that i thought might be useful for founders. so i built it. it's free and ungated, that's why i don't have any numbers.
btw i'm launching it on PH tomorrow. sounds like you're very keenly aware of the issue. feel free to support.
any feedback is welcome :)
Have calculator users actually changed their payout or conversion setup after seeing their estimated FX loss, or is the main value still awareness?
i know founders who've changed their set up off the back of my suggestions. so it works.
That downstream behavior is much more useful than awareness. Could be useful to compare notes by email sometime, if you’re open to it.
sure. compare notes on what tho? feel free to give me a follow on twitter - i'm happy to connect
also, i'm launching this tool on PH tomorrow
The interesting part is whether the calculator actually drives changes in setup, and whether that translates into meaningful behavior after the launch. I’m not on Twitter, so email is easier on my side if you’re up for it.
The invisible cost pattern is what makes this a real problem worth solving. FX fees are the kind of leak that never shows up in a single transaction as alarming, but compounds quietly across every sale. Most founders discover it the way your Twitter poster did — by accident, months later, when they finally look at the actual payout versus the list price.
We run our SEO tool across seven languages and will eventually need to handle multi-currency pricing. The lesson I take from your story is to set up currency-native accounts before scaling into those markets, not after discovering the leak. The mistake most founders make is treating payments as solved once Stripe works, and never revisiting what happens between the charge and the deposit.
What percentage of the founders you talk to have never even checked their FX markup?
as for the percentage of founders who never check this - i reckon it's the fast majority. ppl tend to think that once Stripe is setup it's all done and dusted ie they've got the best set up
that's right - get your payments setup to accept currencies your customers are paying in from the start
The invisible cost pattern is what makes this a real problem worth solving. FX fees are the kind of leak that never shows up in a single transaction as alarming, but compounds quietly across every sale. Most founders discover it the way your Twitter poster did — by accident, months later, when they finally look at the actual payout versus the list price.
We run our SEO tool across seven languages and will eventually need to handle multi-currency pricing. The lesson I take from your story is to set up currency-native accounts before scaling into those markets, not after discovering the leak. The mistake most founders make is treating payments as solved once Stripe works, and never revisiting what happens between the charge and the deposit.
What percentage of the founders you talk to have never even checked their FX markup?
The invisible until someone checks” part really resonates. A 2–3% leakage doesn’t sound huge in isolation, but once you apply it across recurring revenue and spending, it can become a meaningful cost. I also like that you chose a calculator over a generic guide people usually need to see their own number before they care enough to change the setup.
yeah, 2-3% of revenue adds up. the sooner you get this set up, the more you'll save.
yeah, the calculator is much better than a guide
I’d be curious about this too. My guess is the pain can be pretty different depending on the user — freelancers and remote workers might feel it more when receiving international payments, while SaaS users probably notice it when paying for tools. It would be interesting to see which side is actually costing people more in real-world use.
for any biz operating globally, losses on revenue will be higher than on expenses
if not, they don't have a biz lol
I think it probably depends a lot on the user. Freelancers and remote workers may feel it more when receiving international payments, while SaaS users probably notice it when paying for tools. I’d be curious to see which side ends up costing people more in real-world usage.
if you run a biz that sells internationally, you'll feel it at both ends, as it were. b/c you'll be receiving payments in various currencies (which are auto-converted to your home currency) and paying for tools in foreign currencies
Exactly. And I think that’s where the hidden cost becomes much more noticeable. You’re getting hit when money comes in and again when you spend it abroad. For an international business doing this frequently, even small conversion differences can add up pretty quickly.
yeah, that's why i built FixMyFX - to help ppl realise how much they waste AND how they can fix it
That makes sense. I think the “how much am I actually losing?” part is probably what makes the problem click for people. Once they see a real dollar amount instead of just a percentage, it becomes much easier to justify changing how they handle FX.
indeed
Yeah, exactly. Seeing the actual number makes the problem much harder to ignore
Seeing that loss framed as an actual dollar amount makes all the difference—a generic article saying "you might be losing 2%" gets bookmarked and forgotten, but a fast calculator makes it an immediate problem to solve. Keeping it as a single HTML file with zero signup friction was definitely the right call for getting quick adoption.
Are you noticing people getting hit harder on the payout conversion side, or when paying for international software and tools?
the auto-conversion on the revenue FX fees are probably higher b/c revenue is typically higher than cost