Manifold Studio: nft and analytics tools rating breakdown
Creation · creator-owned contracts
The best deal in this category and the clearest answer to the ownership question: Manifold deploys a smart contract that you own, under your name rather than a marketplace’s, and charges nothing to use it — no deployment fee, no per-mint fee, no share of your sales. You pay gas, and that is the entire cost. Work minted through it stays yours and stays portable if Manifold disappears tomorrow.
The best deal in this category and the clearest answer to the ownership question: Manifold deploys a smart contract that you own, under your name rather than a marketplace’s, and charges nothing to use it — no deployment fee, no per-mint fee, no share of your sales. You pay gas, and that is the entire cost.
How the score is built
Each criterion is scored 0–10 and weighted. The median column is the middle score across every entry in this ranking, so a row reads as a position rather than a number.
| Criterion | What we measured | Weight | Score | Category median | Rank | Weighted gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you keep when you leave | 0% share of your sales taken · published · 2026-08-27 · source | 30% | 10 | 8 | 1 of 6 | +0.60 |
| What it costs, and what the free version does | free — creator pays gas only cost to deploy and mint · published · 2026-08-27 · source | 28% | 10 | 7.5 | 1 of 6 | +0.70 |
| What it genuinely does that you could not do yourself | — | 22% | 8 | 8.5 | 4 of 6 | -0.11 |
| Are the terms published? | — | 12% | 9 | 8.5 | 2 of 6 | +0.06 |
| Chains and data breadth | — | 8% | 7 | 9 | 5 of 6 | -0.16 |
Measured 27 August 2026 · weights and method · decided by what it costs, and what the free version does, worth +0.70 points against the median
What you keep when you leave: 10/10
For creation tools: who owns the deployed contract, whether the collection is portable to another platform, and whether the tool can change terms on work already minted. For analytics tools: whether queries, dashboards and exports remain usable outside the product. A tool you cannot leave is a subscription with hostages.
Scored 10 of 10 against a category median of 8, which places it 1st of 6 among nft and analytics tools on this criterion. At a 30% weight that is 0.60 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 5.
What it costs, and what the free version does: 10/10
Published prices quoted from the vendor’s own documentation — per-mint fees, revenue shares, subscription tiers — together with an honest description of what the free tier actually does. The spread in this category is extreme: the same act of publishing a collection is free at one tool and a 10% revenue share at another.
Scored 10 of 10 against a category median of 7.5, which places it 1st of 6 among nft and analytics tools on this criterion. At a 28% weight that is 0.70 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 2.
What it genuinely does that you could not do yourself: 8/10
The specific function that justifies the price: contract deployment without code, indexed multi-chain data, labelled address clusters, query infrastructure. Where the same result is available free from a block explorer or a public API, that is stated rather than glossed over.
Scored 8 of 10 against a category median of 8.5, which places it 4th of 6 among nft and analytics tools on this criterion. At a 22% weight that is 0.11 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 6.
Are the terms published?: 9/10
Whether fees, revenue shares and plan limits are stated plainly in public documentation, or only discovered at the point of use. A creation tool that reveals its revenue share after you have minted is scored on that.
Scored 9 of 10 against a category median of 8.5, which places it 2nd of 6 among nft and analytics tools on this criterion. At a 12% weight that is 0.06 points above the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 6.
Chains and data breadth: 7/10
Chains supported and, for analytics, the breadth of indexed data — from the vendor’s own documentation.
Scored 7 of 10 against a category median of 9, which places it 5th of 6 among nft and analytics tools on this criterion. At a 8% weight that is 0.16 points below the median contribution of the weighted total. The best score in the category is 10, the worst 7.
Other measurements
Its nearest neighbours in this ranking
| # | Entry | What it costs, and what the free version does | How it differs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Block explorers | 10 | Level on what it costs, and what the free version does; the gap is elsewhere. |
| 3 | Dune | 7 | Behind by 3 on what it costs, and what the free version does. |
Questions about this score
Does Manifold take a cut of my sales?
+
No. There is no deployment fee, no minting fee and no revenue share — you pay network gas and nothing else. Compare that with OpenSea Studio's 10% on drops, and on a $50,000 launch the difference is $5,000.
Why does owning the contract matter?
+
Because it decides what happens to your work when a platform changes its terms or shuts down. A contract you own is portable: the collection keeps working, keeps its provenance, and can be listed anywhere. A collection minted on a platform's shared contract lives at that platform's discretion, and this industry has a long list of platforms that stopped existing.