A Kalshi "yes" contract priced at 55 cents looks identical whether it’s bought on Kalshi, Robinhood, Webull, or Crypto.com. The number on screen doesn’t change from app to app.
What changes is what a bettor actually pays to hold that contract, and that depends entirely on which exchange is filling the order behind the app.
Take a single Kalshi "yes" contract priced at 55 cents on an NFL game. Buy it direct through Kalshi, through Robinhood, through Webull, or through Crypto.com, and the quoted price reads 55 cents on all four.
The question is what each platform adds on top of that 55 cents before the trade settles, and whether all four are even trading the same underlying contract. Worked out contract by contract, the answer is no on both counts for at least one of them.
Kalshi’s standard taker fee is round-up(0.07 x price x (1-price)) per contract, charged only when an order fills immediately against the book. Resting limit orders pay a quarter of that rate on designated markets, and some markets charge resting orders nothing.
At 55 cents, the formula works out to 0.07 x 0.55 x 0.45, or 1.73 cents, which rounds up to 2 cents. That puts the all-in cost at 57 cents to buy the contract direct on Kalshi.
A 57-cent cost for a $1 payout converts to roughly -133 in sportsbook odds, a 57% break-even win rate. Kalshi charges no settlement fee and no membership fee, and ACH transfers are free, though debit-card funding can run up to 2%.
Robinhood’s event-contract trades route through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC onto KalshiEx LLC’s order book. Kalshi is the regulated exchange behind Robinhood’s sports contracts, not Robinhood itself.
Robinhood charges a flat $0.01-per-contract commission on top of Kalshi’s own $0.01-per-contract exchange fee, for $0.02 total per side, on both opening and closing a position. Webull’s setup is the same in practice: the contracts, matching, and settlement all run on Kalshi’s order book, with Webull supplying only the app and funding rails. Despite Webull’s "$0 commission" marketing on sports prediction markets, traders still pay Kalshi’s $0.01 exchange fee plus a $0.01 Webull platform fee, $0.02 total per contract on every open and close.
Run the math and a 55-cent contract costs 57 cents all-in on Robinhood and 57 cents all-in on Webull, the exact same total as buying direct on Kalshi. That isn’t a markup. Kalshi’s own fee at 55 cents is already 2 cents, and the $0.01-plus-$0.01 split simply divides that same 2 cents between Kalshi and its distribution partner.
On its Q2 2026 earnings call, Robinhood’s CFO said the platform traded about one billion event contracts in the quarter ending in June, and at a penny per contract that implied roughly $10 million in quarterly revenue, with a large share coming from sports.
The match holds across most of the price range because Kalshi’s formula produces a fee that rounds up to 2 cents anywhere from roughly 17 cents to 83 cents. Outside that band, the apps and the exchange part ways.
At a 10-cent contract, Kalshi’s formula gives 0.07 x 0.10 x 0.90, or 0.63 cents, which rounds up to just 1 cent. The all-in cost on Kalshi direct is 11 cents. Robinhood and Webull still charge their flat $0.02 total, putting their all-in cost at 12 cents, a full cent more for the same contract.
For comparison, Interactive Brokers charges 2 cents per contract on Kalshi-listed contracts and 1 cent per contract on ForecastEx-listed ones, a reminder that flat per-contract fees behave differently from Kalshi’s own formula once price moves away from the middle.
Crypto.com’s prediction markets are not Kalshi contracts. By Crypto.com’s own product page, they’re offered on the company’s own CFTC-regulated exchange, Crypto.com | Derivatives North America, known as CDNA.
CDNA is the rebranded North American Derivatives Exchange, the CFTC-registered exchange Crypto.com acquired in 2021 and formerly known as Nadex. Underdog’s prediction-market product is built on the same partnership, meaning it also settles on CDNA rather than Kalshi.
That makes a Crypto.com contract priced at 55 cents a legally distinct product from Kalshi’s, even when the number on screen matches. No reliable source was found for a published, itemized per-contract fee schedule for Crypto.com or CDNA sports event contracts comparable to Kalshi’s public formula. Figures circulating on aggregator sites conflict with each other and with Crypto.com’s own materials, so a clean fee comparison isn’t available.
Kalshi, Robinhood, Webull, and Coinbase all settle on Kalshi’s own exchange. Coinbase offers Kalshi’s event contracts through a non-exclusive partnership, making it another reseller rather than a rival exchange.
Crypto.com and its partner Underdog settle on CDNA instead, a separate CFTC-registered exchange with its own order book.
On Oct. 17, 2026, CDNA sued Missouri in federal court to block state enforcement against its sports event contracts, arguing the Commodity Exchange Act preempts state gambling law. Kalshi, Polymarket, Robinhood, and Underdog received the same cease-and-desist letters from Missouri but had not sued as of that filing, a live sign that which exchange sits behind an app isn’t just a fee question.
On Kalshi’s Week 7 NFL board, Oct. 20, 2026, prices across 14 games averaged a 1-cent gap against sportsbook lines, on volume of about 2.42 million contracts that day. Across weeks 2 through 7 of the 2026 season, the average weekly gap ran between 0.7 and 1 cent.
Individual games show the same pattern. For the Thursday Oct. 22, 2026 Patriots-at-Bears game, Chicago’s -148 moneyline lines up with a 60-cent Kalshi ask against a 57.2-cent fair value, while New England’s +124 price sits at a 41-cent ask against 42.8 cents fair. In the Oct. 25, 2026 Giants-at-Texans game, Houston’s -520 favorite price corresponds to a 79-cent ask versus 80.4 cents fair, and New York’s +390 underdog sits at 21 cents against 19.6 cents fair.
With Kalshi and sportsbook pricing running about a penny apart most weeks, the line itself isn’t where these four apps differ. The fee layer is, and it mostly only shows up once a contract moves away from a 50-cent coin flip toward the cheap or expensive end of the board.