Tracking What Your Swap Provider Actually Charges
A spreadsheet with five columns, kept for twenty trades, replaces every comparison article including this one.
Swap pricing varies by provider, by pair, by direction and by moment. No published comparison can tell you what yours costs. A short record can. Use a crypto swap platform as the reference while reading, because its published figures are what the comparisons assume.
The five columns
Date and time. Pair and direction. Size. The market mid price at the moment of the quote. The quoted output.
From those, the implied cost as a percentage.
Why the mid price matters
It is the only reference that makes quotes comparable across time.
Without it you have a list of outputs that reflect the market moving rather than the provider’s pricing.
What twenty entries tell you
Whether your provider is consistently competitive or drifting.
Whether it is better on some pairs than others, which is usually the case because inventory differs by asset.
Whether its margin widens with size in a way that makes sense.
And whether volatility affects it more than it affects alternatives.
The comparison entries
Periodically, request from a second provider within the same few seconds and record both.
Simultaneity is essential. A quote lasts seconds and a comparison spread over minutes measures the market.
Five comparison entries are enough to know whether switching would pay.
What people find
Frequently, that a long-standing provider has widened over a year with no change in conditions.
That is not misconduct. A provider quoting without competition prices differently from one quoting against an alternative, and the drift is gradual enough that nobody notices without a record. Payment companies face a different cost stack, which crypto rails built for fintech companies addresses.
The conversation it enables
Present the data rather than an accusation. Over the last quarter our average implied cost has been a certain figure and a comparison came in materially tighter.
Providers respond to this. One that cannot explain the gap and does not improve has answered the question.
The effort
About thirty seconds per trade.
Against a cost measured in tenths of a percent on every transaction, for as long as you use the provider, that is the best return available on half a minute. To check any figure above against a real provider, a regulated crypto exchange publishes the equivalent terms.
Fees move with network demand. Any figure here reflects the date shown above and should be re-checked before you act on it. Where a measurement was taken by hand, the article says so.