Every money transfer has two prices. One is printed on the screen. The other is hidden inside the exchange rate, and it is almost always the larger of the two.
The money guides explain why that is and how the industry ended up here. This piece is the practical half: how to measure it, today, on the corridor you actually send to.
The rate to measure against
The mid-market rate is the midpoint between what buyers and sellers are trading a currency at. It is the real rate — the one on Reuters, the one Google shows you, the one no consumer transfer service actually gives you. Every provider adds a margin to it, and that margin is their real price.
Today's mid-market rate
loading…This is the benchmark, not an offer. No provider will give you this rate — they all take a margin below it, and the size of that margin is the real cost of the transfer. Compare what a service says your recipient actually gets against the figure above.
Those are live. Take the number for your corridor and hold on to it for the next ninety seconds.
The ninety-second method
1. Open your provider and enter exactly $1,000 CAD as the send amount. Round numbers make the arithmetic visible. 2. Write down the amount the recipient receives — the final figure, after everything. 3. Multiply $1,000 by the mid-market rate above. That is what a zero-margin transfer would deliver. 4. Subtract. The difference is the total cost of the transfer, fee and margin together. 5. Divide by 10 to read it as a percentage.
That final number is the only one worth comparing between providers. Not the fee, not the advertised rate, not "$0 transfer fee" — the amount that actually lands, against the amount that mathematically could have.
A provider charging a $0 fee and a 3% margin costs you $30 on a $1,000 transfer. A provider charging a $5 fee and a 0.5% margin costs you $10. The first one advertises "no fees" and is three times more expensive. This is not an edge case; it is the business model.
Do this on your own corridor, not a generic one
Margins are not uniform. The same provider can be sharp on CAD→INR and poor on CAD→PHP, because the margin is set per corridor by competition, volume and the cost of the payout network at the other end.
They also move by day and by amount. A provider that wins on $500 may lose on $3,000, because fixed fees fall away as a share while margins do not. Measure the amount you actually send, not a benchmark amount.
This is why "which service is cheapest" has no permanent answer, and why any article that gives you one — including this one — should be treated as out of date the moment it is published.
The referral, and the honest caveat
Remitly is a service we hold a referral with, and that link is paid. Through it you get $10 off a first transfer of $50 or more, and we receive $35. Those are Remitly's numbers and Remitly can change them; their page is the one that counts.
Now the part that matters more than the link: we are not telling you Remitly is the cheapest, because on your corridor it may not be. No single service always is. Run the ninety-second method above against Remitly and against two others before you commit to anything, including our link.
If something else wins for your transfer, use it. A one-time $10 bonus is worth far less to you than half a percent of margin paid every month for five years. On $800 a month, half a percent is $48 a year, forever. The bonus is $10, once.
That is an odd thing for a page earning $35 to say. It is also the only version of this page worth writing: the guide that taught you to distrust "no fees" advertising cannot then sell you on a rate it did not check.
What to keep
- The fee is not the price. The amount that arrives is the price.
- Measure on your corridor, your amount, today. All three change the answer.
- Re-check twice a year. Providers move margins quietly and the winner rotates.
- Small percentages, monthly, for years. That is the whole game — this is not a one-time decision, it is a recurring one you make by default every time you do nothing.
Sources
Live rates above are mid-market, fetched in your browser from Keppet Open Data — a static, source-attributed dataset naming the UN, BIS, ECB and Swissquote as its inputs and dating every value — with open.er-api.com as a fallback. Nothing about your transfer is sent anywhere; the widget only reads rates.
The method needs no source: it is arithmetic against a public rate, which is exactly why it survives when a comparison article does not.
Not financial advice. Every paid link on this site, and what we receive from each, is listed on one page.