The question tested
We tested matched standard-price sets containing both a quote with a displayed fee of zero and a quote with a positive fee. The leader was the quote with the highest recorded recipient amount.
This design isolates the consumer question better than counting how many fee-free rows exist in the archive.
What the split means
A zero-fee label was often competitive, but it did not determine the outcome. Positive-fee quotes won more than four in ten eligible sets, consistent with a stronger customer rate outweighing a visible fee.
The finding supports comparing recipient amount and sender total. It does not imply that every fee-free provider embeds a margin or that every positive fee buys a better rate.
Important limitations
The study covers four corridors and only exact matched keys. Providers with different funding or payout rails were correctly excluded, which narrows the sample.
Third-party card, bank or wallet charges are not reliably present in quote records and were not invented.
How this result was produced
Eligible rows used high or medium confidence and an API or HTML source. We retained one provider row per exact key using confidence, source quality and recipient amount, then required at least two providers.
A mixed-fee set required fee=0 for at least one contender and fee>0 for at least one contender. Ties spanning both fee types were tracked separately; none occurred in this snapshot.
These are quote observations, not completed transfers. Results apply only to the named routes, dates, amounts and methods; they do not predict a future quote or measure delivery reliability.
