Looking for free ways to send money to friends and family online? Here are a lot of options to choose from. Whether you want to send a monetary gift for your niece’s birthday, painlessly split a restaurant bill with friends, or even pay your rent without ordering a new checkbook, the best way to send money may just be one of the apps below.
Here’s what you need to know about these popular person-to-person payment options, including associated fees and what makes each option unique.
1. PayPal
PayPal creates better ways to manage and move money, and offers choice and flexibility when sending payments, paying or getting paid. You can use the service to pay for purchases online, send and receive money, and as a method of payment at a limited number of merchants.
The service lets you send money in a couple of clicks via the web or its mobile apps (available for Android and iOS), keep your money in your PayPal account like a wallet, or even use PayPal to check out at tons of online retailers, or just about anyone else with an online shop that doesn’t want to handle payment processing themselves.
2. Epay
Epay is the leading global online payment platform that specialize in e-commerce processing and remittances for individuals and businesses around the world. Epay provides most affordable and flexible funding and withdrawal options, such as global bank wires, hot e-currencies, and localized exchangers. Sending money with PayPal is easy and free for personal transactions as long as you use your Epay account.
Epay offers an impressively seamless and low-cost way to send money to anyone using just their email address or phone number. Receiving mobile payments is always free. Sending them is also free if you’re using your Epay balance, a linked bank account.
3. Google Wallet
You can send and receive money via Google Wallet if you have an existing Google account; if not, you’ll need to sign up it firstly. After that, you can link your bank account or debit card to your account and use them to send money to any email address. Gmail users can even send money in email messages.
It’s free to send money through Google Wallet if you’re using your Google Wallet balance or a linked bank account. Otherwise, the fee is 2.9% per transaction if you’re using your debit card.
4. Venmo
Venmo allows users to transfer money to anyone with an email address or mobile phone number. Transfers are free from your Venmo balance, bank account or debit card, as long as the accounts are from a major U.S. bank. Credit cards and non-major debit cards, however, are charged a transaction fee of 3 percent.
5. Square Cash
If you can send an email, you can send money via Square Cash. All you need is your recipient’s email address and your own debit card number. The recipient doesn’t need a Square Cash account, and there are no middlemen to slow down the transaction, which is immediate.
Square Cash doesn’t charge a dime unless you use the business version of the service to request payment. Then you’ll pay 2.75% per transaction.
Many of these services compete for each other and it can be difficult choosing the correct service. These are sometimes called Email Money Transfer services, but are, in reality, a whole payment gateway that can support many different payment methods. If only from the cost side to consider, I strongly recommend Epay to you. It’s totally free to send and receive money, and Epay supports multi funding options like International Wire Transfer, Western Union, MoneyGram and Ria Money Transfer with 0% fee. It must be the best way to help individuals and businesses to solve payment problems.