# About Cost Per Trade

Updated: 24 September 2026. The Cost Per Trade pricing desk

## In short

Cost Per Trade is the editorial desk behind thundermessage.com. We price one thing: what it costs to
open and close a position on a perpetual futures venue. That means the published maker and taker rates,
the money the order book takes on top, and the five other things a trader is buying with that fee —
where the collateral sits, the venue's security record, the markets it lists and who it lets in.

## How the desk works

- The half of the bill a venue prints — rates, market counts, sign-in rules, restricted
  jurisdictions, audits — is read off that venue's own rate pages, documentation and terms, and
  every figure on a sheet is stamped with the day it was read.
- The half no rate page prints is timed here instead of taken on trust. Every 10 minutes a script
  pulls the public BTC perpetual order book of each venue on the price list, and the tables print
  medians with the count of readings under them.
- Where a number has to come from somebody else, it comes from whoever produces it: open interest
  and 24-hour volume as CoinMarketCap publishes them, audit records as CertiK Skynet holds them. No
  figure on a sheet is lifted from a rival comparison site.
- One formula prices every sheet and it is written out in full on [how we rate](/how-we-price). What
  a page is about decides which venues make its sheet; it has no effect on the weights.
- A figure is dated by the day it was taken, never by the day the page was last edited, and a sheet
  is restamped when a figure on it has moved. The rereading schedule sits with the method, on
  [how we rate](/how-we-price).

## Who pays for the price list

The reader does not. These sheets are published for money: the run was bought, a venue priced on it
may be the buyer, and every page here should be read as the work of a desk that was paid to write
it. Cost Per Trade does not hold itself out as a neutral party, here or on any other page.

The money buys the sheet. It does not buy a rate, a reading, a place on a list or a shortcoming left
off one. Published rates are copied from each venue's own rate pages on the day stamped beside them;
the book readings belong to this desk and carry their window and their count under the table; and
the sequence of any sheet is the formula on [how we rate](/how-we-price), fixed on 22 September 2026
before a venue had been scored, worked over those two sets of figures. No row is tinted, boxed or
badged, and every venue priced here — the cheapest as much as the dearest — is written up with at
least two shortcomings taken from its own documents.

## What this desk does not do

Nobody here tells a reader what to trade, handles a reader's money or puts an order on a book for
them. Leverage cuts both ways, and a perpetual position can be closed out with every dollar of
margin behind it consumed. Nor is a venue given a score without a published formula and dated
figures underneath it, or a place on a sheet that nobody at this desk has read.

## The thundermessage.com domain

Between 2018 and 2025 this address carried several unrelated projects: a Lightning Network message
board, a blank blog, a parking page and, in late 2024, a bulk messaging service run on an
off-the-shelf script. All of them are closed. Cost Per Trade has no connection with any of them, does
not use their name or their mark, and has not republished any of their content. Nothing on this site
speaks for them.

## Corrections

Write to desk@thundermessage.com. If a figure here is wrong, send the address of the sheet
and a link to the source that shows the right value; a corrected sheet carries a new date.

The Cost Per Trade pricing desk, 24 September 2026. Corrections: desk@thundermessage.com.

This price desk is paid to publish, and a venue on the sheet may be the party that paid; the order of every column is the published formula.