Bitcoin Forum

Coinbase is the best place in my opinion to buy crypto.... easy, convenient and nice interface, however lately their fees are ridiculous especially for those buying small amounts under £20, $20

I would like to buy approx £20 of BTC a week/month... however this incurs a £1.5 fee, thats 7.5%, pretty pricy

If I want to buy £10 worth it costs £1, 10%.... unless your buying £100 + then Coinbase fees are just to high for the small time investor.

Coinbase covers the spread between buy and sell prices to create one uniform price for all users regardless of whether they're buying and selling.

In that sense, they're not really a normal exchange. They exist for a very nice, user friendly interface, primarily for those who are somewhat less serious investors or people who need to store coins without understanding how to store their coins themselves.

If you want lower fees, try using Coinbase's dedicated exchange GDAX instead.

If you describe yourself as a small time investor you don't have any right here dude. Get your little suitcase and go away. These are not my sentences. Whales want like this ;)

Every exchange has some kind of issues and high fees is the major issue of Coinbase. No doubt their services are great and the support they provide is remarkable but high fees is the issue that bothers most of their users. Coinbase is great for just holding the coins or for higher amount transactions but it is not suitable for lower amount of transactions as the high fees takes up around half of the actual amount. It is better to use other wallet providers for lower transaction amounts.

Let's be honest about...
£20 is the cheapest bottle of Tesco whiskey or if we talk about £10, a six pack of Heineken (small 330ml ones).
This is not investing, those are play money for Kid's Casino.

If they would go and offer this for 20p they would be losing money every time you would buy.

If you have a plan of £20 per week, do the following, buy one time £80 and then for the next 4 months do the savings.

20 pounds a week, do you know how many bitcoins are? It is less than 0.0018 a week, and if you are going to buy bi-weekly or once per month, it is not even worth it.

The best thing that you can do, is just wait a month, and get $100 - $150, and then use that money to buy some bitcoins, it is not a huge amount of money, but, it is something at all..

And try to get your bitcoins out of coinbase, they had a lot of issues during this week, and their wallet has been offline for more than 12 hours during Tuesday and Wednesday.

Why don't you plan ahead and use their bank deposit option?
If you make small debit/credit card purchases all the times, no matter which exchanges you use the fees are going to catch up to you.
As others mentioned, GDAX is excellent.
You deposit fiat to Coinbase, then transfer free of charge to GDAX.

If you are looking at £20 / week maybe you could look into other ways of doing this, I fear you will spend a heavy fraction of your money one way or another on the conversion - the fee might look harmless, but you might not be getting a favourable price.

Try look around and see if you could do bounties or signature campaigns - or even participate in Airdrops of new coins and tokens and sell them in the future for BTC - it might be easier than trying to convert small amounts of money every week.

Yeap that's the reason I don't use coinbase at all, you don't own your private keys and their fees are high.
Electrum seems to be a better option.

You can't just get fees reduced by asking Coinbase. The problem is Coinbase is centralized and can do whatever they want. And they must charge large fees on the basis that they want their transactions pushed through asap whereas it would be better for everyone if we just kept fees lower. Unfortunately most people are greedy and only don't want to wait.

Pretty pricey is an understatement the only place that charges more vig on bitcoin is the bitcoin ATMs or they charge similar (7-8%). Honestly I think despite them being big if they lowered their fees they would get more customers and make back all that money they lost. I guess their play is to charge most vig and be user friendly and they must have some analytics to back up why they are charging this much. I did take some business classes but what do I know, I would opt personally for a high volume strategy but they have opted for different.

Both of coinbase and xapo, have lot of fees when you want to buy crypto. I lost a lot of dollars to buy few bitcoin from xapo, in the last month. I didn't advice anyone to buy from them because they tax a high percent, So the best thing is to go to an exchange like localbitcoins.com and then you can make a good exchange sometimes without any fees.

If you are buying only 20 pounds worth of crypto per month then you can just hold your fiat untill you get a higher amount of money to avoid fees. Such small amounts of crypto are useless because you can't buy anything because of fees and at the same time you will may just a couple % profit from holding crypto and you won't get rich with your £20 anyways.

20 pounds a week can't really be considered by any means an "investment".
What's that ? A middle schooler allowance money ?

The fees you specified are actually quite good. Don't buy until you have a few hundred dollars.

Have you ever tried using GDAX? Its pretty much the same thing as coinbase but without the huge fees. Its not as user friendly but after some time getting used to it you'll find it very efficient and easy to maneuver. The fees are almost zero there once you have your account verified.

Wow, hahah , this really made me laugh a lot, dont be so hard with him. Probably he does not have enough money to invest in bitcoin.


But yes, coinbase fees are very high at the moment, and that is not the fault of them.

The fees are very high because of the miners, and of course, of the entire blockchain, there are more transactions everyday and that is the main reason of why the transactions are taking more & more time to get confirmed.

We need more miners & more hashrate in order to be able to proccess those transactions faster, and to lower the fees, of course.

Coinbase isn't going to reduce their fees. They don't care about their users as much as the noobs who sign up there think. They overchanrge on fees and are basically just a crypto bank. That is all. And it is unfortunate because crypto is supposed to be decentralized however this is definitely not the case with Coinbase right now. I recommend LocalBitcoins instead!

I don't think they care anymore about complaints especially from users investing 20$ or less.
Instead of buying every week just hold your money till you have a bigger amount which will make you reduce fees.

Maybe the lack of concurrence is the reason behind high fees. Users do not have many alternatives, they find themselves forced to accept coinbase or any other company rules even if it is unfair.

GDAX has no fees on limit orders. Can you wire £ to Coinbase, transfer to GDAX and save on fees that way? I'm assuming wire fees are cheaper than their conversion fees. The conversion fees are pretty brutal.

Unfortunately, that is going to be coinbase for you. It is going to be pricey as hell.

If you want a good deal on your coin and you are able to get all the paperwork and ID into a licensed exchange then maybe buy via bank wire through an exchange such as kraken. I'm not sure where you live, though. So it may not be supported.

Exchanges have drastically smaller spreads as well as fees compared to coinbase, since whales trade on it and it's not a vendor type company like coinbase is. You can easily research available exchanges in your country.

That's not always the case. Here's what I do: ACH transfer to Coinbase (free). Transfer USD to GDAX (free). Set limit buy orders (no fees). It won't last forever, but GDAX really needs the order book liquidity, so maker fees are 0%.


Personally, I'd recommend against Kraken. Firstly, the performance of their exchange has been abysmal recently. Lagging trade engine, stops not triggering, endless DDOS, unreliable API. Just a couple weeks ago, Kraken's CEO publicly apologized for the state of the platform (https://twitter.com/TuurDemeester/status/933062846858104834). He said there is a major upgrade coming in early December -- I won't hold my breath. Also, I don't think they hold any licenses. I feel much more comfortable at Coinbase.

Exactly, many are being forced to accept whatever may come their way because there aren't enough competition for coinbase even though there are many web wallets  out there many prefer the ease with coinbase and it's interface above the others.

I am from PH and the only wallet convenient to use here for converting in and out fiat to bitcoin is coins.ph the fee also sucks appraisal for bitcoin for buying and selling also sucks. If only coinbase is available here I would choose to use coinbase though.