For non-us citizens, USD's either incur a conversation fee to another currency, or an international withdrawal fee. There is no way to get money out without paying one or other fee.
Coincidentally they added the 3% withdrawal fee soon after Wise became a popular bank account option. PayPal was a great choice until then!
So you can open an USD card on wise and withdraw there?
But they probably have a limit? If yes, there's no workaround?
Maybe if I ever have to implement PayPal again I’ll test it out :)
Say you want to buy product in USD, and you come from non-USA country. Paypal would "helpfully" convert USD to your local currency using their own exchange rate (worse than any other one - goes without saying), charge the linked bank account (which probably is in USD anyway, to avoid paying for conversion fees), then the local bank would charge you again by converting the payment from the local currency to say USD because the account is in USD. Those practices probably cost me thousands over the years until I've figured out what was happening.
I've turned on the option (intentionally buried and difficult to find) that tells Paypal to charge me in the currency I've was purchasing (USD), and not to do the conversion. But the fuckers had a habit of flipping that option so you're caught off guard. Needless to say, been Paypal-free for years now. One can imagine how much Paypal and banks profit from this scammy/dark-pattern behaviour on a global scale.
People from Stripe will probably appear in this discussion any moment now. It’ll be interesting seeing them try to explain this one.
It’s the crossborder settlement which they charge for, which I don’t think is crazy, as it just reflects the underlying costs Stripe must be incurring themselves.
As someone who ran a business in multiple countries, the bank always charged similar fees for these transfers between accounts. Stripe letting me settle directly in the account where I want the money to land, rather than me having to log in to my bank and initiating a transfer manually where fees are ~the same is definitely a better option, which I’m happy they offer.
They are clearly losing money on their (really expensive) forex fees so are trying to recoup this by this payment.
There is no intrinsic reason I see why the fees are so high for this.
Edit to add: they actually use ACH for US bank USD payouts, so even less cost than SWIFT.
I also just looked it up how much this costs with my bank, and it's a minimum fee of $25 + agent/intermediary bank fees on top of it, for amounts less than $5,0000.
I assume that Stripe can negotiate better rates though, but for the sake of simple pricing, and cost-averaging over different amounts (which are, given that they serve the long tail, likely heavy weighted on smaller amounts), it is not inconceivable that this 1% is closer to cost than one might imagine.
The 1% is for all non local currency payouts. Example: "The primary currency for Stripe accounts in France is EUR. All other currencies fall under alternative currencies." "1% Of the payout amount, when you choose to payout in select alternative currencies." Ref https://stripe.com/docs/payouts/alternative-currencies So basically this will result in very expensive payouts for anyone doing USD charges outside US or EUR charges outside Europe. Like many SaaS companies are. Charging any other currency is problematic for many customers so it is not really an option. Like I don't want to be charged in pesos for a SaaS that I am using.
The alternative is to have Stripe convert USD to my local currency. For a small 2% fee.
I was excited to ditch the 2% currency conversion fee - nope, just reduced to 1%. For what? A currency conversion fee can be somewhat defended, or, at the very least, “everyone else does it”...
Now I want my funds in the same currency you accepted them, and I have to pay for the privilege?
This is absurd. A 1% fee to transfer USD to a USD bank account?
The alternative is to charge in another currency - which Stripe will put a 2% currency fee on.
This is already on top of their expensive transaction costs.
Will actively look for alternatives now.