How to not pay COINBASE fees (USD to BTC/ETH/LTC)

in #cryptocurrency8 years ago

If you're like me, you've bought your very first bitcoin on Coinbase . And why wouldn't you? It's arguably the easiest option for taking your hard earned USD greenbacks you have and converting it to magical internet money. You can even do it on your phone! It really is a fantastic service considering how simple the process is. Well everything comes at a cost and Coinbase has quite a few. See Below. 

(https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/2109597-buy-sell-bank-transfer-fees)

Buying any coin using your credit card will bring a whopping 4% fee. Sold bitcoin after a spike and want to cashout? Another 4% if you are planning on using the PayPal option! Even the cheapest option being the Bank Account Transfer will run you 1.5% selling and buying! Now that may not seem like a lot, but if you are planning on making a sizable investment, this adds up. For me, that fee hit me for $75 during my first big investment. The solution to getting around this fee is simple enough; use GDAX.

GDAX is the exchange owned by Coinbase and is already integrated with your Coinbase  account. Go ahead, log into the GDAX exchange with your Coinbase credentials. BOOM! You are in! Deposits from your bank account are free (similar to how you would fund your USD Wallet on the Coinbase App). Transferring anything from your Coinbase account is also instant and fee. Now here's the good part; buying some coinage with your USD. What are the fees like?

(https://www.gdax.com/fees/BTC-USD)

Only 0.25% taker fee and 0% maker fee on GDAX! Compare this to the 1.5% fee Coinbase would charge you to just buy Bitcoin. Now depending on your 30 day volume, you could be paying less but I'm sure you would already know this stuff if you were trading ~94,148.18 BTC in a months time. Transferring your bitcoin to your Coinbase wallet (or any wallet) is also free if you don't count the network fees. 

So let's recap. To save the most money when buying bitcoin, ethereum, or litecoin with USD, sign up for a Coinbase account and USE GDAX. 

thanks for reading and have a great day!

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Yeah gdax is awesome. Only one problem, during a bull run is hard to buy bitcoin without a fee. You need to place a buy order but price keeps going up. Within minutes price will be higher than that 0.30% fee. It happened to me many times.

Happened to me multiple times as well.. Any smart solution to get around this obstacle?

Don't buy during a bull run?

Thanks! Glad I found this post!

This is how to get around bit coins huge 20$ networking Fee!

Thank you for breaking this process down. And thank you all for further helpful comments!

Thank You. I was looking for this.

Thanks for reminding us of this!

Thanks. I did not know this. Excellent!

Or use Gemini instead. They'll even cover the mining fees when you transfer you BTC out.

Don't they have lots of other fees though?

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I quickly found that the Coinbase site would often go down in periods of high market volatility; it's not a service that I feel I can rely on. It's nice to know that there are viable alternatives out there. Thanks for posting

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What about the costs of moving BTC off of Coinbase? Is there a cheaper way?

Also, note that coinbase to coinbase (peer to peer) transfer is free. So, if in your friend circle everyone one has coinbase account, you can also trade among yourselves for free.

Which will also in-time increase the website value of Gdax

Thank you for this ... Seems a little too good to be true in way? Why would coinbase have a free service to do a very similar thing ?

to drive traffic onto their sister website(ie gdax) and build up a second most popular coinbase like website that users trust.

Also, gdax is a currency trading website. technically a currency trading platform with margin trading for daily trading so it's not really intended for buy and hold in your wallet investing like coinbase. That's why price is lower on gdax, because people theoretically will be using it and paying fees more often. This would be gdax way of giving day traders more incentive to use them rather than other day trading sites. Not too good to be true just intended originally for a different purpose but still usable for other purposes...like say an old piece of clothing that was meant to be worn but you can cut it up and use it as rags to clean instead. Not original purpose but it works!

How do you minimize the initial fee to purchase without waiting a week for your money to hit coinbase account? As far as i know Gdax/coinbase don't allow a quick and cheap way to get started so what are the other options?

Thank you this is awesome!

Thank you this is exactly the information I needed.

Thanks for the tip. Another thing to note is that it takes 3-5 business days for funds from a bank account to deposit into GDAX. If you're trying to hit a specific high or low, fund your account before that moment!

I hope you see this comment! I just opened a acct with coinbase and gdax and I am about to put the coin on gdax but when I enter the gdax wallet and go to send the money it's telling me I need to pay 30 dollars. Can help me out brother?

Could you help me understand... I’ve been trading with limit orders on GDAX, but I just did my first market order for the experience.

I sold 0.19541065 LTC. The filled transaction says the fee was ~0.1648! That is a 0.84 transaction fee, not 0.30! Can anyone explain this?

The best way to avoid fees is to abandon coinbase and use the Robinhood app. It currently offers commission-free stock trades, but will soon offer no-fee crypto trading. Register via the link for a free randomized stock: https://share.robinhood.com/tunaida

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