How these cards are made

What a card is based on

The facts on a card are taken from what the venue or vendor publishes itself — its fee schedule, its documentation and API reference, its terms — and the card records the date on which each was read.

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 on every card

A venue, a dashboard and a client library are put through one set of questions: what it costs and what each tier unlocks; where any free tier ends; which markets it lists and who resolves them; whether you may use it from where you are, and what a fill costs; and what its terms permit you to do with the data. Because every card answers them in the same blocks, the listings can be filtered and two cards read against each other.

Dates are per block

A fee schedule can change within weeks and availability overnight, by regulatory action, so each block is dated separately instead of the page carrying a single review date. Pricing and availability are never published without one, and a date past its limit is flagged.

Blank, and “None”, are different answers

An empty field, shown as an em dash, has not been checked. None is a finding: a library that charges no trading fee, a venue with no maker rebate. Since the two look alike and mean opposite things, the build treats them separately — a fee that could not be priced stays empty and the validator records the gap, rather than reading “None” and implying nothing is charged.

Fees are converted before they are compared

Venues publish trading fees in units that do not line up. Some quote a coefficient applied to the price, some a percentage of what the fill costs, some a flat charge per contract per side. The same printed number can mean two different things, and one venue quoting 3.00% can be cheaper than another quoting 1.75%.

So the fee field on every card carries one thing: the effective taker fee at a price of 50 cents, as a percentage of the dollar a winning contract pays. It is the only figure that can be read across venues. The whole curve, the coefficient and any per-category table live in the card’s own pricing section, where prose can hold what one number cannot — and what a trade actually costs explains the conversion.

Words we do not use

A short vocabulary is rejected by the build rather than discouraged in a style guide: terms that assert conduct by named, living companies, and terms that promise a reader an outcome. They are checked across every page here, not only the ones about venues. Where a claim of that shape is true, it is written narrowly and attributed — a named regulator’s finding on a named date, or a court’s holding with the case and the posture it was decided on.

What this catalogue does not do

It does not publish odds, forecasts, picks or any statement about which contract to take. The boundary is drawn at the mechanism rather than at the topic: a product sold to tell you what to buy is outside the catalogue, and so is a page here that would do the same. That is also why nothing on this site is dated as a post — guides are reference pages corrected in place, carrying the date they were last changed and no publication date, because a dated post reads as stale whether or not it still holds.

The hands-on badge

A card may additionally be marked Tested hands-on, where we have held an account or key and used the product, with a note on the card recording what was tried. The mark supplements the sourcing above rather than replacing it; at present none of the 116 cards carries it.

Nothing in the catalogue is sponsored today and no card carries an affiliate link: all 116 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.