Motivation letters: SwissJobs.app or Word templates?

Feature comparison

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

Pricing side by side

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

What is actually inside a Word cover letter template

A .docx file is a zip archive of XML, and the paper size sits inside it as a pair of numbers. On 4 September 2026 we downloaded every cover letter template from Word's galleries in four languages and opened the files — 16 distinct ones in the English gallery — and this is the first finding: 15 of the 16 are set to US Letter, 8.5 by 11 inches, and one is A4. Fill one in, save as PDF, and you send a sheet that is wider and shorter than every other page in a Swiss application. Anyone can check it: unzip the file and look for the page-size entry in the document part. A4 is 210 by 297 millimetres.

The second finding is the addresses. In 9 of the 16 files the sender or the recipient sits in the United States: the accounting letter puts the applicant in Carson City, Nevada and writes to Seattle; the finance one writes to Denver; the nursing one to Bellevue, Washington. Phone numbers are in the US three-three-four pattern. None of this is hidden — it is the example text you are meant to replace — but it is also the shape of the letter: an American address block, an American date position, an American salutation and sign-off.

The third finding is what is missing. Across the 16 files, the words Switzerland and Swiss never appear. Neither does work permit, nor reference letter, nor any CEFR band. Those are not decorative details for an applicant here. The permit line is the first thing a Swiss employer looks for when the name is not local; the percentage workload is often the thing the advert is actually negotiating; the Arbeitszeugnisse are what the enclosures list names. An American template does not omit them to save space — it has never heard of them.

The other language galleries are not better, only differently wrong. In the German gallery, 11 of 16 files are US Letter and 6 are not German files at all but the English ones served unchanged — the card called "Bold nursing cover letter" delivers a byte-for-byte identical file in both galleries. The Italian gallery repeats that split, and its classic template is headed with one person's name and address and signed with a different person's name. The French gallery is fully localised but pads its list: among its 14 files sit a fax cover sheet, a sheet of business cards ten to a page, and a letterhead.

What the Word template is genuinely better at

It would be dishonest to present the template purely as a source of mistakes. It has three advantages no online tool matches, and for plenty of people they outweigh everything above.

First, the file is yours. No account, no connection, no subscription to cancel, and no provider that closes in two years. A dossier you maintain across a decade lives in a folder on your own machine, and that is a serious position rather than nostalgia. A .docx opens without a Word licence too — LibreOffice and the browser version both read it.

Second, control. In Word you move every millimetre, you put a line exactly where you want it, and nothing reformats itself behind you. If you already have a layout in your head, the template is the shorter path. Word's comment and track-changes mode is also the better tool for having someone read your letter over, which is the point at which any editor loses.

Third, the single application. If you have one job in view and nothing else, a template finishes before any signup does. That is exactly why our five worked letters download as Word files with no account and no payment — standard, apprenticeship, speculative, internship, and applying in German as an English speaker. They are set to A4, carry Swiss addresses and postcodes, a place-and-date line, a subject line with the workload in per cent, and the permit sentence in the English one. If that is your situation, take one and stop reading here.

How much of the Swiss market has a template at all

The galleries do not only offer designs — they offer finished letters for named professions: accounting and finance, healthcare and nursing, UI/UX and graphic design, food service, teaching. Everything else is an empty frame with placeholders. So the coverage can be measured.

We held the open adverts in our index of 3 September 2026 against those five groups, apprenticeships and internships excluded: 11.6 per cent fall into one of them. For 88.4 per cent of open Swiss positions there is no worked letter that so much as names the occupation. We counted generously — the design group takes any title containing "designer", not only UI/UX — so the true share is lower rather than higher.

By the language the advert is written in, English-language adverts are covered in 6.2 per cent of cases, German-language ones in 14.5, French in 7.7 and Italian in 2.7. That ordering matters for anyone job-hunting in English here: the English gallery is the largest and the most American, and the English-language slice of the Swiss market is the one it fits second-least well. English-language adverts in Switzerland cluster in pharma, finance, machinery and IT, and those are not the professions the gallery writes letters for.

The point is not that a worked nursing letter is bad. The point is that a profession template only moves the work: it supplies sentences about nursing in general, while the advert you are answering names a specific ward, a specific percentage and a specific qualification. Those three facts are in the posting and in no template.

What SwissJobs.app does instead — and where it stops

You paste the text of the advert and choose your CV; the draft is written from both, in whatever language you are using the tool in. It opens in the same editor as your CV, so you overwrite any line by hand, and for bigger changes you give the AI a plain-language instruction. You download the result as PDF or as a Word file, neither watermarked. Each application keeps its own version with the advert text stored beside it, which is why the twelfth letter is not the eleventh with a new company name in it.

The numbers, counted in the code on 4 September 2026 rather than written from memory: a free account writes 5 letters a day and 10 per rolling month, plus 5 AI edit instructions a day and 10 a month on a letter. Letters carry their own allowance separate from CVs, so the two halves of one application do not compete for the same budget. After that there is a 7-day trial, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancellable monthly.

And the objection that belongs in the same paragraph: the generator needs an account. We checked it — all three wizard steps redirect a visitor without a session to the signup page, and our own landing page says so. If you will not create an account on principle, the Word template is the better answer, and our five worked letters exist for exactly that case.

No tool, ours included, promises you an interview. What is defensible is the mechanism: a letter that picks up the advert's own vocabulary and answers the things a Swiss dossier is asked for gives a human reader fewer reasons to put it aside than a text that came out of a file written before the advert existed.

Who should take which

One application, a layout already in your head, no account wanted: a Word template — ideally one that is set to A4. Take one of our five worked letters as .docx if the Swiss form matters to you more than the styling does.

A search running over weeks, several adverts a week, possibly across two languages: SwissJobs.app. That is where the arithmetic tips, because every letter belongs to a different posting and the saved file needs more surgery each time.

Relocating, or applying from outside Switzerland: read the Swiss conventions before you choose a tool. A US or UK template will not carry the permit line, will call the document a resume, will put a "References available on request" line where the enclosures belong, and will be set to the wrong paper. Those are the four things a Swiss recruiter notices in the first three seconds.

And if you pick us but want to own the file: those are not in conflict. Download the finished letter as a Word document and put it in your folder. What separates it from a template is where the text came from, not what ends up on your disk.