Coinbase

Payment method/fee:

• U.S. bank account or Coinbase wallet: 1.49%

• Debit card: 3.99%

• Instant card withdrawal: Up to 1.5% (minimum fee of $0.55)

• ACH transfer: Free

• Wire transfer: $10 ($25 outgoing)

Example:

Say I want to buy $1,000 of BTC right now. The displayed price is $50,000/BTC. However, I can easily see the price of BTC being quoted outside of Coinbase is roughly $49,750. So the price has been marked up by 0.50%. The default option is to pay with credit card, where you will be charged a "Coinbase fee" of $40, which is 4.0%. Let's say you buy, the price of Bitcoin goes up 10%, and then you sell. You end up paying 9% round-trip fees, locking in at most 1%. Coinbase gets 90% of your profit and you take home 10%.

Bank Account

A better option is to fund from your US bank account, but you will still pay 1.5%. So in the example above, Coinbase keeps 40% of your profit.

Coinbase Pro

This is just as easy as using Coinbase, just with more data and charts. In the previous example, you would pay $49,750 (instead of $50,000) and the spread between bids and asks is $0.01. The quoted fee is $2.50, which is 0.50%. This is much cheaper than 4.5% for debit/credit card or 1.5% for bank account purchases. Now if Bitcoin goes up 10% and you sell, Coinbase has taken 10% of your profits instead of 90%.

Pricing tier Taker fee Maker fee

Up to $10K 0.50% 0.50%

$10K – $50K 0.35% 0.35%

$50K – $100K 0.25% 0.15%

$100K – $1M 0.20% 0.10%