Methodology

The two kinds of fee data

They come from different places and are refreshed on different clocks, so we label them differently everywhere on the site.

• Withdrawal and deposit fees — machine-collected per exchange, one row per coin × network × exchange. These carry a synced timestamp (latest: 2026-08-29 00:57 UTC).
• Trading fees, VIP ladders, token discounts, fiat and other fees — curated by hand from each exchange’s official fee schedule, because virtually no exchange publishes its fee schedule through an API. These carry a verified date and a link to the exact page we read (latest: 2026-08-28).

Where a number comes from

For each exchange we take the first source on this ladder that actually works, and we record which one it was:

1. The exchange’s public API. Preferred, because it is the same data the exchange serves its own users and it can be re-pulled cleanly.
2. The JSON endpoint behind the exchange’s own fee page. Used when the public API omits fees or covers only a fraction of the listed coins. This is still the exchange’s own data, read the way its own web page reads it.
3. The official fee page, read by a person. Used for trading fees, VIP ladders and one-off fees. Someone reads the exchange’s published schedule, records the numbers and stores the source URL and the date.

Coverage is deliberately exhaustive per exchange: if an exchange lists 9,000 coins, we want all 9,000 rows, not the top hundred. A missing coin looks identical to a free withdrawal on a comparison table, and that is exactly the kind of error this site exists to avoid.

Normalising what exchanges publish

Matching a ticker to a coin

Tickers collide — several different projects ship under the same symbol, and the one an exchange means is not always the famous one. Every symbol is resolved to a specific asset by its CoinMarketCap identifier, with a manual override table for the collisions that automated matching gets wrong. When a symbol cannot be resolved with confidence, we still publish the exchange’s fee, but we leave it unattached to any coin page rather than attach it to the wrong coin.

Naming the network

The same chain appears as “Bitcoin”, “BTC”, “btc”, “BTC (SegWit)” or “Mainnet” depending on who wrote the exchange’s integration. We map 514 observed spellings onto 201 named chains so that a comparison across exchanges is a comparison of the same route. The mapping happens when we render, never by rewriting what the exchange said: the exchange spelling stays visible on detail pages. Ambiguous bare tickers that different exchanges use for different chains are deliberately left unmerged instead of being guessed.

Turning a fee into money

A withdrawal fee is quoted in the coin. The USD figure you see is fee in coin × the coin’s live price at page load, recomputed on every refresh rather than frozen at sync time. Percentage fees stay percentages — there is no honest fixed USD value for them. Trading fee percentages are stored as published (0.1 means 0.1%), and a trade’s cost is computed from the tier your 30-day volume actually puts you in, not from the headline rate.

What we exclude, and why we still show it

• Implausible amounts. A few exchanges report fees in a token’s raw integer units, which converts to millions of dollars. Anything above $10,000per withdrawal is kept out of every average, median, minimum and maximum — one such row is enough to ruin a chain’s statistics. We still count those rows publicly and still show the exchange’s number on the detail page, flagged, because hiding it would be editing the exchange.
• Paused routes. Coins whose withdrawals an exchange has currently disabled are counted separately and never win a “cheapest” badge — a fee you cannot pay is not a deal. They stay listed, because knowing a route is closed is useful.
• Unknowns. Rendered as a dash. We never substitute zero, an estimate or a competitor’s number for a value the exchange did not publish.

Verification

Before a newly collected exchange goes live, its numbers are spot-checked by hand against the exchange’s own fee page — our rule is at least five coins across three exchanges per batch, chosen to include both major coins and long-tail ones, since collection bugs usually show up in the tail. Curated trading fees are re-read at the source and re-dated rather than silently carried forward, so an old verified date is visible to you rather than hidden from you.

Automated checks run alongside the human ones: rows whose USD value is implausible, exchanges whose row count collapses between syncs, coins that resolve to two different assets on the same exchange, and chains that split into two spellings after a mapping change.

Refresh cadence

• Prices — polled continuously; the USD side of every fee is recomputed when the page rebuilds.
• Withdrawal fees — re-synced per exchange on a rolling schedule; automated hourly syncing is being rolled out exchange by exchange. Until an exchange is on it, the sync timestamp on the page tells you exactly how old its numbers are.
• Trading fees — re-verified against the official schedule periodically and whenever an exchange announces a change or a reader reports one.
• Network (gas) fees — read straight from each chain every two minutes and kept for seven days, so the gas tracker shows the current state of the chain rather than a cached estimate.
• Pages — rebuilt on a 30–60 minute cycle, so what you read is at most that far behind the database.

Known limits

• Fees can depend on your account: region, KYC level, VIP tier, promotions, market-maker agreements and fee-token holdings all change what you personally pay. We publish the schedule, not your invoice.
• Some exchanges publish a fee range or a “dynamic” network fee that moves with chain congestion. We show what they publish; the amount charged at the moment you press withdraw can differ.
• Funding rates and slippage are not part of the fee tables — they belong to other pages and are being built separately. On-chain gas has its own page: it is a network fee, not an exchange fee, so it never enters an exchange comparison.
• On layer-2 rollups the gas tracker reports the cost of execution on the rollup only. It excludes the data fee the rollup pays to Ethereum, so a real transaction there costs somewhat more than the figure shown.
• An exchange appearing here is not an endorsement of it, and a low fee is not a proxy for a safe venue.

Corrections

If a number here disagrees with the exchange, the exchange is right and we want to know. Send the exchange, the fee, what we show, what they show and a link to [email protected]. Fixes are made in the underlying data, so they propagate to every page that uses the number, and the row’s verification date moves with them.

Methodology — FAQ