You open a recharge website, type your mum's Moroccan number, pick 100 MAD, and the site quotes you €11.95. You shrug — fair enough, that's a few euros for the convenience.
It is not a few euros. The real cost of 100 MAD that day was €9.30. You just paid a 28% premium and nobody told you. The trick is called the "FX margin" or "spread", and it is how every major international recharge site finances itself. Here is exactly how it works and how to spot it.
What you actually pay for
When you recharge from abroad, the recharge site is doing three things for you, in order:
- Charging your card in EUR/USD/AED. Stripe (or equivalent) takes its 2.9% + €0.30 processing fee from the recharge site, not from you.
- Settling with the operator in MAD.The recharge site has a wholesale agreement with Inwi / Maroc Telecom / Orange, buys 100 MAD of credit for somewhere between MAD 92–98 (depending on volume), and immediately pings the operator's API to credit the recipient.
- Converting your money to MAD. This is where the margin lives. The recharge site uses a rate that is worse than the public mid-market rate Reuters or Google would quote, and pockets the difference.
The mid-market rate vs the "recharge rate"
On the day this post was written, the mid-market EUR/MAD rate was approximately 10.75. That means 100 MAD = 100/10.75 = €9.30.
Real recharge-site quotes for 100 MAD on the same day:
- One major site: €11.95 (implied rate 8.37 — a 22% margin)
- Another: €11.40 (implied rate 8.77 — a 18% margin)
- Another: €10.85 (implied rate 9.22 — a 14% margin)
- Cheapest we surveyed: €9.95 (implied rate 10.05 — a 7% margin)
That is a 20-percentage-point spread between the most and least expensive site for identical credit on identical operators. On €100 of recharge per month, the difference between best and worst is €20 a year leaving your pocket for no reason.
How to detect the FX margin yourself
You only need two numbers:
- The mid-market rate of your currency to MAD (or whatever the destination currency is). Look it up free at xe.com or finance.yahoo.com.
- The recharge site's quoted price for the denomination you want.
The formula: margin % = (quoted price × mid_rate) / denom - 1.
Worked example: site quotes €11.95 for 100 MAD, mid-rate is 10.75. (11.95 × 10.75) / 100 = 1.285 → margin is 28.5%.
Now you have a comparison metric. The cheapest site is not always the one that looks cheapest — they may strip €0.50 off the quote and bury 5% extra in the FX rate. The margin % is the only honest measure.
Why the margin is so high
Three reasons, in honest order:
- Most users will never check.Looking up the mid-market rate takes 30 seconds but the recharge happens at a moment of urgency (Mum's phone is dying, kid needs to call home before school). Recharge sites are priced for the urgency, not the comparison shopper.
- The wholesale margin from the operator is thin. Operators pay the recharge site somewhere between 2–8% commission. For the recharge business to be profitable enough to fund marketing, customer support, and processing fees, the FX spread carries the rest.
- Currency conversion is genuinely complicated. Recharge sites hedge against MAD volatility by holding inventory in batches and re-pricing periodically. The margin partly funds this inventory cost. But the part that funds inventory cost is small. The bulk is profit.
What an honest pricing model looks like
We built Parlo around the position that the FX margin should be visible and small. On every capability page on this site, the breakdown is:
- The face-value denomination (e.g., 100 MAD)
- The mid-market FX rate at quote time
- A flat, disclosed service fee (typically 4–7%, never more than 9%)
- The all-in price in your currency
That structure cannot fund a TV ad campaign or a sponsored Instagram influencer — but it can fund a real product. We'd rather have users who comparison-shop and stay because we honestly are the cheapest, than users who never check.
Compare for yourself on the Inwi-Morocco corridor:
- 100 MAD on Inwi from France
- 100 MAD on Inwi from Spain
- 100 MAD on Inwi from the UK
- 100 MAD on Inwi from the UAE
If you take one thing away
Before you tap pay on any recharge site, do the 30-second mid-market check. The formula above is the only thing standing between you and a quietly excessive margin. If the site is honest, the margin will be visible and small. If it is not, you have your answer.