What does buying bitcoin really cost?

The receipt for a bitcoin purchase rarely says what it cost you. What you paid is the difference between the money you handed over and what the bitcoin you got is worth at the market price, and much of that difference can sit inside the price, where the receipt doesn’t show it. So an app that charges no fee can cost you more than one that does.

The differences are large. In early 2026, researchers bought and immediately sold bitcoin and five other coins through the apps of nine regulated providers in Germany. On average, the round trip cost between 0.53% and 6.45%, depending on the app.

The cost can sit in six places: the fee, the spread, the way you pay, a currency conversion, the network fee to move the bitcoin, and the app’s own withdrawal fee. Few apps show all six on one screen.

The fee you see

Some apps charge a fixed amount per purchase, some a percentage, some both. It’s the cost people compare, and often not the one that costs them more. A fixed fee also weighs more on small purchases: 3 USD is 3% of a 100 USD purchase and 0.3% of 1,000 USD.

The spread, which you don’t

At any moment a market has two prices: the bid, what buyers are offering for a bitcoin, and the ask, what sellers want for one. The gap between them is the spread, and the market price sits in the middle.

An app that sells you bitcoin quotes you a price above the market price, and buys it back below it. That gap is the app’s spread. It’s how many apps that advertise “no fees” are paid, and it never appears as a fee: it’s already in the price you’re shown. Ontario’s securities regulator puts it plainly: trading fees are sometimes embedded in the price. Prices also differ from one platform to another, it adds, and if a platform doesn’t make clear how it sets the prices it quotes, you should ask.

Two offers, side by side

Say you spend 1,000 USD, and two apps offer you bitcoin at the same moment:

	App A	App B
Fee	1.5%, or 15 USD	None
Price above the market	None	2.5%
Your bitcoin, at the market price	985 USD	About 976 USD
What it cost you	15 USD	About 24 USD

The one with no fee costs more. With App B, all 1,000 USD go into bitcoin, but at a price 2.5% above the market, so what you get is worth 1,000 divided by 1.025: about 976 USD.

What researchers paid when they bought and sold

The study above, by the Frankfurt School’s Blockchain Center, made 432 round trips in January and February 2026, with 100 or 500 euros each time. The average round trip cost between 0.53% and 6.45%, depending on the app, and for most apps the relative cost barely changed between the two amounts. Spreads, which apps often don’t show separately, weighed heavily on what was actually paid.

A second study from the same school, published in September 2026 and commissioned by one of the six brokers it tested, made 2,088 round trips over a year, in bitcoin and two other coins. On average, a round trip cost between 1.23% and 4.58%, depending on the broker, in some cases well above what the brokers advertised. On a large exchange used for comparison, the spread at the same moments was about 0.16% for bitcoin, and most of the cost, the study found, couldn’t be explained by the market’s spread. Being registered under the EU’s crypto law didn’t systematically lower the cost. Its author’s conclusion: the fee a broker states or advertises tells you little, on its own, about which one to choose.

Who pays when the app charges nothing

Some apps don’t fill your order themselves. They pass it to a trading firm, a market maker, which sells you the bitcoin at its ask and pays the app for sending it the order. This is called payment for order flow.

Robinhood, a US app whose crypto orders carry no fee by default, explains how it’s paid on its help pages. As of June 2026, for every 100 dollars of crypto its customers buy or sell through its market makers, it receives 0.95 dollars from its market maker, and “that amount is included in the spread”. In its own example, on a 100 dollar purchase with a buy spread of 0.96%, it receives 0.95 dollars of the 0.96.

Market makers pay far more for crypto orders than for stock orders. A working paper in the SEC’s research series, published in January 2025, put the rate Robinhood then received at 0.35% of every dollar of crypto, against about 0.008% for stocks: some 45 times as much.

Regulators see a conflict of interest in it: the app is paid by the firm that sets your price. In stocks, the SEC found in December 2020 that Robinhood’s customers, sold on “commission free” trading, had received worse prices than at other brokers, in large part because of the unusually high payments it took for their orders. The worse prices cost them 34.1 million dollars more than they saved on commissions. Robinhood agreed to pay a 65 million dollar penalty, without admitting or denying the findings.

In crypto, the EU and the UK have since moved against it. MiCA, the EU’s crypto law, forbids firms that pass on or carry out their customers’ crypto orders from taking any payment, discount or other benefit for sending those orders to a particular platform or firm. In June 2026, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority said that crypto firms taking such payments are unlikely to meet its rules on “best execution”, conflicts of interest and inducements. Those rules take effect in October 2027.

