None of the above. They are actually cheaper than most alternatives. I believe their "trick" is to maintain accounts in each country such that a cross country remittance doesn't actual involve money movement which saves on fees.
Can't any random international bank propose the same service for cheaper? Or are they already making more money than Wise ever would by taking larger fees?
I heard an interview from Wise where they just talked about all the random things they did to just drive down costs. They know people care mostly about speed and cost, so they focus there. It seems to not really be 1 thing, but a million small optimizations.
They could, but, yes, it's too profitable to charge extra margin to unsophisticated customers.
Maybe one day.
Banks probably charge a lot less to those moving hundreds of millions around. But the people/businesses occasionally moving around $1000-$1m have been getting shafted for an eternity.
SMS is very popular in the US for historical reasons. Many users in other countries (like India) moved to products like Whatsapp because their cell phone plans charged per message but US phone plans have had free SMS pricing for years so we've never had a push here. iPhone is market leader in the US so iMessageis also heavily used since its default for SMS between iOS users.
Interesting. In UK it was common (and still has I think?) for contracts/deals to include lots of free SMS texts but even then most people have readily moved to WhatsApp, Messenger etc.
In my mind texts quickly became like voicemails, something older people would use cause that's what they know but not something I'd want to use regularly if given the option.
Part of the reason UK switched over quickly is because of much higher international texting needs which these apps also neatly solve. Your average American just straight up does not need international messaging capability
I’d find this surprising! I’m probably the only person I know who frequently messages (via iMessage nonetheless) with foreign contacts. In addition I’m pretty sure cross-state comms in the USA are treated like international comms are in Europe but I could well be wrong on this point (and as per xkcd[1] I’m sure we’ll find out soon if I am)!
The UK rolled probably rolled out free SMS texts later than the US; the US was one of the first markets that rolled it out. I don't know when whatsapp rolled out there but I'm guessing it pre dates unlimited SMS being ubiquitious.
iMessage has pretty much the same feature set as Whatsapp so US users don't really have a reason to migrate at this point.
We had free texts before iPhones nevermind WhatsApp. Not unlimited but hundreds of SMSs a month was common. That said another thread here implied that carriers included MMS messages in free texts, not just SMS? If so that might explain as MMS aren't free in my experience.
I stopped using door dash when I watched multiple delivery drivers go pick up my food, sit and wait for a bit, drive in the wrong direction, pick up food from another restaurant, drive in the wrong direction to another location, then deliver my cold food.
It clarifies this in the 2nd paragraph:
"sites in Texas have emitted double the amount of the gas than in New Mexico, per unit of production, since 2019"
How is search index a moat? It's hard to build, yes, but there is no moat here and anyone can build it as long as they have infra, talent and money.
Also for Apple while I am not sure, but looking at the Android phones there is hardly any feature of Apple which hasn't been covered by some Android phone, so I don't think IP is an issue. It's just that overall quality is much more consistent for Apple across generations that it has built a good brand.
I don’t think you understand how moat is used in this context. A moat isn’t impossible to cross, just harder to cross than a lawn. Also, I don’t think you can saw two features are the same unless the quality is the same. Two sms apps are not equal if one of them occasionally fails to send/receive messages.
I agree that postman has a moat. I think it’s important to say that every company has a moat in that they’re organized, located somewhere, and have customers. The size of the moat varies. We can treat a moat as a scalar value of dollars to cross.
Every company also has a valuation, either through public markets, private markets, or discounted cash flows.
A house cleaning company has a moat of trained cleaners, existing client generation process, goodwill of existing clients, etc. If the value of their discounted cash flows exceed the cost of crossing their moat, they are vulnerable.
The argument is that crossing postman’s moat would cost much less than their private valuation, and their future roadmap is unlikely to build a moat that is significantly harder to cross.
The advantage of Bruno (and the VS code plugin) that storing data in "just a file" is friendly to keeping a local copy, and also to sharing, reviewing and versioning with existing tools (git).
Not "weird" -- that's literally the operational model of VC. It is all about increasing the valuation of the invested company, as quickly as possible, and then selling it while the evaluation is high. Once a company gets VC investment, this is the only route that matters (unless the board somehow resists the dominance of the VC shareholders, which is extremely difficult to achieve).
I moved out of a scientist role into software engineering specifically because I hated the long feedback cycles. My research feedback cycle would be 5-10 years.
