Pricing and economics
Free to integrate. You keep 100% of your own fees.
No API key to start. No contract to sign before your first quote. If you add a fee on top of ours, it’s entirely yours — we don’t take a cut of it. [Own claim]
How we actually earn, in our own words, before you ask
Execution is capped at the price we quote you. Your user never receives less than the number we showed. If the trade settles better than that — market movement in Nordstern’s favour between quote and execution — that improvement accrues to Nordstern, not to the end user.
That’s a real trade-off, and it’s worth being direct about it: it means the tighter and more honest our quote is, the less room there is for that improvement, and the less we earn per trade. We only make money by beating our own promise, never by missing it. Quoting honestly is structurally against our own short-term interest — which is exactly why you can believe the quote we give you.
One more number worth publishing precisely because it’s the obvious place to be suspicious: our underquote rate — quoting below what execution actually delivers — is measured and published with its conditions stated. [Nordstern telemetry] A model that only ever benefits from tight quotes would show up here first if it were drifting toward conservative underquoting; we publish this number so that drift would be visible before it became a pattern.
You’re not the first to ask who keeps the difference. 1inch captures positive slippage the same way we do — it’s the market standard. Velora rebates it to users instead, and markets that as a real difference from the rest of the category. It is a real difference, and it’s worth knowing about if surplus routing matters to your users or your DAO’s treasury policy. What we won’t do is capture it quietly: it’s on this page, unprompted, and it’s a term we’ll discuss if it matters to your integration — not a fixed policy we’re not willing to talk about.
A whitelisted tier with higher reliability is available on request — free. Talk to us.
Pricing questions, answered directly
How do you make money if it’s free?
Execution is capped at the price we quote. If the trade settles better than that, the improvement is ours; your users always get at least what we showed them, and you keep 100% of any fee you add. It also means quoting honestly costs us money — a tighter quote leaves us less. That’s the alignment: we only earn by beating our own promise.
So you keep positive slippage. Velora rebates it to users.
Correct, and it’s a real difference worth understanding. Velora returns surplus to users and charges elsewhere; 1inch captures it, as we do. What we won’t do is capture it quietly — it’s on our pricing page, and it’s why quoting accurately is against our own short-term interest. If surplus routing matters to your users or your DAO, tell us; it’s a term we can discuss, not a secret.
We already use 1inch / 0x / Uniswap. Why would we add Nordstern?
You don’t have to stop using them. You already query several routers and take the winning quote — keep doing that. Add us to the set and look at your own numbers: win rate, revert rate, how often our quote matched settlement. No key, no contract, nothing to migrate. If we don’t win quotes on your traffic, we cost you nothing.