$45 wire fee on a $900 payout - what are you all getting paid through instead

Caveat first: this is one network and my volume with them is small, so it may not generalise.

They pay by wire only. Last cycle was $912 and $45 of it went on the intermediary bank fee, then my own bank took another 7 on the receiving side. Call it 6% to get paid, on top of everything else that already comes off the top.

1. I asked whether they do anything else and got a no. 2) I asked whether they'd cover the fee and got a different, faster no. 3) The obvious answer is batch it quarterly, but I would rather not have three months of earnings sitting on someone else's balance sheet.

So: what are people actually getting paid through in 2025 when the network offers wire and nothing else? Not interested in theory, interested in what you personally receive money on.

batch it. the fee is flat, the payout isn't. that's the whole answer

same, mine takes 38 every time no matter the amount

Ran this last year because I had the same problem across three networks at once. Flat fee against payout size, four cycles each:

Cycle size	Wire fee	Effective
$400	$42	10.5%
$900	$45	5.0%
$2,100	$45	2.1%
$6,400	$48	0.75%

The fee moved by $6 across a sixteen-fold range in payout size. It is a flat cost being charged as though it were variable, and the only lever you have on it is the denominator.

Quarterly batching took my blended cost from 5.8% to 1.4%. The counterparty risk grindstone will tell you not to worry about is real, but it is a risk you can size: I don't batch with a network I've been with under six months, and I don't batch more than about a third of a month's revenue with any single one.

or stop using banks. ask for usdc, done

They don't offer it. That was the first thing I asked.

Had this exact thing with a network in 2023 - wire only, flat $40, payouts around the $700 mark so it stung the same way it's stinging you.

What actually worked wasn't switching rails, it was switching who was asking. I stopped emailing accounts and asked my AM directly whether they could pay a partner invoice rather than a standard affiliate payout. Turns out they had a second process for anyone invoicing as a company, and that one went out on a different rail with no intermediary fee at all. Nobody advertises it because it creates work for them.

Have you asked whether they pay company invoices differently to individual payouts? One message, worst case they say no like they said no twice already.

For LATAM this is worse actually my friend. My bank take the wire and then convert with their own rate which is 4% away from the real one, so the fee you see is not the fee you pay.

I use a intermediary that receive USD and hold it, then i convert when i want. Is not perfect and the account took two months to open, but the spread is 0.8 instead of 4. For me the wire fee was never the expensive part, the conversion was.

Fair. My table is all EUR and GBP receiving. Doesn't cover what paulofrz is describing at all.

Late follow-up, because grubstake88's suggestion is the one that worked and it deserves to be at the bottom of the thread rather than lost in the middle.

Asked about company invoicing. They do have a separate process, it goes out on SEPA instead of SWIFT, and the fee is 40 cents.

One message and eleven days to set up. So the answer to my own question turned out not to be the rail at all - it was the payout category I got put in on day one and never questioned. Worth checking if you're staring at a flat wire fee.