GG I have done many calculations regarding this (transfer from USA to bunq with currency exchange) like you described after the introduction of the Local currency accounts. Considering all costs for both sender and receiver, Wise is cheaper by a significant amount almost regardless of how much money you want to transfer.
If we make an example with 1000 USD, then if you go with Wise the fees are easy. The sender pays 1000 USD via ACH bank transfer to Wise (normally ACH transfers are free or very cheap), they will shave off 6.40 USD and convert the rest at the real market rate, netting you a total of 942.53 EUR on your bunq account. There are no fees for receiving, because it'll just be a regular SEPA transfer for you.
But if we go the SWIFT route, well first we don't know how much money the US bank is gonna take, but it's probably a lot more than for the ACH transfer. But even if we don't consider these costs at all and just assume the US bank will transfer the 1000 USD for free, then you will have to pay 10 Euros to receive the transfer on the Local currency account to bunq. Next up, you will want to exchange this to the Euro bunq account, which means 0.5% network fees and an unknown exchange rate (but let's pretend it's the same as at Wise, which would be the best-case). That is another 5 USD going out of the window. So after everything, you now end up with 933.86 EUR, without accounting for sender fees.
By the way there's no reason to do the Wise payment in two steps. Just let the payer use Wise directly to send you Euro to your bunq account. By having more steps in there it just gets more expensive. It it probably still cheaper to use Wise even if you split it up like this, but I haven't calculated for this case.
