Every month, money that belongs to me crosses a border. And every month, the amount that arrives is smaller than the amount that was sent.
Not because anyone cheated. Because the price of moving money is quoted in a way that hides most of it.
You are shown a fee. The fee is real. It is also, in most cases, the smaller half of what you pay. The larger half sits in the exchange rate — the gap between the rate you are given and the rate at which currencies actually trade. That gap never appears on a receipt. It is never labelled a fee. And it is almost never in the comparison you were shown before you clicked send.
I started recalculating these numbers for myself. Then I noticed something: the recalculation almost never exists anywhere online. Not because it is difficult — the arithmetic takes two minutes — but because nobody with an incentive to publish it has one.
That is what 404 means here. Not an error. A number that should exist and doesn’t.
What we do
We take one product, one amount, one moment in time, and we work out what it actually costs. Then we show the arithmetic so you can check it yourself.
Four things we commit to:
We show the calculation, not just the conclusion. Every claim comes with its inputs, its formula, and its result. You are meant to recalculate it. If we are wrong, you should be able to prove it in a spreadsheet.
We date and source every number. Rates move by the minute; fees change without notice. A number without a timestamp is a number you cannot trust, including ours.
We disclose what we earn. Where we receive a commission, we say so next to the link — not in a footer. Our full commission structure is public.
We publish conclusions that cost us money. When the honest answer is “your bank is cheaper here” or “none of these is worth it at this amount,” that is what we publish.
What we are not
I am not a licensed financial adviser, and this site does not give financial advice. I do not tell you which product to use, and I do not recommend investments. I recalculate published numbers and show my working.
That limit is deliberate. The value here is not authority — it is verifiability. You should not trust these numbers because of who wrote them. You should trust them because you can check them.
Who writes this
Written and calculated by Ari. Corrections are welcome and published openly: if you find an error, email us and we will fix it and say what changed.
— finance404