Paid Across
The real cost of receiving international payments
I've spent 20+ years in payments and I still pick the wrong provider sometimes. Every "best for nomads" comparison I found was outdated SEO. So last week I built the one I'd actually trust. paidacross.com, free, no signup, no email gate.
Example: receiving $1,000 as a freelancer in Lisbon, converted to euros at today's mid-market rate (about 1 EUR = $1.16):
Revolut: ~€855
Wise: ~€852
Western Union: ~€843
Payoneer: ~€831
Bank wire: ~€820
About €35 between best and worst. On a $5k monthly invoice that's roughly €175 you didn't need to lose. Delivery speed swings one to four days too.
A few things that surprised me while checking each provider's own pricing:
Wise charges very different rates by corridor. USD to EUR is about 0.5%. Push the same account into a thin pair like Pakistani rupee or Ghanaian cedi and you pay close to 2%.
Payoneer's "1% fee" is true but incomplete. Receive dollars and let them auto-convert to euros and you stack 1% to receive on top of up to 2% to convert, roughly 3% all-in. Take euros straight into a EUR receiving account over SEPA and you pay almost nothing, which nobody tells you.
Revolut's headline rate only holds under specific conditions: free Standard plan, weekday, within a $1,000/month allowance. Go over it and a 0.5% fair-usage fee kicks in. Convert on a weekend and add 1%. Invoice $5k a month and you blow past that allowance fast.
Stack: Next.js, Vercel, Tailwind. Calculation runs client-side, no database. Fee data is a typed object in source, which I open-sourced. The exchange rate is pulled live so the euros never go stale.
Business model: free calculator, funded by affiliate links once approvals land, disclosed openly at paidacross.com/how-we-make-money. Ranking is pure fee math, never paid placement.
What corridor matters to you? Anything in the data that looks off? Providers you use that aren't here yet?
4 Comments
Airwallex might be worth adding if you are thinking about e-commerce sellers specifically. The use case is a bit different from the freelancer scenario: instead of receiving a client wire, you are pulling from Stripe or Amazon Seller Central into a multi-currency account. On the Stripe side, Airwallex lets you set it as a payout destination and the USD lands without conversion. Their FX rate on USD to CNY or USD to AUD tends to track within 0.3-0.5% of mid-market, which puts it close to Wise for common USD pairs. One thing that makes the corridor math interesting: Airwallex fees behave differently depending on whether you convert on receipt vs. hold in the account currency. The account-as-buffer model means the effective rate can shift depending on when you convert. I have been tracking this for sellers based in China expanding internationally: chinaabroadguide.com/airwallex-vs-wise-vs-pingpong/ (written for that audience but the fee structures are the same).
This is useful because it is not another generic “best payment app” comparison. The corridor-specific angle is the real wedge.
I’d probably avoid positioning Paid Across as only a calculator. The stronger frame is closer to: “the real net amount you receive after fees, FX spread, route, and timing.”
That gives you more room to build around freelancers, remote workers, agencies, and small exporters instead of just one-off comparisons.
The biggest monetization risk is affiliate approval before traffic. I’d probably build the first distribution loop around high-intent corridor pages first: USD to EUR for freelancers, USD to INR for contractors, EUR to GBP, USD to PHP, etc. Those pages can rank and also make affiliate partners see clearer commercial intent.
Also worth making the disclosure page a trust asset, not just a legal page. In payments, people need to believe the ranking is not quietly bought.
Happy to put a tighter version in writing if useful. The useful part here is probably the affiliate/GTM path, not more provider suggestions in the thread.
This is the most useful reply I've had, thanks. You're right that "real net amount after fees, FX spread, route, and timing" is a stronger frame than "calculator," and I'm reworking the homepage around it. Corridor pages are exactly where I'm headed, though I'm starting with lower-competition receiving corridors (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria) before the saturated ones like INR. And the disclosure-as-trust-asset point is well taken. What have you seen work on the affiliate-before-traffic problem: land approvals early on projected intent, or build corridor traffic first and let the numbers make the case?
I’d treat it as both, but not equally.
I would not wait for big traffic before talking to affiliate partners, because projected corridor intent is part of the story. But I also would not pitch them with a generic “payments comparison site” angle.
The cleaner version is: show them the corridor pages you are building, the user intent behind each corridor, and how the ranking/disclosure system will make the referrals more trusted.
So the affiliate pitch becomes less “approve my site” and more “I’m building high-intent receiving corridors where users are already deciding between providers.”
The deeper part is choosing which corridors to build first, how to structure the pages, and how to make the affiliate pitch credible before the numbers are large.
Drop your email and I’ll send over a tighter version. This is easier to map properly in writing than as a long thread reply.