About PixelRates

Why PixelRates exists

Buying in-game gold is one of the few markets where the price you are quoted is almost never the price you pay. A seller advertises a low sticker rate to win the click, and then the checkout adds a payment-method surcharge, a currency-conversion markup, or a vague "processing" fee that quietly erases the discount. Comparison sites have historically made this worse rather than better, by letting sellers pay for the top spot, so the ranking you were trusting is really an advertising auction wearing a lab coat.

PixelRates exists to end both problems at once. We show the real all-in price: what actually leaves your account after every fee. We pair it with a trust signal that sellers cannot buy. Our coverage spans OSRS gold, RS3 gold, WoW gold and FFXIV gil, with CS2 on the way.

How we source prices

Every price on PixelRates is independently sourced. We read each seller's price from their live storefront the same way a buyer would, many times a day. Sellers cannot submit, upload, or edit their own prices. That single rule is the foundation of the whole site: it is what stops the bait-and-switch, the fake "sale," and the manipulated feed. If a seller changes their rate, we catch it on the storefront, not in a form they filled out about themselves.

The all-in price engine

The sticker price is only the starting point. Our all-in engine takes that number and adds every cost a buyer actually faces: the payment-method fee, any hidden currency or FX markup baked into the checkout, and any surcharge, then subtracts any coupon that genuinely works. The result re-ranks the sellers, because the cheapest sticker price is rarely the cheapest real price.

The choice of payment method alone can reshuffle the whole board. Crypto is usually the cheapest route, and some sellers even discount it; PayPal and card typically add somewhere in the range of five to twelve percent once fees and markups are counted, and Skrill sits somewhere between. On PixelRates you pick your payment method and the ranking updates to show what you would truly pay. The exact formula is laid out on our methodology page.

The PixelScore

Price is only half of a good decision; the other half is whether the seller actually delivers. Each seller carries a PixelScore that aggregates reputation from across the web: Trustpilot, Reviews.io, and marketplace seller ratings, combined with our own first-party, verified-buyer reviews, each source weighted by how many reviews it represents. Because it is built from many independent sources at once, and recomputed from the live data the same way for every seller, no single seller can quietly inflate its own standing.

Ban-risk and report-a-ban

We track something no other comparison site does: ban risk. Buyers can submit proof-backed ban reports: proof of purchase together with proof of the ban, which feed a per-seller, per-delivery-method ban-risk score. Over time this reveals which sellers and which delivery methods are associated with account actions, so you can weigh safety alongside price and reputation. Because every report has to carry evidence, the signal stays honest instead of turning into a rumour board.

What we do not do

PixelRates is a comparison site and nothing else. We do not sell gold, and we never touch your money. We do not process payments of any kind. When you decide on a seller, you leave PixelRates and transact with that seller directly. Most importantly, no one can pay us to change the objective ranking. We do not run sponsored placements today; if we ever introduce them, they will be pinned above the list and clearly labelled, and the price-and-trust ranking beneath them will never be affected by payment.

How we make money

We are open about the business model, because it is the thing most likely to corrupt a comparison site. PixelRates earns through referral arrangements: some outbound links may earn us a commission. We do not sell advertising today; paid placements may come later, once the site has real traffic. Neither commissions nor any future placement will ever be a ranking factor. The order in which sellers appear is decided by the all-in price and the PixelScore alone, exactly as described on our methodology page and our disclaimer. If a payment could move a seller up the list, it would defeat the entire reason the site exists.

Who we are

PixelRates is operated by Magcore Technologies Inc., a company based in Ontario, Canada, and built by a team that has operated in the RuneScape gold-pricing space since 2017. We have watched this market from the inside for years: the fee tricks, the fake reviews, the sites that quietly sold their rankings. PixelRates is the tool we wished existed the whole time. That history is why independent sourcing and the all-in engine are not afterthoughts bolted onto a directory; they are the entire point of the product.

Playing by the rules

A few things we will always tell you plainly. PixelRates is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Jagex, Blizzard, or any other game publisher. Buying in-game currency may violate a game's Terms of Service, and we will never promise that you cannot be actioned for it. That risk is real, which is precisely why we bother to track it. Gold is delivered through an ordinary in-game trade, so a legitimate seller will never need your account password; if anyone asks for it, walk away.

Spotted a wrong price, or a seller we should be covering? Tell us through the contact page. Buyer feedback is one of the sources that keeps the data honest.