Glossary / Buying & exchanges
Instant buy
Also known as Brokerage buy.
- Definition
- An instant buy is the one-click purchase widget on an exchange, where the venue quotes you a single price and sells to you directly instead of matching you in the order book.
One price, one button, no order types. Coinbase's simple trades carry flat fees running from 0.99 to 2.99 dollars on purchases up to 200 dollars, plus a spread the company describes as roughly 0.50 percent, while the Advanced Trade screen inside the same account charges a fraction of that. Convenience here is not free, it is priced, and the price is deliberately not shown as a percentage.
How it works
An instant buy makes the platform your counterparty rather than your matchmaker.
Press the button and the venue quotes a firm price good for a few seconds. Accept it and the platform fills you from its own inventory, then hedges on a wholesale market at a better price than it gave you. Your cost is the sum of three things: the markup inside the quote, any flat or percentage fee shown on the confirmation, and the processing charge attached to your payment method. Only the middle one is normally displayed as a number.
Payment rail is the biggest swing. Cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay add a processing surcharge on top of everything else at Kraken, Bitpanda, Coinmama and CEX.IO alike, while bank transfers over ACH and SEPA are free or close to it at most of them. Paying a card surcharge on an instant buy stacks the two most expensive choices available.
Delivery differs too. On Coinbase or Kraken the coins land in an account balance. On Coinmama and Itez there is no balance at all: the bitcoin goes straight to the wallet address you type at checkout, which is cleaner for self-custody and unforgiving of a typo, because there is no account to recover it into.
The word instant describes the quote, not the settlement. Coins credit immediately, but a purchase funded by bank debit is commonly locked against withdrawal until the debit clears, which takes several business days on ACH.
Where you see it
Nearly every large platform now runs two products under one login, and the instant buy is the one the app opens on.
Kraken splits its Buy widget from Kraken Pro. Coinbase splits simple trades from Advanced Trade. Binance splits Buy Crypto from spot. Bitstamp, CEX.IO and Luno each pair an instant screen with a cheaper order book. Bitpanda does not split at all: it quotes one price with the premium built in and charges no separate commission, which is honest about being a broker rather than an exchange.
There are cases where the widget is the right answer. A first purchase of 50 or 100 dollars is not worth learning order types for, and the absolute cost of a few percent is a few dollars. In markets where the local order book is thin, a broker quote can beat the slippage you would eat on the book. And for anyone who will realistically never open a trading screen, the cheapest interface is the one that gets used.
Where it stops being reasonable is repetition and size. A recurring schedule routed through instant-buy pricing pays that markup every cycle for years, and any purchase above a few hundred dollars is large enough that the order book saves real money. The tab is usually one tap away.