Confirmed that pay now you get charged in sgd the exact amount shown on agoda. No DCC no cross border fee no nothing. At least that's the case when I book on agoda app.
Also confirmed that pay later will charge you 4 or 5 or 6% more. The percentage varies. Not much if your booking is sgd100-200 bucks. But if booking many nights sgd700-1000+, that 5-6% will be something like $50-1xx more. That's a huge difference.
So use pay now and pay later according to the pros and cons to your booking. Also note that for pay now, if your booking has free cancellation, agoda refunds slightly less than what you have paid if you cancel within the free cancellation terms.
I think its possible to get back the difference if you make abit of noise to agoda. Whether that is worth the hassle I leave it to the individual to judge.
HTHs!
And below is the agoda pay later conspiracy observations, read if interested:
And just an observation, the pay now figure (Sgd) vs the pay later figure (local currency as they state in small print you will be charged in local currency and the amount is subject to prevalent forex rate blah blah). Pay now sgd if compared to pay later local currency is at an EXTREMELY FAVOURABLE forex rate. Favourable to us. Something like the existing forex rate you check at that point of time, or even slightly better. Maybe a marketing tactic to make agoda prices comparatively lower than the other OTAs. As with some tripadvisor threads I've read regarding this matter, I'm pretty sure its just agoda tricking its customers as most people would click pay later, not knowing it actually costs more. Those tripadvisor threads on agoda payments have confirmed that even when the forex rate changes in favour to them from date of booking to date of "pay later", they still get charged more.