Introducing PixelRates
PixelRates ranks in-game gold sellers by the true all-in price: sticker plus every fee, minus coupons, all sourced independently.
The sticker price is a lie
Open any gold seller's storefront and the first thing you see is a price per million. It looks like the whole story. It almost never is.
By the time you actually pay, that headline number has been quietly rebuilt. A payment-method fee gets bolted on at checkout. A currency conversion runs at the seller's rate, not the real one, and skims a few percent on the way through. A "processing" surcharge appears. A coupon you never found would have taken money back off. The price you compared and the price you paid are two different numbers, and the gap is usually where the seller makes its margin.
The other half of the problem is the reviews. Search "best OSRS gold site" and you get listicles. Most of those rankings are pay-to-play: the site at the top paid to be at the top. That is not a comparison, it is an advertisement wearing a comparison's clothes, and it is worse than useless because it looks like research.
PixelRates exists to fix both problems at once.
One honest number
Our answer is a single figure we call the all-in price. It is the real cost to you, delivered, after everything:
- the seller's sticker price, plus
- the payment-method fee for how you pay (crypto, PayPal, card, Skrill), plus
- any hidden currency (FX) markup baked into the conversion, plus
- any surcharge the checkout adds, minus
- any working coupon we have verified.
Once you rank sellers this way, the leaderboard scrambles. The cheapest sticker price is very rarely the cheapest real price, and the winner changes the moment you change how you pay. Here is an illustrative example, not measured data, to show the mechanism:
| Seller | Sticker / M | Pay with crypto | Pay with PayPal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seller A | $0.150 | $0.147 | $0.166 |
| Seller B | $0.152 | $0.145 | $0.160 |
On the sticker, Seller A looks cheaper. Pay with crypto and Seller B wins, partly because it discounts crypto. Pay with PayPal and both jump five to twelve percent as the processing fee lands. Same two sellers, three different answers, depending on a choice most comparison sites ignore entirely.
Rule of thumb: crypto is usually the cheapest way to pay and some sellers discount it further, while PayPal and card typically add roughly 5-12% on top of the sticker.
We source every price ourselves
This is the part that makes the all-in number trustworthy, and it is the line we will not cross: sellers cannot submit their own prices to PixelRates. We scrape each seller's live storefront ourselves, on our own schedule, and compute the all-in figure from what a real buyer would actually be charged.
That single design choice removes the two oldest tricks in this market. It removes price manipulation, because a seller cannot feed us a flattering number that is not on their own checkout. And it removes bait-and-switch, because we are reading the price the storefront quotes, not a marketing rate that evaporates at payment. If you want the full accounting of how we collect, normalize, and rank, it is written up in plain terms on our methodology page.
Price is not the only risk
Cheapest is not the same as safest, so all-in price is only one of three layers we track.
The second is a PixelScore for each seller. It aggregates reviews from across the web (Trustpilot, Reviews.io, marketplace ratings) alongside our own first-party, verified-buyer reviews, weighted by how many reviews each source represents. One glowing testimonial proves nothing; a long, consistent record across independent sources is signal.
The third layer is the one no competitor tracks: ban risk. Buying in-game currency can violate a game's Terms of Service, and the real-world consequence of a bad delivery is your account, not just your money. Buyers submit proof-backed ban reports to us (proof of purchase plus proof of the ban), and those reports feed a ban-risk score that is broken out per seller and per delivery method, because how gold reaches you matters as much as who sold it. It is a report-a-ban system, built by buyers, for buyers.
Two more promises hold this together. Sponsored listings are pinned above the list and always labelled. A seller can pay for that marked, pinned spot, never for a better position in the objective ranking beneath it. And a word we will keep repeating because it matters: gold is delivered by in-game trade, so never share your account password. A legitimate seller never needs it, and anyone who asks is telling you what they are.
What we launch with
PixelRates opens covering the two games we know best: Old School RuneScape gold and RuneScape 3 gold. Our team has operated in the RuneScape gold-pricing space since 2017, and that is where we can be most useful on day one.
At launch we track eight sellers across the market, spanning the big marketplaces and the established storefronts: Eldorado and PlayerAuctions on the marketplace side, and RPGStash, SkyCoach, Overgear, Chicks Gold, Probemas and RSorder among the direct sellers. You can browse the full roster, each with its PixelScore and ban-risk breakdown, on the sellers page, and hunt for verified discounts on our coupons page.
What comes next
RuneScape is the starting line, not the finish. World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV and CS2 are coming next, and the same three-layer model (all-in price, PixelScore, ban risk) carries directly into every one of them, because hidden fees and pay-to-play rankings are not a RuneScape problem, they are an in-game-economy problem.
A note on where we stand: PixelRates is independent. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Jagex, Blizzard, or any game publisher. We do not sell gold and we do not process payments. We compare sellers and link you out to them. That distance is the whole point; it is what lets us rank on your interest instead of someone's ad budget. You can read more about who we are on the about page.
Compare for yourself
You do not have to take any of this on faith, and you should not. Pick the game you play, choose the payment method you actually use, and watch the ranking reorder around the real number instead of the sticker. If you have been burned by a fee that showed up at checkout, this is the tool built for exactly that.
Start with the live board for OSRS gold, set the payment method you actually use, and watch the total change. One honest number, sourced by us, ranked for you.