Five crypto apps for beginners: costs and custody compared

Anyone in Germany buying bitcoin for the first time downloads an app and almost always pays more than they think. The visible part of the cost is usually small or absent altogether, because many providers advertise fee-free trading. The real price sits in the spread, and across the five apps in this comparison it ranges from 0.15 percent to 2.49 percent per purchase. On 100 euros that is 15 cents or 2.49 euros, and over a year of savings-plan instalments it becomes a difference of several dozen euros.

The second question matters even more for beginners and is asked less often: who owns the coins after the purchase, and can you get at them at all? An app that does not permit a transfer to your own wallet is selling you exposure to a price, not a cryptocurrency. This article sets both sides side by side, the costs and the custody, for five apps that German beginners use most often.

For this comparison, cryptoticker.io laid the published fee and price information of these five providers side by side on October 3, 2026: Bitvavo, Kraken, Bison, Bitpanda and Trade Republic. Five apps were examined and four points per app, namely the cost per purchase, the custodian, the transfer option and the regulatory authorisation. cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on October 3, 2026.

What separates a crypto app from a crypto exchange

A crypto app is at first nothing more than an interface. What lies behind it determines the price and the rights you hold over your coins. Three constructions are common in the German market, and on screen they look almost identical.

With an exchange app you place an order into an order book in which other users form the other side. You pay a stated trading fee, usually split between maker and taker. Maker means your order first sits in the book and provides liquidity; taker means it is executed immediately against an order already there. Bitvavo and Kraken work this way.

With a broker app, by contrast, you buy directly from the provider, who quotes you a price. You often see no fee at all, but the buying price sits above and the selling price below the market price. Bison and Bitpanda follow this pattern in their main apps.

The third form is the neobroker, which places crypto alongside equities and ETFs in a securities account. Trade Republic belongs here, but since its wallet launch it actually holds the coins as crypto assets and not as a certificate. That is an important difference from providers carrying only crypto ETPs: there you buy a security tracking the price, and never a coin.

Spread instead of fee: where the costs in a crypto app really arise

Fee-free is rarely free of charge with crypto apps. Bison states expressly on its own fee page that trading is fee-free and that only a customary market spread applies. That spread is precisely the price.

What the spread is

The spread is the gap between the price at which you can buy and the price at which you could sell at the same moment. It is not debited; it is built into the quote. That is why it appears on no statement as a line item, and why beginners underestimate it so often.

In practice: you pay twice, once on the purchase and once on the sale. Professionals call it the round trip. A study from March 2026 put these total costs for buying and selling at 0.53 percent for Bitvavo at the low end and 6.45 percent for Coinbase at the high end. Between those two values lies a factor of twelve, on an identical product.

On top of that come costs with nothing to do with trading. Bison charges 2.49 percent for an instant deposit by credit card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, while the ordinary euro transfer remains free. At Bitpanda a PayPal deposit costs 1.49 percent, and the SEPA transfer nothing. Depositing conveniently may therefore cost you more for the payment route than for the purchase itself.

Five crypto apps on cost: 0.15 to 2.49 percent per purchase

The overview below summarises the published terms as of October 3, 2026. The values are list prices for retail clients without discounts; volume tiers lower them markedly at some providers.

On the range at Trade Republic, some context, because it stands out: the provider publishes no fixed spread for cryptocurrencies, and the available figures diverge. Around 0.5 percent on bitcoin is cited in one place and up to 2 percent in another. We are not smoothing that over; we name both ends. What applies in your case you will see only in the order screen, when the buying and selling prices are shown at the same time.

Why 100 euros buys different amounts of bitcoin across five apps

An example makes the range tangible. You buy bitcoin for 100 euros. At Bison's average spread of 1.25 percent, roughly 98.75 euros arrives in bitcoin and the rest stays with the provider. On an instant buy in the Kraken app at 1 percent it is roughly 99 euros. Through the same provider's exchange interface at 0.40 percent as a maker, roughly 99.60 euros remains.

As one-offs these are matters of cents, and arguing over them for a single purchase is not worth it. It becomes interesting with a savings plan. Invest 100 euros a month for twelve months and you pay roughly 15 euros in mark-up at 1.25 percent and roughly 4.80 euros at 0.40 percent. After five years there is a difference of a good 50 euros, without either side having delivered anything different.

This calculation has a limit you should know about: it treats the average spread as constant. In reality it fluctuates with market conditions, and on small coins it comes out differently in quiet phases than in hectic ones. An exact figure for your purchase comes only from the order screen at the moment of execution. How purchase costs and price performance relate to each other is set out in our overview of the bitcoin price.

Custody: who owns your coins inside the app

After the purchase your coins as a rule do not sit with you but with the provider. That is the normal case across all five apps and in itself no shortcoming, because that is exactly what the custody licence exists for. It does change who holds the key when it matters.

Custodian and insurance

Trade Republic names the custodian: the crypto assets sit with BitGo Europe GmbH in cold wallets, meaning on keys without a permanent network connection. Bison lists custody together with insurance cover against theft and hacking attacks, among other things, as a free service, without naming the custodian on its fee page.

