Built by someone who knows what it costs when the money doesn't arrive

Growing up in Bo, Sierra Leone, I walked to school each morning past the same money transfer queue. It formed early — women in market cloth, men in pressed trousers, all waiting for the same thing. A number. A receipt. Proof that the money their family abroad had sent had actually arrived.

I watched my grandmother count out crumpled leones on the kitchen table after each transfer. She would do the math out loud, dividing what arrived by what she had been told to expect. The numbers never quite matched. There was always a shortfall — a few thousand here, ten thousand there — that nobody could fully explain.

Nobody told her about exchange rate margins. Nobody explained that the "free" transfer had already taken its cut before it left the sender's country. She simply trusted the process and counted what arrived.

When I moved to the United States in 2021, I became the person on the sending end. I opened apps. I compared fees — the ones listed, anyway. I sent money home for the first time and waited for the call confirming it arrived.

The call came. My family had received the money. But when I calculated what they should have received versus what they got, I discovered that for every $100 I sent, $8 to $15 was disappearing — consumed by fees I had not seen and exchange rate margins I had not understood.

I spent a weekend building a spreadsheet to compare providers properly. Not just fees, but effective rates — the total SLE received divided by the dollars sent. The differences were striking. Some providers delivered nearly 20% more than others on the same amount. The information existed but it was buried, scattered, and designed to be compared only in isolation.

I built RemitSL so my family — and yours — stops losing money to fees that do not have to exist.

The technology to compare providers transparently is not complicated. What was missing was a site built specifically for Sierra Leoneans, showing the right numbers in the right currency, with honest context about which providers are actually worth using.

Every leone that does not arrive is a leone that could have bought medicine, paid school fees, or kept the lights on. RemitSL exists to close that gap.