Two apps that try to tell you the real price

The comparison that matters here is not features. It is whose data is better, and how you would know.

Almost every currency app answers the same question: what does this number equal? A much smaller group tries to answer the one travellers actually care about: is this number reasonable? FairPay is one; RoamRate's Local Price Index is another.

How to judge a price dataset

This is the useful part of the page, and it applies to whichever app you end up using — including ours. Before trusting any local-price feature, ask:

• How many places does it actually cover? Broad country coverage with thin city data is much less useful than deep data for the twenty cities you would go to.
• How many items, and which? A coffee and a beer tell you about cafes. A taxi fare and a hotel night tell you about the expensive decisions.
• When was it collected? Prices in high-inflation countries rot within months. Undated price data is a guess.
• Where did it come from? Crowdsourced, scraped or surveyed are very different things with very different failure modes.
• Does it distinguish tourist prices from local prices? An average that blends both tells you neither.

If an app cannot answer those, treat its numbers as a rough sense of scale rather than a benchmark to argue with a vendor about.

The honest position on ours

RoamRate's Local Price Index covers everyday anchors — coffee, beer, a short taxi ride, a hotel night — for the place you are standing in, and it lives inside the app where it can be maintained and versioned. We deliberately do not publish city-by-city price tables on this website, because a published price we cannot commit to refreshing would undermine the exact claim the product is built on.

If a free alternative has deeper coverage for the places you actually travel, use it. The point is that you have a local benchmark, not that it comes from us.

What RoamRate adds that a pure price app does not

Price context on its own still leaves you doing arithmetic. RoamRate puts the conversion and the benchmark in the same view, works with no connection, and is built to be used one-handed — which is the situation where the question comes up.