Skydo

What is Skydo?

Skydo is a cross-border payments platform built specifically for Indian businesses that get paid by overseas clients — exporters, IT and software service firms, agencies, and freelancers. Instead of routing money through an expensive SWIFT wire or a percentage-based wallet, Skydo gives you foreign-currency virtual accounts (USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, AED, SGD). Your client pays into a local account as if paying a domestic supplier, and the money settles into your Indian bank account in 24–48 hours, at the real exchange rate, with the compliance paperwork already done.

The model is deliberately simple: Skydo charges a flat fee per payment rather than skimming a percentage, and it does not add a margin on the exchange rate. It is RBI-authorised as a Payment Aggregator – Cross Border (PA-CB), settles through HDFC Bank, is ISO 27001 certified, and is used by 40,000+ Indian exporters across 150+ countries. For a service exporter sending five-figure invoices, the flat fee plus zero markup is the difference between losing 1–2% of every payment and losing a fixed $29.

Why getting paid from abroad is broken for Indians

If you have ever received an international payment as an Indian freelancer or business, you know the three taxes nobody advertises. First, the percentage cut: wallets and marketplaces shave 1–4% off the top, and that slice grows with every rupee you earn. Second, the FX markup: the “rate” you are quoted is usually 1–2% worse than the real mid-market rate, an invisible margin baked into the conversion. Third, the compliance tax: chasing your bank for a FIRA, decoding SWIFT charges, and reconciling what landed against what was invoiced — hours of unpaid admin per payment.

Skydo’s entire design answers those three taxes one by one. The flat fee kills the percentage cut. The mid-market rate kills the FX markup. The instant, free FIRA kills the compliance tax. None of these is a gimmick — they are the exact line items that quietly erode an exporter’s margin.

Skydo at a glance

How Skydo pricing actually works

Skydo’s pricing is three bands. As advertised in 2026 you pay a flat $19 up to $2,000, a flat $29 from $2,000 to $10,000, and 0.3% above $10,000 (custom pricing past $100K/month) — plus GST, with the exchange at the mid-market rate and no added FX margin. Because the fee is fixed in dollars, your effective cost drops as invoices grow — the opposite of how percentage rails behave.

Invoice size	Skydo fee	Effective %
$1,000	$19	~1.9%
$2,000	$19	~0.95%
$5,000	$29	~0.58%
$10,000	$29	~0.29%

Skydo vs Infinity vs Wise vs Payoneer

The honest comparison is about fee structure, not brand. Percentage rails are fine for small, occasional payments; they get expensive precisely when your business is doing well and invoices grow.

Provider	Fee model	FX markup	FIRA
Skydo	Flat $19 / $29 / 0.3%	None (mid-market)	Instant, free
Infinity	Flat 0.5% all-in	None (mid-market)	Free
Wise	~0.43–1% + fixed	Mid-market	~$2.50 each
Payoneer	Up to ~2% + annual fee	~0.5–2%	Varies

On a single $10,000 export invoice, a 2% all-in cost is $200 and a flat 0.5% is $50; Skydo caps it at $29. Across a year of retainers and milestones, the gap is real money — which is exactly why high-ticket exporters gravitate to the flat-dollar model.

FIRA, LUT, and why compliance is the quiet dealbreaker

For Indian service exporters the FIRA (Foreign Inward Remittance Advice) is not optional paperwork — it is the proof that foreign currency actually entered India, needed for GST treatment, LUT-based zero-rated exports, and clean books at audit. With a traditional bank, getting a FIRA can mean emails, branch visits, and delays; Wise charges around $2.50 per certificate. Skydo issues it instantly and free for every payment, downloadable from the dashboard.

The knock-on benefit is calmer year-end reconciliation: every receipt maps to an invoice, the rate is the verifiable mid-market rate, and the FIRA is already on file. Compliance done well is invisible — and that invisibility is precisely the product.

A worked example: what Skydo saves over a year

Numbers make the case better than adjectives. Picture a software consultancy in Pune that bills $8,000 a month to a single US client — a fairly ordinary services-export profile. On a percentage rail charging an all-in 2% (fee plus a typical 1% FX markup), that is $160 per payment, or $1,920 a year, quietly skimmed off the top. Through Skydo the same payment costs a flat $29 — $348 a year — at the mid-market rate. The annual difference is roughly $1,570, before you count the per-FIRA charges and the hours saved on reconciliation.

Scale that to a firm with three such clients and the saving clears $4,500 a year — real budget for a contractor, a conference, or a month of runway. The point is not that Skydo is marginally cheaper; it is that percentage-based costs compound silently with every successful month, and a flat fee simply doesn’t. Skydo’s own customers report savings in the ballpark of ₹10,000 per transaction and well over ₹1,00,000 annually versus banks.

Security & regulatory standing

Moving money across borders is only worth doing on rails you can trust. Skydo holds RBI authorisation as a Payment Aggregator – Cross Border (PA-CB) — the specific licence India introduced to regulate exactly this kind of service — settles through HDFC Bank, and is ISO 27001 certified for information security. Funds move through regulated banking infrastructure rather than being held loosely, and every transaction produces an auditable FIRA. For a business whose books get scrutinised at GST and income-tax time, that regulatory clarity is not a nice-to-have — it is the baseline for using any cross-border tool at all.

Eligibility & what you need

Item	Detail
Who	Indian-registered businesses, exporters, and freelancers
Best for	Invoices above ~$5,000 (flat fee wins biggest there)
Currencies	USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, AED, SGD collection accounts
Compliance	Instant, free FIRA per payment; RBI PA-CB authorised
Cost	Flat $19 / $29 / 0.3% + GST; no monthly fee

The deal stack — what to pair it with

Skydo handles getting paid. Pair it with the rest of a lean export back office:

• Invoicing: an invoicing tool — send branded invoices with your Skydo account details baked in.
• Accounting: accounting software — reconcile foreign receipts and FIRA docs at filing.
• Multi-currency account: Infinity — a flat-0.5% account that wins on your smaller invoices — many exporters use both.
• Payments: other payment tools — compare Stripe, Payrix, and more for online checkout.

Who should not use Skydo

Skydo is the wrong call if you mostly receive small payments — at $300 a pop, $19 is ~6%, and a flat-0.5% account like Infinity costs less. It is also not a spend account: there is no card or outbound bill-pay, so if you need to pay foreign vendors, pair it with an account that does. And because it is purpose-built for Indian residents, it is not the right fit if you bill from outside India.