Feesless: from hackathon win to startup attempt

01 · Challenge

Helping family back home shouldn’t cost 7.5%

Every year more than 2.2 million Bosnians living abroad send about $2.5 billion home. With an average commission of 7.5%, nearly $200 million a year goes to fees instead of families.

The process is also slow and inconvenient. Recipients often pick up cash in person, there is little transparency, and Bosnia and Herzegovina still lacks modern, fully digital ways to send and receive support.

02 · Research

People send money for groceries and medicine

At the hackathon we worked from a World Bank research paper. The key finding: most recipients spend what they receive on essentials, such as groceries, medicine, healthcare and gifts. We also learned that many people send cash with bus drivers from Germany or Austria for little or nothing, and that some recipients have no bank account but do have a smartphone.

• High transfer fees

  Western Union, MoneyGram and banks charge high commissions, especially on small amounts.

• Slow and inconvenient

  Queues, documents and limited opening hours, hardest on older and rural recipients.

• No transparency

  Senders can’t see how money is spent; recipients face surprise exchange rates and fees.

• No modern digital option

  Fully digital remittance tools are barely adopted in BiH, so people fall back on cash.

• Exchange rate losses

  Unfavourable rates and double conversions quietly eat into every transfer.

03 · Solution

Skip the bank, send the groceries

Online, you pay $100 and get $100 worth of goods; the store absorbs the 1.5–3% processing fee. So if we know what people spend the money on, why not cut out the banks and send it straight to grocery stores, pharmacies and clinics, as digital coupons? After ten failed ideas in a few hours, this was the one that won the hackathon.

• Senders abroadLower fees, more control

  Little or no transfer fee, support that goes to essentials, and no bank queues or delays.

• Families at homeInstant and safe

  Goods and services right away, no cash to withdraw, coupons usable in everyday trusted places.

• Partner businessesGuaranteed traffic

  New customers who can only spend at partner locations, repeat purchases and visibility abroad.

We thought we were geniuses (it turned out we were not, but it was a nice feeling). After the win we gathered a team, redesigned and simplified the product, cut unnecessary features, defined the development stages and ran more interviews with senders and recipients.

04 · The failure

The market said no

We built a fully functional prototype in Figma to present to partners and clients.

We pitched Konzum, Mercator and Bingo, the largest grocery chains in Bosnia. They weren’t interested: they didn’t want to invest outside their core business or give up margin, even with exclusive partnerships on the table. With only a few major players in the market, their rejection ended the project. Smaller businesses turned out to be just as conservative.

05 · Outcome

A failed startup, a valuable experience

The project never reached the market, but the journey was worth more than the outcome. We found a real, large-scale problem, validated it with research, built a solution around real needs and pushed it far beyond the hackathon.