Somebody has to pay
the network. Usually it is us.
Every movement on a public network carries a small fee that goes to the network itself — not to us, and not to anyone we could ask for a discount. Most apps pass it to you and call it gas. We cover it on the first $500 of conversions each month, up to $0.10 on any single one.
How we pay a fee on your behalf
The awkward part of these networks is that paying the fee normally requires holding the network’s own token — so someone with a hundred dollars and no other holdings cannot move their hundred dollars. That is a genuinely stupid piece of design, and it is worth understanding how it gets removed.
You sign, but you do not send
Your phone produces a signed instruction — the sealed envelope. Signing costs nothing; it is a piece of maths on your device. What costs money is putting it on the network.
We put it on the network and pay the fee
Our system takes your signed instruction, submits it, and pays the network's fee out of our own funds. It cannot alter what you signed: the instruction is sealed, and a network rejects a tampered one outright.
You are never holding the network's token
No topping up, no keeping a little something aside so your money can move, no arriving at a payment to find you cannot make it. Your balance is dollars, all of it is spendable, and the mechanics stay ours.
The three times you pay it yourself
Told plainly, because an allowance whose edges are vague is a bill you did not agree to.
Past $500 of conversions in a month
Beyond that, the network's fee is yours. It is not a penalty and it is not a different rate — it is the same few cents, now paid by you instead of by us. The counter resets on the first.
On a single fee above $0.10
We cover up to $0.10 per conversion and you pay only the excess — not the whole fee. On the fast networks this effectively never happens. On Ethereum at a busy hour it can, and the app shows you the number before you confirm.
When you already hold the network's own token
If your account happens to hold enough of it to cover the fee, the transaction pays from there rather than from us. Nothing extra is charged and nothing is hidden — but it does mean a small holding of a network token can go down slightly after a transaction, and you should not be surprised by that.
This is not what HOLD charges
Worth separating, because they arrive in the same sentence and are not the same thing. The network fee is a real cost paid to strangers who keep the network running. What HOLD makes is a different number, and it is written on the page of the product it applies to — never gathered into a single schedule, which is a document that serves competitors more than customers.
The limit
The allowance is a policy, not a promise.
We can change what we cover, and if these networks became dramatically more expensive we would have to. What we will not do is change it quietly: the figures on this page and in the app are the same figures, and if they move you will see them move before it costs you anything.
The questions people actually ask
Is sending money to someone free?
Sending dollars to another person costs you nothing from us, and on the fast networks the network's own fee is a fraction of a cent that we absorb without thinking about it. The allowance on this page exists for conversions, which are the operations heavy enough to be worth counting.
What happens on the first of the month?
The counter resets. It runs on calendar months, not a rolling window, and it counts the value you converted rather than the number of times you did it. Nothing carries over and nothing is lost — the allowance is not a balance you are spending down.
How will I know if I am about to be charged?
The screen tells you before you confirm, in dollars and cents, as part of the total. There is no line item that appears afterwards. If a transaction is going to cost you something, you see the number while you can still decide against it.
Why does the same action cost different amounts?
Because the fee is set by the network, not by us, and it moves with how busy the network is — like surge pricing, except nobody collects it. The same transfer might cost a fraction of a cent at one hour and several cents at another. It is one of the reasons the app prefers the cheaper networks unless something requires otherwise.
Is this how HOLD makes money?
No. Covering the fee costs us money — that is the point of it. What we make is described on the page of whichever product you are using, and never here, because a fee paid to a network is not revenue and putting them in one place invites you to confuse them.
Keep reading
Who holds your money
What it means that the money is in your name, what we can never do to it, and the one case where that stops being the whole story.
How your account is protected
Passkeys, your PIN, two-factor, recovery codes and the list of devices signed in. What each one actually stops.
Networks and dollars
The four networks we settle on, the dollars we support, and why you are never asked to choose between them.
Three ways to see one account
The same balance shown as plain dollars, as the dollars you actually hold, or with every network in view. You pick.