How we rank providers

Every ranking on RisingTide comes from one number: PHP delivered — the pesos the recipient receives on a given send amount, after every cost. Never the headline fee, never the advertised rate alone.

The math

• Total cost = transfer fee + funding surcharge + FX markup. The FX markup is the gap between the provider's exchange rate and the mid-market rate (the rate you see on Google), which is where many providers hide most of their price.
• Every quote is priced per combination of funding method (bank account, debit card, credit card), payout method (GCash, bank deposit, cash pickup), and send amount ($200 / $500 / $1,000 / $2,000) — because each of those genuinely changes the answer.
• All money math runs on exact integer arithmetic (centavos, not floating point) and is covered by automated tests.

Where quotes come from

• Live API quotes — pulled directly from the provider's systems (currently Wise). These rows carry no “Estimated” badge.
• Estimated quotes — for providers without API access, we compute quotes from their published fee schedules plus the current mid-market rate. These rows are always badged Estimated. We verify schedules manually against provider calculators and version every change with its effective date.
• Quotes refresh every 6 hours. Every quote is timestamped, and if one is more than 12 hours old it's badged “rate may have changed” rather than silently shown as current.
• The “typical bank wire” row is a deliberately included baseline (typical SWIFT fee plus typical bank FX markup) so you can see what the old way costs.

Savings figures

Any savings number we show is an estimate, computed by comparing a quote against the alternatives visible at the same moment — never a promise about a specific transfer. Community figures aggregate outbound clicks; personal figures compare your self-reported transfers against our recorded quote history for that date.

Independence

Affiliate commissions fund the site. The ranking pipeline has no knowledge of which providers pay us, and no provider can pay to move up. When we get something wrong, tell us — corrections make the rankings better for everyone.