Methodology
A comparison site is only worth reading if you know where its numbers come from and what decides the order. This page answers both, including the parts that are less flattering.
What decides the order
By default, results are sorted by one number: how many pesos the recipient ends up with for the exact amount you enter. That already folds in both ways a company charges you — the fee it names and the margin it adds to the exchange rate — so a "zero fee" offer with a worse rate lands where it belongs.
The formula is what the recipient receives when you pay exactly the amount you typed, in total. Where a company charges the fee on top of the transfer, we normalise it to (amount − fee) × rate so every row answers the same question. Where a company already nets its fee out of the amount it quotes, we use its own figure and derive the fee for display only.
In the app you can re-sort by four other criteria:
- Lowest fee — the named fee alone, ignoring the rate margin. Useful for checking a claim, misleading as a way to choose.
- Fastest — the company's own published upper bound on delivery time. Rows with no published estimate sort last rather than being guessed at.
- Most trusted — see the honest caveat below.
- Cheapest total — fee plus rate margin expressed as a single cost.
What does not decide the order
- There is no paid placement. No company can buy a listing, a position, or a competitor's exclusion. There has never been such an arrangement and if one is ever offered, this page will say we refused it or that we took it.
- Commission is not an input. The ranking code never receives commission data — it does not know which companies pay us or how much. We do earn commission from some of them; that is set out in full in our affiliate disclosure, including where the conflict of interest genuinely sits.
- Promotional pricing does not lift a row. When a company publishes both a standard price and a new-customer offer, the ranking uses the standard price and the offer is shown as a labelled extra. Otherwise every list would be topped by whoever ran the loudest first-transfer promotion.
Where each price comes from
Prices are not scraped from marketing pages and they are not estimates of ours. They are requested from each company's own public pricing endpoint at the moment you compare:
| Company | Source of its numbers |
|---|---|
| Wise | Its own quote endpoint |
| Western Union | Its own price catalog |
| Remitly | Its own calculator endpoint |
| TransferGo | Its own booking-quote endpoint |
| CurrencyFair | Its own comparison-quote endpoint |
| Taptap Send | Its own published rate and fee schedule |
| Sendwave | Its own public pricing endpoint |
The rows we do not source ourselves
This is the part most comparison sites leave out. Several companies publish no public pricing endpoint we can call — their sites sit behind bot protection that blocks any non-browser request. For those, the app currently falls back to figures published by Wise's comparisons API: numbers Wise states about its competitors.
- The comparison says how many of the listed prices come from that source, right under the table, and the provider page for such a company says it on the quote itself — so you always know which prices are first-hand and which are not.
- Wise is a competitor of the companies in question and a company we can earn commission from. We are not going to pretend that is a neutral source. We have seen its competitor figures diverge from the operator's own price — in one live check it understated what Western Union delivered on a €1,000 transfer by roughly 630 pesos.
- That is why a first-hand quote always replaces the Wise-sourced row for the same company, and why the Wise-sourced rows are a stopgap: each one is removed as soon as we can obtain that company's prices directly.
- The example table on our home page uses first-hand quotes only — no Wise-attributed numbers appear there at all.
Companies we drop entirely
A handful of traditional banks appear in the Wise comparisons data. We remove them rather than list them: we cannot verify their pricing first-hand, none of them has a referral programme relevant to international transfers, and an unverifiable row you cannot act on is worse than no row.
The mid-market rate
Every margin we quote is measured against the mid-market rate — the midpoint between buy and sell prices on the wholesale currency market, the rate with no margin added. It is the number you see quoted by search engines and news sites, and the number almost nobody actually gives you. We take it from the same request that returns the quotes, so the comparison and its reference rate are always from the same instant.
How often the numbers refresh
- In the app (app.sulitsend.com): quotes are fetched when you compare and cached for two minutes, so a repeated search does not hammer the providers. Change the amount and it fetches again.
- On this marketing site: the €500 example refreshes about every 15 minutes and is stamped with the time it was taken. It is a snapshot, not a live ticker, and it says so.
- When a fetch fails, we show that it failed. We do not fall back to a remembered price, and we do not fill a gap with an estimate. An empty row is honest; a stale one attributed to a named company is not.
Known limits, stated plainly
- Delivery method. You can filter by bank transfer, cash pickup or mobile wallet, but only Western Union and TransferGo currently re-price per method through a public endpoint. Every other row keeps its bank-transfer price and is tagged to say so — the filter tells you who offers the method, not what each of them charges for it.
- Trust scores are editorial. The "most trusted" sort reflects our own reading of each company's regulatory standing and track record. It is a judgement, not a measurement, and it is not audited by anyone. Treat it as the weakest signal on the page.
- Delivery times are the company's claim, not our observation. We pass through what each one publishes and mark the ones that publish nothing.
- Coverage is not complete. We compare the companies whose prices we can obtain, on the Spain→Philippines corridor. A company missing from the list is usually a company we cannot price yet, not a company we judged and rejected.
- Historical rates come from the European Central Bank's daily reference rates, which publish once per business day. That means we cannot show a true intraday chart, and we do not present daily data as if it were intraday.
Corrections
If a number here looks wrong, it might be. Tell us which company, which amount and roughly when, and we will show you the calculation or fix it: hello@sulitsend.com. Corrections to the comparison are made without being asked twice.
Last updated: 28 July 2026