With the recent announcement of the fees that will be applied to cryptocurrency, can anyone recommend an alternative for crypto? The high crypto fees that alpaca will enforce are a bit of a showstopper. Doesn’t alpaca use the FTX exchange to settle their crypto trades? FTX doesn’t advertise any fees higher than .07 on their site where as alpaca is going to charge .30?
Alpaca:
FTX:
I also can’t use Alpaca for trading crypto for the facts above but really wish I could because being able to trade crypto and stocks from within trading view with the same broker is a very nice thing to have.
@vagrand currently I use Kraken Pro, you can see their fee schedule here. I would be happy to trade using Alpaca, would actually prefer it, only if they could come close to Kraken’s fees. They don’t have to beat them but they should be competitive.
I totally agree. For me, the entire reason I was interested in Alpaca Markets was for the 0 fees associated with crypto trading.
Now that there are fees, I will no longer trade crypto at all.
Ditto on having a single exchange to trade both types of assets; that’s a significant opportunity and advantage for Alpaca and I assume they realize that. I assume with the volume that will be traded with Alpaca, they can get an advantageous rate with a third-party broker while pocketing some of their own our fees as margin. I’ll check-out Kraken, thanks for the suggestion.
Where did you get that fee list for FTX? Is that the US or international site. Here are the fees I found on the US site:
I didn’t trade on Alpaca because they didn’t charge fees. I think this is a HUGE step in the right directions. I’d rather have to pay a very small percent than not get my trades in. For my algorithms, I lose money if I can’t get my prices due to a middle man making money on the spread. I suppose it also just depend on how you trade.
I don’t disagree with addition of the fees to create added clarity. However, the fees themselves are some of the highest I’ve seen making it hard to justify the use of Alpaca’s crypto api. And I’d argue that these fees are “very small”. For my algo, it’s quite significant unfortunately.
Thanks all the questions and opinions and we appreciate your candid feedbacks. This is still beginning of our journey and we are trying to be close to our users we grow togther with.
For some clarifications. This new pricing is for us to be more transparent. The previous pricing was embedding the transaction costs into the trade itself which is sometimes seen in other service providers. We think this was not transparent and transparency is key in our community.
The price not being competitive to other service providers is something we need to keep working on. It’s a classic two-sided market problem that everyone faces when starting something new, but I understand this doesn’t just justify itself. Different services (not just trading services but any kind of ones) have different offering (values) and prices for that. We think our offer being API-frist for both crypto and stocks is something unique in today’s environment and we continue to push the boundaries. We think it’s fair to ask for the business for the right value. That being said, I hear where you are coming from and we continue to work on this. Like said above, as our customer base grows we can certainly consider more aggressive plans, but in order to get there, we need more users who love our services. It is actually great to hear you are comparing us with some of those top players in the space even though we entered into the crypto space pretty recently. This shows how much you are expecting from Alpaca.
All that being said, let us roll it out first, as well as think more about what we could do to solve this two-sided market problem in parallel. In the meantime, we are all here to hear more about your pains, needs, desires, what you expect from us, all of which are valuable for us to build what you need.
Thank you for being so open and explaining Alpaca’s growth needs and how we can contribute.
@hitoshi I typically trade in the range of 10,000,000 to 25,000,000 in combined stock/crypto assets and within OAuth (tradingview). Looking at Alpaca’s fees I wouldn’t get the same fee schedule as if I were using the trading API which is managable but is the volume only crypto volume or do you combine both Stock and Crypto volume together?
Thank you!
The cheapest place for trading crypto assets is at Tastyworks. There you can trade stocks, etf, futures and more to come.
Best of all is they have over twenty crypto products and the max cost is $10.00 for unlimited crypto
website looks like a scam
@shilpa thanks for a great suggestion. I think it makes sense to combine the stock and crypto trading volume into this tiering. The initial version we are rolling out may not have this, but we will incorporate the idea soon after that. We will keep you posted. One thing to note is that it may not be 1:1 between stock and crypto volume simply because of different economics behind these assets. That being said, we definitely want to appreciate anyone who uses Alpaca, either stocks or crypto or more importantly both, as an unified platform.
Hitoshi,
Why advertise Fee-Free trading yet not keep your word?
I got an e-mail from you guys for crypto fee-free trading,…
A
Good catch. We will review the messages are consistent in our emails.
Alpaca Services and API design are very good, but this new crypto fee is a total show stopper for me, please make crypto trading free.
Why not rolling out an Alpaca Token (pls not on Ethereum chain, since we’re at fees, you know) and offer a discount for those who use Alpaca token to pay fees? That’s something, I’d dare to say, common/standard in the cryptosphere.
There’s my 2 cents.
Cheers!
Was only a matter of time. Hope Alpaca recognizes the landscape around them on the day that I received an email stating that the unlimited data API will be increased from $9/month to $99/month (yes, a 1000% increase). FTX will offer no fees for either trading or data.
Trading data is free at Alpaca for crypto data (which includes several other exchange data) and the basic tier for stocks. The premium (Unlimited) plan is for the consolidated feed in case you need it.