Insurance cover is not a deposit guarantee scheme. For crypto assets the statutory deposit protection of 100,000 euros does not apply, because it covers bank balances in euros and not coins. Where a provider promises insurance, it is worth looking at what exactly is insured, with whom, and up to what amount. That is in the terms, not in the advertising.

In practice: as long as the coins sit with the provider, you share its default risk. How real that is was shown several times in 2026, from a breach at a large exchange in September through to incidents at intermediate layers. Anyone holding larger sums therefore spreads them or withdraws them.

Transfer to your own wallet: the question that counts before the first purchase

All five apps in this comparison permit a transfer to your own wallet. That is not a given, and at Trade Republic it is new: only with the wallet launch on November 14, 2025 did pure trading become an offering in which customers can send and receive around 50 cryptocurrencies. The provider charges no fee of its own for this; the network fee of the respective blockchain is borne by the customer.

Bison likewise lists cryptocurrency withdrawals as free, as well as deposits. These figures come from the Bison app's fee page, and the details on the wallet launch from Trade Republic's announcement of November 14, 2025.

Why this matters before the first purchase: an app without a transfer function ties you to the provider. You can then only sell, not move. Anyone wanting to switch to self-custody later has to sell and buy again, and in Germany that is a taxable event. Which devices qualify for self-custody is then the next question, and it is better asked before the purchase than after.

MiCA authorisation: how to spot a permitted app in Germany

Since January 1, 2026, crypto-asset services may be offered in Germany only by those holding a BaFin authorisation or a valid notification. The EU-wide transition period ended on July 1, 2026. Since then the question of authorisation is no longer a formality but the dividing line between a provider allowed to operate here and one that is not.

The authorisation does not have to come from Germany. The procedure permits operating in all other member states on a licence from one EU country. Bitvavo is authorised through the Dutch AFM, Kraken through Luxembourg and Ireland, Bitpanda through BaFin and the Austrian FMA, and Bison and Trade Republic through BaFin. Germany leads the list of authorisations granted within the EU, with 56.

Two notes on this, because they are easily misunderstood. First, an authorisation says nothing about the price and nothing about the quality of an app; it says that a supervisor is looking. Second, the number of houses holding a full trading permission is small: across the EU, as at the July 2026 reference date, only 14 trading venues held one.

Savings plan, minimum amount and staking: what beginners often overlook

Three points decide more in everyday use than the last tenth of a percentage point in the spread.

The savings plan is the first. It takes the question of the right entry moment off your hands and spreads the purchase over time. What matters here is whether the fee is charged as a percentage or as a flat amount: one euro of order fee on an instalment of 25 euros is four percent, on 250 euros it is 0.4 percent. Small instalments at a provider with a flat fee are therefore expensive, even where the figure looks small.

The second point is staking. Trade Republic offers it for networks such as Ethereum and Solana and points out that the coins are bound to the network while staked and cannot be sold. That is not an aside but the heart of the matter: stake, and you give up availability at any time. How much of the yield stays with the provider differs widely, and at Bison we put that share at 27 percent of the rewards in a separate piece on September 6, 2026, which you can read in our analysis of the Bison app.

The third point is rewards tied to payment activity. Trade Republic credits back two percent of card spending as Crypto Saveback, capped at up to 1,500 euros of monthly card spending. Such models only pay off if you use the card anyway; as a reason for choosing a crypto app they do not qualify.

Holding period and tax: the choice of app reaches into your tax return

In Germany the gain on a sale of cryptocurrencies has so far been tax-free after a year of holding. For the period, what counts is the acquisition date of the individual coin, and this is exactly where the app becomes a factor: you need an unbroken list of your purchases with date and quantity, otherwise the period cannot be evidenced later.

Which records an app supplies is therefore no convenience feature. Some providers make a ready annual statement available, others only an export of individual transactions that you have to work up yourself. Anyone using several apps in parallel needs a tool that brings everything together in any case; a selection is in our overview of tax tools and portfolio trackers.

A note on where things stand: on October 14, 2026, the federal cabinet takes up a draft bill providing for a flat-rate withholding tax of 25 percent on crypto assets from 2027, as matters stand only for acquisitions after December 31, 2026. None of this has been decided. For your choice of app it mainly means that acquisition records will matter even more in future than they already do today.

Crypto apps for beginners: What to take away

The differences between the five apps are larger than the interfaces suggest. Cheap and expensive lie a factor of ten apart, and the custody question decides whether you own coins or merely take part in their price.

1. Project the mark-up onto your planned instalment, not onto a single purchase. A flat amount per order hits small instalments hard, a percentage spread hits large sums. The current terms across trading venues are in our crypto exchange comparison.
2. Check before your first purchase whether the app permits transfers to your own wallet. Without that function your only way out later is a sale, and in Germany that is a taxable event. Suitable devices are shown in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Settle the authorisation and the records before money moves. Since July 1, 2026, every provider needs a permission, and you need a list of your purchases with dates. Which houses have a supervisor behind them is set out in the list of regulated crypto exchanges.

(As of October 3, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)