The convert button is the most expensive button on your exchange. Here is how to measure it.

[shinratensei_]

If one person runs the test on any venue and posts the pair, the quote, and the book mid, this stops being anecdotes and becomes a comparison. First number posted sets the benchmark everyone else gets measured against.

I've always known that those convert button are expensive, they're there to trap newbies who get intimidated by the market UI but i recently ran a number through it.

• With simple convert, a 1k USDT quotes give me 0.01567 BTC roughly equal to 986 USDT according to market price.
  
• A spot buy order with 1k USDT gives me 0.015886 around 999 USDT at market value.

There might be some precision loss but the difference is huge, you're getting charged 14 times higher for something that could be done in just 10 seconds at most. I don't want to mention the exchange but always skip simple conversion if you don't want to get charged significantly higher . Only use it when you want to consolidate portfolio and sell something you can't sell on the market directly e.g the value is below trading threshold.

The exchange doesn't lie either, the conversion rate is there and clearly different to the market rate.

[feeedge]

shinratensei_, first number on the board, and it is worse than the thread's own estimate. Your math checks out: 0.01567 versus 0.015886 on the same thousand is 13 dollars gone, about 1.3 percent, against roughly 1 dollar in trading fees on the spot route. Fourteen times the cost for ten seconds of convenience, on the most liquid pair in crypto. Your closing point is the honest one too: the venue shows the rate before you confirm, so nothing is hidden in the legal sense. It is hidden in the practical sense, because the number is a rate, not a cost. Nobody reads 0.01567 and feels 13 dollars. Fair call leaving the venue unnamed, the pattern matters more than the pile-on.

slaman29, good correction. On sites with a busy chat, word traveled: people compared notes out loud and the swap markup became common knowledge. Chat was the measuring tool. Most venues today have no chat and no shared context, so every user meets the convert screen alone. That is the gap threads like this one are supposed to fill.

Anyone else with a quote handy: 986 versus 999 on BTC/USDT is the benchmark to beat. Post yours, named venue or not.

[slaman29]

slaman29, good correction. On sites with a busy chat, word traveled: people compared notes out loud and the swap markup became common knowledge. Chat was the measuring tool. Most venues today have no chat and no shared context, so every user meets the convert screen alone. That is the gap threads like this one are supposed to fill.

Anyone else with a quote handy: 986 versus 999 on BTC/USDT is the benchmark to beat. Post yours, named venue or not.

That is quite a good 'convert' rate, I wonder if yours published the convert volume! I know of no other source to beat yours other than a pure swap service, generally these are worse rates but NEAR has practically <1% all the time and half the time 0.2 max %.

Good luck with your journey

[batonidze]

Great breakdown `feeedge`. People often get lured in by the 'zero fee' marketing without realizing the exchange is just widening the spread dynamically. For API traders, most libraries (like CCXT) will explicitly warn you against using 'convert' endpoints exactly because the quote slips heavily. That's why market-making bots always hit the raw orderbook instead.

If anyone is building automated tools, never hook into swap/convert endpoints unless you're explicitly trying to calculate latency-arbitrage against the book – which you probably won't win anyway because their internal quoting engine is faster than your API calls!

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