The monthly fee is the first line, and the spread is wide
Debit card costs start with a single question: what the account charges each month. Across these brands the answers stretch from €0 at ActivoBank and RSD 0 at AikBank, through smaller standing charges such as €2 at APS Bank, €1.50 at ABN AMRO Zakelijk and FJD 3.50 at ANZ Fiji, to CHF 140 at American Express CH, AUD 30 at ANZ Credit Cards and ZAR 115 at Absa.
Read the monthly fee as the top of the price list, not the whole bill. It is the part you pay for holding the account. What you pay when you spend the money sits on a separate line, and for a card used abroad that line is often the larger one.
Currency comes before ranking. Each figure is published in the currency its provider quotes in, so ZAR 115 in ZAR and CHF 140 in CHF are not the same size of number. Convert to a single currency at a rate you could actually get before you compare anything. The same caution applies to 1st National Bank Saint Lucia at XCD 5 and ACB Grenada Bank at XCD 0, which sit on different scales to either of those.
A free monthly fee is not a free card
A long list of these providers charges nothing monthly: ActivoBank, Advanzia Bank, Alior, AikBank, AffinityPlus Credit Union, Anadi Bank, Altyn-i, Alif, Alatau City Bank, Aspire, Aspiration, AccessMore, Airwallex, Airtm, Advcash (Advanced Cash) Card, ACB Grenada Bank and Absa Seychelles. That removes the standing charge and nothing else.
The standing charge is also the easiest one to escape. You can close an account you stopped using or move down to a cheaper tier, but fees that follow a purchase cannot be negotiated after the money has moved. Airwallex pairs a free monthly fee with 0.5% on foreign exchange, and Advcash (Advanced Cash) Card pairs a free monthly fee with 0%. Put those side by side with the monthly charge of a card that costs more to hold, then decide which one matches how you actually use money.
The AffinityPlus Credit Union review is a good place to check whether a free monthly fee comes with conditions attached, such as a balance you must keep or a way of holding the account that you would not have chosen otherwise. A monthly charge of €0 is a price, not a description of the account.
Foreign exchange fees do the real damage
Any debit card that spends foreign currency can charge for the conversion, and the rates differ sharply. ACB Grenada Bank charges 1%, 1st National Bank Saint Lucia charges 2%, Araratbank charges 1.5%, Al Rajhi Bank charges 2%, Alpha Bank Cyprus charges 2.7%, ANNA Money charges 1% and AstroPay charges 1.25%.
Arab Bank publishes a range rather than a single rate, and it is worth planning for the top of that span: 2% to 3%. A percentage that looks harmless on paper gets applied to every payment abroad, which is how a card with no monthly fee ends up costing more than one with a small charge and a low markup.
Al Rajhi Bank shows why the monthly line settles so little on its own: SAR 0 each month, then 2% on a foreign purchase. For an Absa customer the standing charge reads ZAR 115, and what that rate does abroad is the open question. Leave it unranked until you have an answer, and prefer the card where every line is known.
Getting money onto the card is also a cost
Top-ups sit outside both the monthly fee and the exchange rate, and providers price them in their own ways. Airtm lists $0 as its monthly fee, then charges a load fee of 1% on first $200 per month. A card that is free to hold can still be expensive to fill, and a card with a modest standing charge can be the cheaper one if you load it often.
Advcash (Advanced Cash) Card lists $0 and a loading restriction: loads from Volet e-wallet only. That is a limit rather than a price, and it narrows which funding routes and currencies you can use, which changes what the card is worth to you.
AccessMore loads by cash or by electronic funds at no cost, and the only charge it lists is for issuing the prepaid cash card. Providers that name their loading costs plainly make this step of the comparison easier than ones that leave you to infer it.
An order of comparison that holds up
Work the same questions for every card on your shortlist: what is the monthly fee, what is charged to convert foreign currency, what does it cost to load the card and from where, and which currency is each of those quoted in. The ActivoBank page answers the first with €0, while ABN AMRO Zakelijk answers it with €1.50 in a business account priced differently again.
Then weight the answers by use. A card kept for home spending is judged almost entirely on the monthly charge. A card used abroad or holding multiple currencies is judged on the exchange rate and the loading rules, because those bite on every payment rather than on a single standing charge. Neither ranking is wrong; they are answers to different habits.
Use reviews to fill gaps and rankings to build the shortlist. The Advcash (Advanced Cash) Card write-up shows a loading restriction sitting next to a free monthly charge, and the crypto debit cards ranking sets accounts that hold and spend digital assets against each other on cost. Rankings give you the order, reviews tell you which line the order came from.
What these numbers leave open
Monthly charges, exchange rates and loading costs decide most debit card comparisons, and they are the ones worth arguing about first. They do not settle cash machine charges, card replacement, withdrawal fees, or what happens to a rate on a weekend or a public holiday. Check those in the provider's own pricing before you commit, and treat any comparison that skips them as unfinished.
If you want a shortlist to start from, the free monthly fee group is large: ActivoBank, AikBank, Advanzia Bank, Alior, AffinityPlus Credit Union, Anadi Bank, Alatau City Bank, Altyn-i, Alif, Aspire and Aspiration all list nothing, and ACB Grenada Bank and Absa Seychelles add to it. The exchange rate then separates them, and that is the line to dig into.