The route falls into four pages: the purchase, the rate and the gap between buying and selling, TWINT as the everyday payment route, and the way back, which costs the same again. Added up, the total stands on the fees page.
The whole route at a glance
1 000 francs as an exampleWhat counts about this calculation is not the final sum but the structure: two of the three deductions grow with the amount, the third stays the same. Which is why there is no amount at which everything is cheap — small sums suffer under the fixed network fee, large ones under the price gap.
The four pages of this section
In, round, back, and the rateWhy TWINT has a page of its own here
The commonest Swiss questionIn Switzerland TWINT is the route almost everyone thinks of first, and on this question it never leads straight to the goal. That is no shortcoming of the service but its build: TWINT moves francs between Swiss accounts and converts nothing. Put the question one stop earlier — to the exchange rather than to the cashier — and you get an answer that can be checked.
Exactly the same holds for PostFinance, for cards and for every other route on which francs are moved. The change of system always happens at the exchange, never in the cashier.
What is deliberately missing from these pages
Three omissionsFirst: no list of exchanges with a fee table. Such lists are wrong within weeks, and the decisive item — the price gap — does not appear in them anyway. What stands here instead is how to measure it yourself in two minutes.
Second: no view on the exchange rate, neither optimistic nor warning. Third: nothing about what follows for anyone's tax position or legal standing — that is a question for a professional and not for a comparison site about cashiers.
Where something on the route can be changed
Two of four stopsOf the four stops, two are negotiable and two are not. At the exchange the choice of provider decides the fee and the price gap; at the network the choice of route decides the network fee. The cashier, by contrast, takes what it takes, and the Swiss account is a given in any case.
| Stop | Negotiable? | Through what |
|---|---|---|
| Swiss account | no | The starting point is fixed |
| Exchange | yes | Through the choice of provider — fee and price gap together |
| Network | yes | Through the choice of route, see networks |
| Cashier | partly | Only through the choice of cashier itself |
Two negotiable stops sounds like little and is the larger part of the arithmetic: all three deductions hang on them.
From which follows an order of operations most guides are missing: settle the route first, then the cashier. Choose a cashier that does not carry your coin and you have bought yourself the dearest item on the whole bill before the first round runs.
Questions people actually type
Answered from the same records as the pageHow do I get from francs to a coin?
Over an exchange: that is where francs arrive, where the swap happens, and from where it goes on to an address. There is no direct route from a bank account into a cashier.
What does the route cost in total?
Three deductions in each direction: the trading fee, the price gap and the network fee. The worked example on this page shows them for a thousand francs.
Why is the way back dearer than expected?
Because the price gap falls again on the sale. It appears on no receipt, because it is not a fee but a property of the price.
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