How ChainCosts earns
Reading ChainCosts is free and always will be. The site is funded by referral commissions: when you open a provider through one of our routed links and sign up, that provider may pay us a commission. This page explains what that means for you and how we keep it away from the data.
Last updated: 2026-07-11
Commissions are paid by the provider. You pay the same published fees either way.
Every routed referral link is marked so both readers and search engines can tell.
Verdicts are computed from published, cited figures. Commission size is not an input.
The model
Some of the exchanges, swap services, and tools we index run partner programs. When you
click a link marked rel="sponsored", the request passes through our
first-party click routing service, which attaches an anonymous click identifier and
forwards you to the provider. If you later open an account or make a qualifying
transaction there, the provider can attribute that sign-up to ChainCosts and pay us a
commission. What the routing service records is described in the
privacy policy.
What it costs you: nothing
A referral commission never changes the fees you pay. You get the provider's standard published pricing whether you arrive through our link or type the address yourself — and where a referral link carries a documented bonus or fee discount, we say so on the page and cite the provider's own terms for it.
Commissions do not move rankings
Comparison verdicts on ChainCosts are computed from published data with per-fact source citations — the rules are on the methodology page. The provider with the lower published base fee wins the cost row regardless of whether it pays us anything; providers with no partner program at all appear in the index and can and do outrank ones that pay. We do not accept payment for placement, for a verdict, or for removing a competitor.
Not every link earns
Where we have no partner relationship, links go to the provider directly and carry no referral tag. The presence or absence of a commission is a property of the link, not of the page: the surrounding facts, sources, and verdicts are produced the same way in both cases. If you think a page reads like the commission got a vote, tell us via the contact page — that is a bug, and we treat it like one.