← All articles

The Cost of a Round Trip: Add Up Every Charge Before You Enter

Published 2026-10-23

Most traders size a position by the stop distance and the target. Fewer size it by what it costs to get in and out. A round trip is the full cycle: open, hold, close. Every part of that cycle has a price, and the price is set before the market has moved at all.

The four lines of a round trip

1. Entry fee. Charged when your order fills. It is a maker fee if you rested on the book and a taker fee if you crossed the spread.

2. Exit fee. The same choice again. A stop-loss is almost always a taker fill, because you are asking to leave now.

3. Spread and slippage. This is not on the fee schedule, but it is real. A market order pays the spread and may walk the book. On thin pairs or in fast markets it can exceed the fee itself. We have no universal figure for it, because it depends on the pair, the size and the moment. Check it on your own fills.

4. Funding. If you hold a perpetual across a funding timestamp, you pay or receive funding. It can work for you or against you, and it grows with holding time. A scalp barely touches it, while a multi-day swing can be dominated by it.

The first two lines are fixed and published. We can put exact numbers on them. The other two you have to estimate from your own trading.

Published fees on five exchanges

Here are the base taker and maker rates, in basis points (bp), per side:

A round trip pays two sides, so the fee cost is the sum of both:

The gap between the columns is the main point. A trader who is always a taker pays well over double what a trader who is always a maker pays, before spread or funding. Most real flow sits in between: a limit entry and a market stop, for example. Work out your own mix before you judge any exchange by its headline rate.

What the rebate changes

If you sign up through us, part of the fees you pay comes back to you:

• Bybit: 22.5% of the fees you pay returned
• Binance: 20% of the fees you pay returned
• OKX: 20% of the fees you pay returned
• Bitget: 20% of the fees you pay returned
• Gate.io: 20% of the fees you pay returned

Applied to the round-trip figures above:

The rebate does not turn a bad trade into a good one. It lowers a cost you were going to pay anyway, and the saving grows the more you trade. A rebate also does not make the taker/taker column a good habit. The maker/maker column is still the cheaper one by a wide margin, rebate or not.

How the rebate works, and where we make money

We are paid by the exchange, and we are paid more when you trade more. That is the whole business model, so you should weigh our enthusiasm for rebates accordingly. Even so, we don't want you to overtrade. A rebate is a reason to cut your costs, not a reason to take trades you would otherwise skip.

The mechanics:

• You pay us nothing. There is no membership fee and no profit share.
• The exchange pays us a referral commission, and we send you 50% of that commission. Commission is only a part of the fee you pay, so in fee terms your return is the per-exchange percentage listed above. The site FAQ has the details.
• Your share of the commission rises automatically with your 30-day volume: 50% as standard, 60% from $1M, 70% from $10M and 80% from $50M. That means up to 80% of the commission. The per-exchange percentages in the tables are the standard-tier figures, and higher tiers improve on them.
• Traders above $200,000,000 per 30 days are handled individually by email.

Payouts and security

Rebates settle monthly and are held for 7 days after month end. The minimum withdrawal is 10 USDT.

We never ask for API keys, passwords or seed phrases. All we need is your public exchange UID. If anyone claiming to be us asks for more, it is not us.

A short pre-trade checklist

1. Decide your likely order types. Will you enter as a maker? Will your stop be a taker? Pick the matching column in the table.
2. Add the fixed part. Entry plus exit, from the published rates.
3. Add your own estimate of spread and slippage for that pair and size.
4. Add expected funding for the time you plan to hold.
5. Compare the total with your target. If the costs take a large share of the expected move, the trade needs a better setup, a better order type or a different venue.
6. Subtract the rebate last. Treat it as a bonus on top of a trade that already makes sense, not as the reason to take it.

A trade whose edge is smaller than its round-trip cost is a loss you have already agreed to. Add it up before you enter.