Wise vs Revolut (2026): Which One You Actually Need.

Here is what Revolut's own plan page said on 27 August 2026, in US dollars. Basic starts at $10 a month and includes $1,000 of exchange at the interbank rate. Grow starts at $40 and includes $20,000. Scale starts at $140 and includes $80,000. Enterprise is a phone call.

Past the allowance, Revolut charges 0.6%. Convert outside market hours and it is 1%. Both numbers are printed in the small text under the row, not on the card you actually read, which is a fair place to put them and a very quiet one.

The other thing that changed and that most comparison pages have not caught up with: there is no free Revolut Business tier in the US any more. Our own database still had Revolut down as "Free Basic, Grow $30/mo" this morning, which was two versions of the pricing page ago. Basic now costs money, and what it buys is thinner than it looks. Ten fee-free local transfers. Zero fee-free international transfers, so every cross-border payment is $5 on top of the subscription. No bulk transfers. No metal card. The $1,000 exchange allowance would cover roughly one invoice.

None of this is a trick. It is a normal software business charging for software, and the spend controls behind the paywall are genuinely good. But if you came to Revolut because you read that it gives you the interbank rate, you should know you are buying a fixed block of currency at a fixed price, and that the price of the block only makes sense at certain sizes.

Wise publishes one fee list and it fits on a screen. Registering is free. Getting account details in 22 currencies is 31 USD, once. Holding money in your account is free. Receiving domestic payments in AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, HUF, NZD, PHP, SGD and USD is free. Sending and converting start from 0.23% and vary by currency. Spending on the card in a currency you already hold is free.

The two fees people trip over are the ones worth knowing before you open it. Receiving a USD wire or a Swift payment costs 6.11 USD per payment, which matters if your clients' finance departments only know how to send wires. And ATM withdrawals are free up to 250 USD a calendar month, then 1.95 USD plus 1.95% each, which is bad enough that you should treat the Wise card as a card and not as a way to get cash.

Percentages are slippery, so I priced a real transfer rather than quoting the floor. On 27 August 2026 I put 30,000 USD to euros through Wise's own comparison tool. Total fees: 88.83 USD, including a 4.91 USD volume discount that kicks in over 25,000 USD. That is 0.296% all in, and the recipient gets 25,657.20 EUR. The same 30,000 through Chase, on the same screen: 723.37 USD in fees, because the markup lives inside the exchange rate where you cannot see it. (Wise built that comparison to sell you Wise, so treat the framing with the usual suspicion. The Wise column is still a real quote I could have clicked through and paid.)

Hold that 0.296% next to Revolut's 0.6% over-allowance fee. Once the allowance is gone, Revolut is charging you about double what Wise charges for the same job. That is the shape of the whole comparison: Revolut is cheaper up to a line and more expensive after it, and the line moves with your plan.

Take the plan price and divide it by what Wise would have charged. That tells you the monthly conversion volume at which the subscription starts paying for itself.

Grow costs $40 and includes $20,000. Below 25,000 USD there is no volume discount, so Wise runs about 0.3125% on this corridor. $40 divided by 0.003125 is $12,800. Convert less than that and Wise is cheaper. Convert between $12,800 and $20,000 and Grow is cheaper, by up to $22 a month at the top of the allowance.

Then the window closes from the other side. Past $20,000, Revolut charges 0.6% on the excess while Wise stays around 0.3%, so Revolut's lead shrinks with every extra dollar and is gone by about $27,800. So Grow's real window is roughly $13,000 to $28,000 of currency converted a month. Outside it, on both sides, you are better off on Wise.

Scale runs the same way, one order of magnitude up. $140 a month against Wise's discounted 0.296% breaks even at about $47,000 converted, and the 0.6% over-allowance fee gives the advantage back at about $112,000. Basic never wins on rate at all: $10 buys you $1,000 of exchange, and Wise would have charged roughly $3.13 for that same $1,000.

Two things about these numbers, and I would rather say them than have you find out. They are FX cost only, so they ignore everything else a plan includes. And they use a USD to EUR corridor, which is one of the cheapest Wise runs. Send to a currency with a wider spread and Wise's percentage climbs, which pushes every break-even point down and moves the window in Revolut's favour. Price your own corridor before you decide. It takes two minutes on Wise's calculator and you will get an exact number instead of my rounded one.

Everything above is one axis, and if it were the only axis nobody would pay Revolut. They do, and the reason is that Revolut Business is a spend-management product that happens to bank, which is a different thing to buy than a rate.

From Grow up you get bills pulled out of your accounting software, purchase orders matched against them, custom approval rules, and per-account permissions. Every plan, including Basic, gets unlimited team members at no extra cost, which is a genuinely unusual pricing decision in a category that loves a per-seat charge. Grow includes one complimentary metal card and Scale two, with extras at $49. Card controls let you set limits by category, currency and period, so the intern's card works at the AWS bill and nowhere else.

Wise does not pretend to compete here, and this is the part where I have to be straight rather than loyal. Wise Business gives you team cards and syncs to your accounting software, and that is where it stops. There is no approval chain. There is no purchase order object. If four people are spending company money and someone has to chase receipts every month, Wise makes you do that chasing somewhere else, in a spreadsheet or in a tool you pay for separately, and after a while that costs more than $40.

So the honest reading is that they are not really the same purchase. If you want the cheapest way to move money across a border, that is Wise and the arithmetic is not close for most people. If you want to stop being the person who reconciles other people's card spending, that is Revolut, and the FX allowance is a rebate on a product you were buying anyway. Plenty of businesses end up running both, and there is nothing embarrassing about that: Wise for the money, Revolut for the cards, one 31 USD fee and one subscription that earns its place.

One more thing neither company leads with. Neither is a bank. Wise is a Money Service Business registered with FinCEN and is not FDIC insured, with the card program run through sponsor banks. Revolut Business in the US is a prepaid card program issued by Lead Bank, Member FDIC. Both disclose it in the footer of the pages I screenshotted for this piece. If you are holding a serious operating balance, that is worth ten minutes of your attention and a real bank for the float.

Open Wise. It costs 31 USD once, it charges you nothing in a quiet month, and at the volumes most solo founders and small teams actually run it is the cheaper of the two by a clear margin. Add Revolut Grow the month your currency conversion sits reliably above about $13,000, or the month a second person starts spending company money and you notice you are the receipts department. Skip Basic. It is $10 for a $1,000 allowance and no fee-free international transfers, which is a card product wearing a rate product's clothes.

Wise holds the finances slot in the 22-tool stack for this reason, and the wider business account review covers the parts this page skips, including what happens when a client will only pay by wire. If you want to know what you are already paying for money movement before you change anything, the method in the subscription audit finds it in about an hour.