Every platform on this board sells the same commodity — energy, delegated to your address for a while — and almost no two sell it the same way. Our board holds 190 price cells; only 67 are quotes a platform actually publishes, and sixteen of the nineteen price exactly one product: 65,000 energy for one hour.
The market has settled on an hour
Nineteen platforms, two energy sizes, five terms: 190 cells. In the current scan 67 are real quotes, 81 are our own estimates from market ratios, and 42 are empty because nothing is offered or could be read.
The distribution is lopsided in a way worth knowing before you shop. Sixteen platforms quote 65k for an hour. Three quote a fifteen-minute rate: Tron Fee, TR Energy and TronMax. Two quote ten days: Feee.io and Tronify, the only two publishing an almost complete ladder with no estimates from us at all. Half the board publishes precisely two numbers, an hour at each size. Want anything else and you are choosing among a handful of sellers, with much of the rest marked “≈” because it is our arithmetic rather than their offer.
Per unit, at a SUN rate
The default model, and the one the board is built to compare. The platform names a rate in SUN per unit of energy; your price is energy × rate ÷ 1,000,000. It scales linearly, so the 130k column is the 65k column doubled on nearly every row. The formula in full is here.
Per transfer, a flat fee
Some sellers price the outcome instead of the input. MeFree prints one price in its order form — 3.00 TRX per 65,000 energy for one hour — and nothing else; the board reads that sentence and multiplies. APITRX publishes a pay-per-transfer mode alongside an hourly rate.
It is the friendliest model for a first-time buyer and the hardest to compare: a per-transfer price lines up with a per-unit one only at the exact size and duration quoted, so every other cell we show for such a seller is an estimate.
On chain, through a dApp
Four platforms carry the dApp tag on our compare page — Brutus.finance, Ergon, JustLend DAO and Tron Fee — and two of them, Ergon and JustLend DAO, are tagged staking-backed as well. You connect a wallet instead of paying a website, which changes both the price mechanism and the paperwork.
Ergon shows what that does to a price list, and its board note spells it out: a tiered rate per million energy per day; rentals of one to seven days, so no fifteen-minute, one-hour or ten-day price exists; a 100,000-energy minimum; and a refundable one-day deposit our figure excludes. JustLend DAO also starts at 100,000 — and if you need one transfer's worth, that minimum is a very different price from what the rate implies.
One visible consequence in our archive: JustLend DAO is the only platform whose price moved continuously through the day of scans we have recorded.
A marketplace with two sides
Brutus.finance and TronMax carry the marketplace tag: the price is what two sides settle on rather than a rate the house sets. From outside we can confirm the number displayed, not the mechanism behind it, so treat the tag as their description rather than our finding. What we can measure is coverage, and it is thin — TronMax publishes a fifteen-minute price and little else, leaving eight of its ten cells as our estimates.
Bot first, with tiers
FeeSaver, re:Fee and Tronex Energy are tagged Telegram-first, and eight of the nineteen offer a REST API. Several price by who you are as much as by what you buy: APITRX's board note records that its bot and API orders start below the figure we publish, because we publish what a plain transfer pays.
Read that in both directions: if you qualify for a tier the board's number is a ceiling, and if you do not, an advertised member rate is not what your first order will cost.
What actually changes your bill
Four things, none of them the headline rate.
The minimum order. Of the platforms that publish one, Ergon and JustLend DAO start at 100,000 energy, Tronex at 65,000, TronMax at 20,000, Tronify at 15,000 and iTRX at 12,000. Below the minimum, the cheapest rate on the board is not yours to take.
Money you park. Ergon's refundable deposit is real capital tied up for the rental, and it is not in the price we show. The same goes anywhere a platform holds a balance instead of charging per order.
Quote or estimate. More cells here are our estimates than real quotes. They carry the “≈” prefix and say so on hover. Never compare an estimate against a quote and conclude anything.
What nobody sells. Not one of the nineteen is tagged for bandwidth. A USDT transfer needs a few hundred bytes of it as well as the energy, and that line is yours to cover whatever you rent.
How to read the board
Sort by the cell you actually need rather than the headline one, check whether it is a quote or an estimate, and check the minimum against the amount you want. Then confirm on the platform's own page before you pay — the cheapest quote right now is 1.30 TRX at NETTS, against a market average of 2.86 TRX. Our comparison tool does the first three steps; only the platform can do the fourth.