Why I don't recommend the cheapest plan

Introduction

I want to talk about something that bothers me about my own industry.

Every nomad insurance comparison site I've ever audited — and I've audited a lot of them, in the year before I built this one — does the same thing. You land on the page. You enter your age and your destination. You get a list of policies, sorted by price ascending. SafetyWing on top because it's {{TOKENSWPRICE}} a month and it almost always wins on price for under-forties. World Nomads near it. The serious IPMI plans buried six scroll-lengths down, because nobody clicks past the cheap stuff and the affiliate commissions on the cheap stuff are easier to bank anyway.

I don't think that's matching. I think that's a price list with a UI on top. Matching is what happens when you actually take the situation someone described — slowmad, mid-thirties, partner, mild asthma, planning to keep doing this for years — and surface the policy that fits the situation, even when the policy that fits costs four times more than the one at the top of the default list.

That's the philosophy. Let me explain why.

The $40 vs $180 example

Here's a concrete case I think about a lot. A thirty-five-year-old slowmad, six months in Portugal, three in Mexico, two in Vietnam, repeat. Solo. Mild asthma diagnosed at age twenty-two, well-controlled with a daily inhaler. She wants insurance.

The cheap option is SafetyWing at roughly {{TOKENSWPRICE}} per four weeks. Around $45-ish at typical rates. The more expensive option is April MyHealth at roughly {{TOKENAPRILPRICE}} per month for a mid-tier plan. Call it $180. The price difference looks enormous. Most sites stop there.

Here's what each actually does.

The cheap plan covers acute emergencies — the broken ankle, the appendicitis, the dengue fever. It does not cover her asthma in any practical sense, because asthma diagnosed at twenty-two is pre-existing, and the policy excludes pre-existing conditions except for an acute exacerbation that requires emergency stabilization. So: an asthma attack severe enough to send her to the ER, covered for the ER visit. A refill of her daily controller inhaler, the pulmonologist consult, the spirometry test her primary care doctor wants done annually — all out of pocket. No mental health beyond a tiny acute cap. No maternity. No annual physical. No therapy. The policy is designed for a trip, and a trip doesn't include any of that.

The more expensive plan covers her asthma as part of routine care once it's declared and accepted at underwriting (sometimes with a small loading, sometimes clean). It covers her annual physical. It covers mental health up to {{TOKENMENTALCAP}} sessions a year at a real reimbursement rate. It covers maternity after a waiting period, if that becomes relevant. It covers the controller inhaler she takes every day. It covers the specialist consult.

The $140 monthly difference isn't a markup. It's the price of the policy doing things the cheap one structurally does not do. If she ever uses any of those things — and a slowmad with a chronic condition almost certainly will, year over year — the cheap plan plus out-of-pocket costs is going to exceed the more expensive plan plus zero out-of-pocket costs, often by a wide margin.

Sorting by price hides this. The $40 plan looks like a deal. It's not a deal. It's a different product.

How we get paid, and why it doesn't break the engine

I want to be honest about this because the industry usually isn't.

Nomadsurance is paid by commission from the carriers. When someone we match to April or Cigna or Passportcard or SafetyWing buys a policy through us, the carrier pays us a percentage. This is how every nomad insurance comparison site is paid. There is no version of this business that doesn't run on carrier commission.

Two things matter about how we handle that.

First: the commission rates vary wildly by carrier and by product. Cheap travel plans pay smaller absolute commissions because the premiums are smaller. IPMI plans pay larger absolute commissions because the premiums are larger. If we let raw commission flow into ranking, we'd push everyone toward IPMI regardless of fit, and we'd be doing the same lazy thing as the price-ascending sites, just in the opposite direction. So in the matching engine, commission is flattened. Ranking is based on fit, not payout. We make less on some matches than we could and we're fine with that — the alternative is a recommendation system nobody should trust.

Second: we tell you this. It's in the footer. It's on the "how we work" page. It's in this essay. If a comparison site doesn't disclose how it gets paid, that's the tell. The disclosure isn't the compromise — the disclosure is the only thing that lets the matching be honest in the first place.

I'm aware that "trust us, the commissions don't affect rankings" is exactly what a dishonest site would also say. The check is: do the rankings change when you change the situation? On a price-driven site they don't, because price is the only variable. On ours, change "I have no medical history" to "I have asthma" and watch which plans move. If the rankings reshape, the engine is doing what it should.

What "matching" should actually mean

The premise of nomad insurance is that nomads have unusual situations, and unusual situations need fit, not defaults.

A twenty-six-year-old on a twelve-month sabbatical with no medical history and no plans to keep going — SafetyWing is genuinely the right answer for them. Cheap, frictionless, designed for exactly that arc. Recommending IPMI to that person is overselling.

A thirty-eight-year-old couple eighteen months into permanent nomadism, talking seriously about kids in the next two years, one partner managing depression with ongoing therapy — IPMI is the right answer. Recommending SafetyWing to that couple is, frankly, malpractice. The maternity isn't covered. The therapy isn't covered. The "what if we want to settle in Portugal in three years" question isn't addressed at all.

The difference between these two cases isn't price. It's situation. Any matching engine that returns the same top result for both is not matching; it's a vending machine.

The bottom line

I built Nomadsurance because the question "which insurance should I get as a nomad" deserves an honest answer, and the honest answer is almost never "the cheapest one." It's "the one that fits, given what you actually do, what your body actually is, and what your next five years probably look like."

Sometimes that's a $40 plan. Often it's not. The work is figuring out which one you are, and the work is what we're paid to do — by the carriers, transparently, with the commission rates flattened so the recommendation has a chance of being real.

If you've ever used a comparison site that asked you almost nothing and showed you mostly the cheap stuff, you weren't matched. You were sorted. There's a difference, and once you see it, it's hard to unsee.