How these cards are made

What a card is based on

What the vendor itself publishes: the pricing page, the docs and API reference, the terms of service. Each was read on a day the card prints, and nothing on the card comes from a reseller’s summary or somebody else’s review.

A card marked Claimed has had its facts confirmed or corrected by the vendor. Claiming is free and buys nothing else: a vendor’s correction is checked against its own documentation before it goes in, the description stays ours, and any wording the vendor wants in its own voice sits in a separate block headed From the vendor.

The same questions, every card

A bot, a terminal and a data API all get asked the same five things: what it costs and what each tier unlocks; where the free tier runs out; which venues and chains it covers; how live the data is, and whether you can use it without a passport; and what the licence lets you do with what comes out. Same questions, same blocks — so two cards read side by side without translating, and the listing can filter on the answers.

Dates are per block

A price page moves in weeks, a venue list in months. So the check date sits on each block, not once at the top of the page, and one that has aged is flagged where it appears.

Blank, and “None”, are different answers

An em dash means nobody has checked. None means we checked and there is nothing there — a library with no paid tier, a terminal with no API at all. They look alike and say opposite things, so the build will not let one stand in for the other: free-tier limits we could not pin down stay blank and get logged as a gap, instead of printing as “None” and reading as unlimited.

KYC is a field, not a footnote

The passport question is a plain yes or no on the card and a filter in the listing, not a sentence buried in the body: a tool you cannot use without identity verification is a different product from one you can, whatever else the two share. It is a boolean on purpose — a field that can say “partly” is one nobody can filter on. Which features switch verification on — withdrawal limits, fiat rails, derivatives — is prose, and it is on the card.

Which tape a number comes from

Two cards can both say they report the price of an asset and mean different numbers. So coverage records where the data is taken from: the venue types a tool reads — centralised exchanges, DEXes, derivatives, OTC — and, for anything reading chains directly, which chains, with multi as a real answer rather than a shrug, listed alongside the specific ones a card highlights. An aggregator indexing forty EVM chains is making a different claim from one that indexes Ethereum well. Where the bitcoin price comes from and where an on-chain number comes from are why those two fields exist.

Prices are in the currency the vendor charges

A tier carries an amount and the currency it is billed in, never a conversion. Converting would publish a number the vendor has never charged and that is wrong again by Monday; leaving it out would claim the product has no price. Subscription prices quoted only in a token are treated the same way — what the card records is what the vendor bills, and the rate it moves at belongs in the card’s own pricing notes.

The hands-on badge

Tested hands-on is optional, and sits on top of all that: we connected with our own key or account and used the thing, and the card carries a note saying what was tried. Not one of the 133 cards has it yet.

Paid placement

Nothing in the catalogue is sponsored today and no card carries an affiliate link: all 133 of them are free listings pointing straight at the vendor. The rules below are the ones a paid placement would run under, written down before there is one to argue about.

A sponsored card is marked Sponsored wherever it appears, and an affiliate link is labelled at the link itself rather than only in a footer. Every sponsorship carries an end date, because an undated sponsorship never ends.

A sponsor may also supply its own copy, which is stored apart from ours and rendered in its own block headed From the vendor. It is never edited into our description, and our description is never written from it.

That label and that block are the whole of it. Money does not buy a position in a listing, inclusion in the catalogue, a rating, or a single extra field on the card — a paid card is filled in against the same blocks as a free one, and a limitation described on it stays described.

Listings sort by name, never by tier. The one ranked list on the site is the picks on an alternatives page, and each of those prints the rule it was ordered by at the top of the list; sponsorship is not part of any of them.

That is how the site is run today, and this page is where a change to it would be written down. The affiliate disclosure covers the links themselves, and advertising covers the terms from a vendor’s side.