How these cards are made

What a card is based on

Most cards are compiled from the vendor’s documentation, pricing page and terms, and that is all such a card claims to be.

A card can also be marked Tested hands-on, which means we held an account or an API key and used the tool: pulled data, ran into the free-tier limit, checked the documentation against what it actually did. That badge comes with a note on the card saying what was done. None of the 92 cards carries it yet.

The same fields on every card

Every card fills in the same blocks whatever its category: what it costs, what the free tier allows, what it covers, how you connect to it. That is what makes the listings filterable.

Blank, and “None”, are different answers

A field we have not checked is left empty and renders as an em dash. A field that does not exist — a library with no paid tier, a terminal that exposes no API at all — is recorded explicitly and renders as None. The two look alike and mean opposite things, so the build keeps them apart: a card whose free-tier limits we could not pin down leaves the field empty and the validator records the gap, rather than publishing “None” and claiming there is no limit.

KYC is a field, not a footnote

Every card answers one question before any other: can this be used at all without handing over a passport. A tool that cannot is a different product from one that can, whatever else the two share, so it is a plain yes or no on the card and a filter in the listing rather than a sentence somewhere in the body. It is recorded as a boolean on purpose: a field that can say “partly” is a field nobody can filter on. Which specific features turn 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.

Dates are per field

Pricing changes in weeks and venue coverage in months, so each block carries its own verification date rather than one “last reviewed” date for the whole page. Dates that have gone old are flagged.

Paid placement

Nothing in the catalogue is sponsored today and no card carries an affiliate link: all 92 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.