A UK customer who swaps sterling for bitcoin in the CoinJar app pays one per cent. The same trade on CoinJar Exchange, the company’s own order book, costs a tenth of that. Same firm, same account, same custody — two prices an order of magnitude apart, and the expensive door is the one the front page opens.
The fee schedule, read properly
The numbers above are not inferred from a spread. They are printed. Per CoinJar’s published UK fee schedule, trades on the main platform cost 1% whether you are going fiat to crypto, crypto to fiat or crypto to crypto. Card, Apple Pay and Google Pay purchases cost 2%. Recurring Buy is 1% on cards.
CoinJar Exchange runs an ordinary maker-taker ladder. GBP pairs start at 0.10% for both sides, tightening to 0.08% maker between £50,000 and £500,000 of thirty-day volume and reaching 0.06% taker with 0.02% maker above £5m.
That entry tier is the interesting number. Most venues make you trade your way into a good rate; here the first pound gets 0.10%, with no volume gate to clear.
The status it claims, and the date that will replace it
The UK business is CoinJar UK Limited, company number 8905988 at Companies House. Its UK site states that the company is registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as a cryptoasset exchange provider and custodian wallet provider under the money-laundering rules, firm reference number 928767. That sentence is the company’s, not ours: this desk has not confirmed the entry on the FCA register, and a number printed on a firm’s own website is not a regulator’s record. Any status quoted in any review, this one included, belongs on that register before it is believed.
Read that precisely. Registration under the money-laundering rules is a financial-crime test: can the firm identify its customers and spot dirty money moving through. It is not authorisation to conduct business, and it sets no standards for how customers are treated — the boundary we traced through Uphold’s two-tier UK structure.
What has changed since that piece is the calendar. Per the FCA, the authorisation gateway is expected to open on 30 September 2026 and to close on 28 February 2027, ahead of the new regime commencing on 25 October 2027. Apply inside that window and a savings provision lets a firm keep serving customers until its application is determined. Apply late and it may do only what an existing contract requires. Do not apply, and it must run off its UK cryptoasset business first. The regulator’s guidance for firms already on the register puts it flatly: they “should note that there will be no automatic conversion and that they will need to secure authorisation by us under FSMA” — the Financial Services and Markets Act, the statute the new regime runs on.
Neither CoinJar’s UK landing page nor its fee schedule mentions the gateway as of this writing. No firm must publish a regulatory plan a month early, and the silence proves nothing. It does mean the biggest open question about a UK account here — what this venue looks like in late 2027 — cannot be answered from the company’s own material.
What the small print concedes
The UK site does not oversell. It carries the standard warning about being prepared to lose everything you put in, describes cryptocurrency as unregulated in the UK, and tells customers they are unlikely to have recourse to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme or the Financial Ombudsman Service. That last point deserves rereading: on the firm’s own wording, nothing dependable stands behind the assets and no free adjudicator can be counted on to hear a dispute. The escalation route most British consumers assume exists may simply not be there.
The shelf and the rails
Sterling movement is the strong suit: Faster Payments in and out at no fee, crypto deposits free too, and outbound transfers at a dynamic network fee that moves with congestion — honest, but nothing to benchmark. The shelf runs to roughly sixty assets, modest beside venues carrying several hundred.
Bottom line
CoinJar suits the UK reader who reads fee schedules and acts on them: sterling in by Faster Payments for nothing, trades on the exchange at 0.10%. Stay in the app and the same firm charges ten times as much for identical execution — less a cheap platform than a platform with a cheap setting most users never find.
The regulatory picture is a snapshot with a known expiry. The status the firm publishes is worth checking on the register; it also belongs to the old framework, and the window that decides what replaces it opens next month. Treat it as a claim to verify, not a settled fact.
The usual caveat, and not a formality: cryptoassets remain high risk, no compensation scheme stands behind them, nothing here recommends buying anything, and the decision — with the loss, if there is one — is yours.