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Build vs. buy

What does a white-label crypto exchange cost?

Price the honest version of building in-house — engineers, months, maintenance — against launching on infrastructure that already exists. The calculator below uses your numbers, not ours.

Cost calculator

Estimate the in-house build

Set your team size, monthly cost per engineer and time to launch. Maintenance is added at ~25% per year — the industry's usual quiet surprise.

Estimates only — actual costs vary by scope, team and region.

Estimated build cost
$432,000
plus ~25% per year in maintenance
First-year total
$540,000
Time to market
9 months
With Monbits: live in weeks, with no upfront build
Get a tailored quote
What you'd be building

The build is bigger than the trading screen

Each of these is months of specialist work in-house — and already running in production on Monbits.

Wallet & key management

An isolated signing service for Bitcoin, EVM chains and TRON, with keys encrypted under AES-256-GCM and never exposed to the public internet.

Liquidity & live rates

Provider integrations with failover, live spot pricing, configurable spreads and rate-locking at order time.

Payment modules

Fiat rails your users expect — PayPal, Liqpay, PerfectMoney, Advance Cash and bank transfers — each an integration to build and keep alive.

Compliance plumbing

AML screening before funds settle, KYC flows, sanctions checks and immutable audit logs an auditor will actually accept.

Operations tooling

The admin panel your team lives in: orders, currencies, rates, users, reporting, filters and a referral engine.

Keeping it alive

Chain upgrades, security patches, monitoring and on-call — the ~25% a year that never appears in the launch budget.

The buy side

How launching on Monbits is priced

One number to start, one number to run — and your margin stays yours.

Integrations, analytics, extra support and branding work are listed with prices in the add-ons catalogue, so you can budget the whole launch before talking to anyone.

  • A one-time setup fee for your branded platform
  • A monthly subscription covering hosting, maintenance and updates
  • You set the rates and spreads — the margin on every order is yours
  • Optional services priced openly in the add-ons catalogue
Side by side

Build vs. buy, honestly

Build in-house Launch on Monbits
Time to market 6–18 months before the first trade Live in days
Upfront cost Multi-engineer payroll for months (estimate it above) One-time setup fee
Ongoing cost ~25% of the build cost per year in maintenance Monthly subscription
Team required 4–8 specialist engineers, retained Your business team; we run the rails
Compliance AML, KYC and audit trails designed from scratch Built in, already in production
Where you win Fully bespoke, at a price Your brand, your rates, your margin — on shared rails
FAQ

Cost questions, answered plainly

The questions buyers actually type into a search bar.

How much does a white-label crypto exchange cost?

On Monbits: a one-time setup fee for your branded platform plus a monthly subscription that covers hosting, maintenance and updates. Optional services — extra integrations, analytics, support and branding — are published with prices in the add-ons catalogue, so you can budget the full launch before a sales call.

What does building an exchange in-house cost?

A realistic minimum is a small specialist team for the better part of a year — wallet infrastructure, liquidity, payment rails, compliance and an admin panel — plus roughly 25% of that build cost every year in maintenance. The calculator on this page turns your own team size and salary assumptions into a number.

What's included in the Monbits subscription?

Hosting, maintenance and platform updates, the operator admin panel with reporting, and the standard payment modules. Revenue mechanics — your spreads and margins on every order — are yours, not shared.

When does building in-house actually make sense?

When the exchange itself is your core technology bet — you need custom market-making, exotic instruments or full control of every component, and you're prepared to fund a permanent engineering team for it. For operators whose edge is brand, audience or distribution, buying the rails and spending the difference on growth wins.

Skip the build. Keep the margin.

Tell us about your market and we'll come back with a concrete setup quote — the number the calculator can't know.

Get a setup quote