shieldHow Many Crypto Payment Gateways Publish Their Fees? 69%, and the Rest Cost More
Shieldz Swap Swap now with shieldz.cash Any coin, any chain · 0.15% fee · no account Swap now60 of 87 crypto payment gateways (69%) publish a per-transaction fee you can check on an official page. 31% do not. In our September 2026 audit, 27 providers offer no verifiable public price: the pricing page says “contact sales”, hides the number behind a login, or does not exist. The opacity is still concentrated where it was in August: 39% of custodial gateways hide their fee versus 14% of non-custodial ones, and the pattern repeats for providers requiring merchant KYC (38%) and offering fiat settlement (35%).
The hidden prices are not discounts. Where we could collect indicative third-party figures, the opaque group’s median is about 1% per transaction, versus 0.8% for gateways with published pricing, before conversion spreads and payout fees.
Method: for each of 87 gateways, we looked for the standard per-transaction fee on the provider’s own pricing page or docs and recorded the source_url; rows that failed the check carry verified=false in the open dataset (CC BY 4.0). Full analysis with charts: the pricing transparency report. Context: the custody gap and the median gateway fee. Shieldz publishes a one-line price: $0 platform fee, non-custodial, buyer pays gas.