Selling crosses the spread again

When you sell, the app pays you below the market price. If you buy and later sell in the same app, you pay the spread twice: a 2% spread each way costs about 4% of your money for the round trip, before any fees. That round trip is what the studies above measured.

How you pay

Paying by card adds costs of its own. Card companies generally charge a processing fee on each credit card transaction, often 1.5% to 3% according to FINRA, the US brokerage industry’s regulator, and an app can pass it on to you.

Some card issuers also treat buying crypto as a cash advance, not a purchase. Citi’s card agreement, for one, lists cryptocurrency among cash advances, next to ATM withdrawals and wire transfers: each carries a fee of 10 dollars or 5% of the amount, whichever is greater, and interest from the day it posts, with no grace period. In January 2022, the UK’s advertising regulator ruled that an ad saying “Buy Bitcoin with credit card instantly” was misleading, because it left out that a card purchase could mean a higher interest rate and a cash advance fee.

If you pay in one currency and the app prices bitcoin in another, the conversion has a cost of its own, often hidden the same way: in the exchange rate. In March 2024, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned money transfer companies that calling a transfer “free” may be deceptive when they charge through the exchange rate.

Moving it out

Sending bitcoin to another wallet costs a network fee, paid to the miners who put the transaction in a block. It depends on how much space the transaction takes, not on the amount: a simple payment takes about 140 virtual bytes, so sending 50 USD of bitcoin can cost the same as sending 50,000 USD.

It also depends on demand. Wallets show the fee rate in satoshis, hundred-millionths of a bitcoin, per virtual byte. Over the past year, a typical transaction paid about 1 satoshi per virtual byte, according to mempool.space. In the first hours of April 20, 2024, as people rushed to create new tokens on bitcoin, the typical transaction in most blocks paid more than 1,000, more than a thousand times the rate of the past year. That day, the average fee per transaction was higher than on any earlier day, according to YCharts data reported by The Block; the next day it was about a quarter of that.

Some apps add a withdrawal fee of their own on top. Ontario’s regulator lists both, the network’s fee and the platform’s, among the costs to check.

Large amounts

On an exchange where you place your own orders, a large order to buy at the market price takes the offers at the ask first, then the ones above it, so part of it fills at higher prices. That’s called slippage, and it grows with the size of the order. A limit order, which buys only at the price you set or better, avoids it, at the risk, as FINRA notes, of not buying at all.

Where the costs hide

Cost	What it is	What to look for
Fee	A fixed amount, a percentage, or both	The total in money, and a fixed fee on a small purchase
Spread	The gap between the app’s price and the market’s	A buy and a sell price, shown before you confirm
Payment method	A card’s processing fee; on a credit card, a cash advance	A bank transfer, and your card’s terms on cash advances
Currency conversion	A margin inside the exchange rate	The rate you get, next to the market rate
Network fee	What miners are paid to move bitcoin	The fee rate, and whether you can set it
Withdrawal fee	The app’s own charge to send bitcoin out	The amount, before you buy

How to work out what you paid

Write down exactly how much bitcoin you received, and everything you paid for it.
At the same moment, note the market price from an independent source, such as a price index or a large exchange’s order book.
Multiply the bitcoin you received by that price. The difference from what you paid is your total cost, fee and spread together.

Doing it once with each app you’re considering, for the same amount at the same time, takes a few minutes. On everything you’ll ever buy, the difference can be a few percent.

How to choose

Compare what you get, not the fee. Ask two apps, at the same moment and for the same amount, how much bitcoin you’d receive with every cost included, and take the one that gives you more. “No fees” says nothing about the price.
Choose an app that shows a buy and a sell price before you confirm. The gap between them is what a round trip costs there, before fees. If an app won’t show them, or won’t say how it sets its prices, go elsewhere.
Pay by bank transfer, not with a credit card. A credit card can add a processing fee, a cash advance fee and interest from the first day.
Pay in the currency the app prices in, or know the exchange rate you’re getting.
Check the withdrawal fee before you buy, not when you want to move your bitcoin out.
Buy to keep, not to trade in and out. Every round trip pays the spread twice.

A purchase costs you once. Where you keep what you bought matters for as long as you keep it: for money you spend, a wallet you control; for savings, a setup in which no one, not even a company that helps you, can move the money alone. The guides on custody and on hardware wallets, multisig and collaborative custody go through the choice.