This update does not change our actual billing rates in any way.
All of our telecommunications billing is done in USD, but advertising in USD would be unfair to our Canadian customer base. To avoid such deception, we provide estimates for our services in Canadian dollars both on our website and in our advertising material. Due to a change in how we calculate currency exchanges, our per-minute rate estimates in Canadian dollars have decreased.
Originally, we estimated our prices using an exchange rate of $1.00 USD = $1.40 CAD. This was overkill, and produced an unnecessarily inflated CAD estimate. We looked at historical USD-CAD exchange rates and chose the 75th percentile exchange rate since 2017. This means the new rate we use for our price estimates — $1.00 USD = $1.33 CAD — is higher than the average daily exchange rate for 75% of the time since 2017. For the record, our previous estimated exchange rate was higher than 97% of all rates in that same time period.
This means that, if the trend continues, come billing time you can expect to pay less than our Canadian dollar estimates 75% of the time.
For the numbers people out there (such as myself), compared to the historical average exchange rate this represents a savings of 2.125%. For a more in-depth look, since 2017 the minimum exchange rate has been $1.2040, and the max $1.4496; thus the most extreme diversion from our published estimates are -9.419% / +9.058%. However, given the means of the upper and lower partitions are $1.2834 and $1.3533 respectively, we get an average under/over-payment of -3.444% / +1.816%.