Trading bot fees explained

Trading bot fees explained: the four lines in one order

The platform fee is the visible one, charged as a percentage of each trade: 1% is the standard in this market, 0.5% is the low end, 2% is the high end. It is charged per trade, so it is paid again on the way out.

Gas and the priority fee are paid to the network, not the tool. On a contested Solana launch the priority fee is what gets your transaction included ahead of others, and it can move sharply with congestion. GMGN’s own fee documentation states plainly that gas, priority fee and slippage come on top of its 1%.

Slippage is a fee in everything but name. The difference between the price you expected and the price you accepted is a real cost, and it scales with the size of the order rather than with the tool's rate.

Platform fees, tool by tool

Low end of the documented range: Banana Gun charges 0.5% on manual trades and 1% on snipes, with no subscription. Trojan documents 1%, which nets to 0.80% on Telegram bot trades after a 20% cashback, and Bloom documents 1% for everyone else and 0.9% for users who arrive through a referral link.

A cashback ladder can bring a 1% headline fee down further. Axiom documents 0.95% net at the first tier and 0.75% at the top tier after SOL cashback; o1.exchange documents 0.80% falling to 0.60% net with 0.20–0.40% cashback tiers; Maestro documents 15–30% automatic cashback on its 1%, and BONKbot 5–25% by volume on Telemetry.

The rest of the 1% club: GMGN, Photon (collected in SOL on every buy and sell), Sigma on EVM sniping and trading, and Bankr, which is priced by plan instead — free with 5 messages a day, Bankr Club at $20 a month, and a 0.7% pool fee on tokens launched through it.

Then the exceptions. Sigma documents a 0% trading fee on Solana against 1% on every EVM chain it supports. copyfomo charges 2% per trade with no documented cashback, twice the usual rate. Terminal publishes no fee schedule at all and advertises up to 35% cashback without the fee it applies to; fomo shows the cost per swap without a public schedule.

A worked example: 1% on $100

Take the standard 1% rate on a $100 trade. The platform takes $1 on the buy. Sell the same position and the platform takes $1 again, so the round trip costs $2 before the network charges anything — and a position that ends exactly where it started has still lost 2%.

The rate changes the arithmetic faster than most people expect. At Banana Gun’s 0.5% manual rate, the same $100 round trip costs $1. At copyfomo’s 2%, it costs $4. At $1,000 instead of $100, the 1% round trip becomes $20, the 0.5% round trip $10 and the 2% round trip $40, all before gas, priority fees and slippage.

This is also where the shape of a strategy shows up. Ten round trips a day at 1% on $100 is $20 a day in platform fees alone, which is a different proposition from one round trip a week.

1. Take the published platform rate and double it: that is the round-trip platform cost.
2. Multiply by your typical position size, then by the number of trades you actually place in a week.
3. Add gas and priority fees per transaction, which vary with the chain and the congestion on the day.
4. Add slippage last, because it depends on your own cap and on how thin the pair is.
5. Check whether the fee applies to successful swaps only: BONKbot documents its 1% that way, which is the wording to look for.

Slippage and MEV are part of the bill

Slippage is the setting most likely to cost more than the platform fee. GMGN’s documentation recommends 30–50% slippage on memecoins, which is what a thin new pair can require; on a larger order, that tolerance is expensive in dollars even though it never appears on a fee page.

MEV is the other invisible line. GMGN, Maestro, Trojan, Photon, Bloom, Sigma and o1.exchange all document MEV or anti-MEV protection of some kind, and Photon describes its own as Smart-MEV. The limits are documented too: GMGN users were hit by an MEV sandwich attack in October 2025 despite anti-MEV settings, and GMGN reported full compensation.

Neither of these is a reason to skip the tool; both are reasons to size positions knowing that the published rate is a floor on the real cost rather than a summary of it.

Referral discounts move the net rate

Four tools in our set publish a documented benefit for the new user. Axiom gives referred users 10% off trading fees, Trojan the same 10% off, Bloom 0.9% instead of 1%, and o1.exchange 20% cashback from day one through a referral link.

Most of the others publish nothing at all, and that is a fact about the tool rather than a gap in our data: GMGN documents no discount for referred users, Maestro and BONKbot document no new-user perk, and Banana Gun, Sigma, Photon and copyfomo publish no referee benefit either. A referral link from those tools is not expected to change your fee.

Trackers work differently, and it is worth not confusing the two. SpyBot pays the referrer 15–25% of a referee’s Premium plans in SOL, and Cielo pays 10% of net trading fees to the referrer, so the new user’s price does not move. Nansen is the exception on that side, with a 10% discount applied automatically, as is Drops Bot with 10% off subscriptions and trades.

What the cheapest label does not tell you

A low published rate and a low real cost are different things. A 1% fee on a tool that fills your order at a good price can cost less than a 0.5% fee on an order routed through a thin pair, and a failed order costs network fees without producing a position. BONKbot’s documentation is unusually precise here: its 1% applies per successful swap.

Fee tiers also need volume to exist. Axiom’s 0.75% top tier, o1.exchange’s 0.60% net, Maestro’s 15–30% cashback and BONKbot’s 5–25% cashback are all volume-dependent, so the number you see on a homepage is rarely the number a new account pays.

Subscriptions are a separate line: Maestro’s Premium plan costs $200 a month for higher limits, and Bankr Club is $20 a month, against a free tier of 5 terminal messages a day. On the tracker side, Cielo’s paid plans run from $59 to $199 a month.

Finally, public usage is not a performance figure. DefiLlama’s trailing 30-day fees show GMGN at about $51.9M, Axiom at $37.2M and fomo at $35.5M, which measures how many people trade through a tool; Sigma is not tracked there at all, so no public usage figure exists for it either way.