shieldHow Many Crypto Payment Gateways Publish Their Fees? 71%, and the Rest Cost More
61 of 86 crypto payment gateways (71%) publish a per-transaction fee you can check on an official page. 29% do not. In our August 2026 audit, 25 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 concentrated: 41% of custodial gateways hide their fee versus 5% of non-custodial ones, and the pattern repeats for providers requiring merchant KYC (40%) and offering fiat settlement (37%).
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 0.5% for gateways with published pricing, before conversion spreads and payout fees.
Method: for each of 86 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.
