How We Price
When you buy a credit on OpenCarbon, about 15% of what you pay is our fee. The rest — roughly 85% — is the price of the credit itself: what we pay the project, through its registry, to buy and retire it on your behalf.
What the 15% covers
- Payment processing — the cut card networks and payment providers take on every order, same as any online store
- Registry and retirement admin — the work of moving a credit into your name and retiring it permanently, so you get a real certificate with a real serial number
- Running OpenCarbon itself — the Core Score review on every project we list, the site, Otto, and the small team behind all of it
What's left after those costs isn't yet profit. It's what keeps a small team going while we grow.
Why we can keep it this low
We're a small, digital-first company. We don't run a global office network, fly staff out to visit every project, or duplicate the fieldwork that registries and independent raters like ICVCM, Sylvera, and BeZero already do — that's exactly the work our Core Score is built on, not work we redo ourselves. We spend our effort on choosing which of those already-vetted projects meet our bar, and on making it simple and honest to buy and retire a credit. That's a leaner operation than one running site visits and offset “impact tourism,” and it's why our fee can stay small instead of padding it to fund things that don't actually make your credit more real.
Where this number stands
15% is where our fee is set today, on our first real listings. If it changes — up or down — we'll update this page rather than let the number go stale. We'd rather you see the real figure than a rounder, friendlier-sounding one.
Why we're telling you this at all
Most carbon marketplaces don't publish a number like this — you usually have to ask, and not everyone will tell you. We think a curated marketplace should be honest about its own cut, not just the credits it sells. This page exists so that isn't something you have to take on faith.