Different remittance providers price in fundamentally different ways: some charge a flat fixed fee, others a pure percentage, and others both. That means the cheapest provider at $100 is often not the cheapest at $5,000. The Break-Even Calculator queries live quotes at seven amounts ($100–$10,000) for your corridor, charts every route, and pinpoints the exact dollar amount at which the cheapest route changes.
Select your send and receive currencies. The tool fetches live quotes at $100, $250, $500, $1,000, $2,500, $5,000, and $10,000 from the same comparison engine that powers every corridor page.
A line chart shows total fee in your send currency on the y-axis and transfer amount on the x-axis, with one line per provider.
Vertical dashed lines mark the crossover amounts — the exact transfer sizes where the cheapest provider changes. A summary table shows the cheapest route at each sampled amount.
For each sampled amount, total fee = totalFeeAmount reported by the live API, which combines the transfer fee and the FX markup into a single dollar cost.
Crossover amounts are linearly interpolated between the two nearest sampled amounts where the cheapest provider changes: crossover = x1 + (b1 - a1) / ((a2 - a1) - (b2 - b1)) * (x2 - x1), where a and b are two providers' costs at amounts x1 and x2.
All seven amounts are queried in parallel. If a provider does not quote at a given amount (corridor not supported), that point is omitted from its line.
The canonical worked example: a 0.6%-only route costs $0.60 at $100 and $60 at $10k. A $5 + 0.2% route costs $5.20 at $100 and $25 at $10k. They cross at exactly $1,250: 0.006 × X = 5 + 0.002 × X → X = $1,250.
Worked example: Sending $1,000 from USD to INR, the cheapest measured route today is Coinbase at 3.15% better than the mid-market rate (a measured premium, not a cost) — about $31.50 more than a mid-market transfer on $1,000, as of September 20, 2026. Rates are refreshed every 6 hours from live provider data.
The break-even amount is the transfer size at which one provider's total cost equals another's. Below that amount, one provider is cheaper; above it, the other is. Routes with flat fixed fees are cheapest at high amounts, while pure-percentage routes win at small amounts.
Providers price differently. Wise charges a small fixed fee plus a low percentage (~0.4%), making it relatively more expensive for tiny transfers but competitive at higher amounts. Crypto rails often charge a percentage-based spread, meaning their cost scales with amount. Banks charge a large flat fee ($15-50) plus an FX markup percentage, making them the worst at all amounts.
RemitRoutes queries live provider costs at seven amounts ($100, $250, $500, $1k, $2.5k, $5k, $10k). Between consecutive amounts where the cheapest provider changes, the crossover is linearly interpolated — the amount at which the two providers' cost lines intersect. All numbers come from real live API quotes, never estimated.
Crypto rails with near-zero flat fees often win at small amounts (under $300). Wise tends to win in the mid-range ($500-$2000) because its percentage is very low once the fixed component is absorbed. At very large amounts, whichever route has the lowest effective percentage wins.
Compare live rates across 370+ corridors on RemitRoutes · methodology.