Affiliate disclosure

Stepwise is free to read, and some of the outbound links on the site are affiliate links. If you click one and go on to open an account or make a purchase, we may earn a commission — at no extra cost to you, and with no effect on the price or terms you receive. This page explains exactly how that works, because you deserve to know how a site you are trusting for money decisions is funded.

Which links are affiliate links

Our affiliate links point to mainstream, regulated exchanges and reputable on-ramps — the kind of provider a beginner should be using anyway. Every affiliate link on the site routes through a /go/ address and is marked so search engines treat it as sponsored. When a link in an article is an affiliate link, we say so nearby rather than hiding it. We only ever link providers we would be comfortable recommending to a friend making their first purchase.

The options that pay us nothing

Some of the tools we recommend most have no affiliate programme at all and earn us nothing — the self-custody wallets MetaMask, Trust Wallet and Exodus among them. We still recommend them, prominently, because moving your crypto into a wallet you control is the honest end of the buying process. The fact that we push hardest on the thing that pays us least is the clearest proof of how we operate.

The rule that never bends

A commission never buys a better review, a higher spot in a comparison, or a softer warning. We rank and describe providers on merit — fees, safety, eligibility and how well they suit a beginner — and the payout, where one exists, is irrelevant to that judgement. If a paying provider is the wrong choice for you, we will say so. Nothing here is financial advice, and crypto remains volatile and risky regardless of how you reached a provider. Reviewed September 2026.