Published fee terms for the main Solana trading terminals and bots, plus the protocol and network costs nobody advertises.
Terminal fees are the smallest part of what a trade costs, and the only part that gets discussed. Here is the full stack.
The main terminals and Telegram bots charge around 1 percent per trade, with volume tiers and cashback bringing the effective rate down to roughly 0.5 to 0.75 percent for active traders. That is charged on each side, so a round trip is roughly double.
On the pump.fun bonding curve, 1.25 percent per side. After migration, PumpSwap charges a tiered fee that starts at 1.25 percent for small market caps and falls towards 0.30 percent for the largest. These are unavoidable and independent of which interface you use.
A base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature, plus a priority fee, plus a tip if you want reliable inclusion. In quiet conditions that is a fraction of a cent; on contested launches, retail snipers routinely pre-set tips of 0.1 to 3 SOL. Creating a token account for a new token costs about 0.0019 SOL in rent, which you get back only if you remember to close the account afterwards.
On a fresh bonding curve, every 1 SOL that lands ahead of you moves the price about 6.8 percent, and 5 SOL moves it around 36 percent. Setting a wide slippage tolerance to get filled hands that entire range to a sandwich bot: one operator averaged 8.67 dollars per attack across 1.55 million attacks in a month.
Adding it up honestly: about 8 to 25 percent per round trip on a 20 dollar position, and roughly 6 to 10 percent on a 500 dollar one. The fixed costs are what make small tickets expensive. Any strategy has to clear that before it earns anything.
Risking 1 percent per trade, the sizing most guides recommend, puts a 100 dollar account below the fee floor. Sizing large enough for fees to be small means risking a fifth or more of the account per trade, which one bad streak ends. Those two requirements do not overlap under a few hundred dollars, and no amount of tooling fixes it.