Platform, launchpad and creator fees
The percent fees that take most of your money: what apps charge, what launchpads charge, who the creator fee pays, and what global fees tell you.
The fixed fees are small. The percent fees are where most of the money goes. On most trades there are two of them: what your app charges, and what the pool or launchpad charges.
Platform fees
Trading terminals, Telegram bots and trading apps make money by taking a cut of each trade. Most of the ones whose fee pages we read in October 2026 charge between about 0.4% and 1% on a typical trade. Some lower the rate for big-volume traders or for people who joined with a referral code. Small trades can cost much more, because a flat fee or a minimum fee is a big share of a small trade. On FOMO, for example, a $20 Solana trade pays 2% on its cheapest route and 4.75% on routes with a $0.95 minimum, and a $2 trade pays a flat $0.10, which is 5%.
Three examples from the platforms' own fee pages, read on 30 October 2026. GMGN charges a flat 1% per trade. Axiom charges 1% and pays part of it back as cashback, so you pay 0.95% net as a new trader and as little as 0.75% at its top volume tier. Pump.fun's own app started charging a platform fee of 0.45%, or 0.40% with a referral code, on 17 October 2026, on top of its launchpad fees. Fees change often, so check the app's own fee page before you trust any number, ours included.
Compare trading platforms and their feesLaunchpad and pool fees
The place the coin trades takes a cut too. On the pump.fun bonding curve the total is 1.25% of every trade: 0.95% to the platform and 0.30% to the coin's creator. After a coin graduates to its PumpSwap pool, the fee depends on the coin's market cap and falls as the coin grows.
| Where the coin trades | Creator fee | Total fee |
|---|---|---|
| Bonding curve | 0.30% | 1.25% |
| PumpSwap, market cap under 420 SOL | 0.30% | 1.25% |
| PumpSwap, 420 to 1,470 SOL | 0.95% | 1.20% |
| PumpSwap, 4,420 to 9,820 SOL | 0.75% | 1.00% |
| PumpSwap, 98,240 SOL and up | 0.05% | 0.30% |
Other launchpads and pools set their own fees. The rule is the same everywhere. It is a percent, it is charged on buys and on sells, and it comes out of your trade.
Creator fees
A creator fee is the slice of each trade that goes to whoever launched the coin. Pump.fun has paid creators a share of trading fees since May 2025. In September 2025 it moved to the tiered schedule above, which pays creators the most just after a coin graduates and less as the coin grows.
This changed the game. Before, a dev made money mostly by selling their own coins. Now a dev earns from every trade, up or down. That gives honest builders a reason to keep working on a coin. It also tempts some devs to fake volume, because every trade pays them.
Creators can also send the fee somewhere else. On pump.fun a creator can pick holder rewards at launch, which shares the creator fee among holders, or route it to a charity. Coins launched in cashback mode pay it back to buyers instead, but that mode is closed to new launches.
What a creator earns in a day
A coin sits at 1,000 SOL market cap in its PumpSwap pool and trades 500 SOL of volume in one day.
- Step 1: At that size the creator fee is 0.95% of every trade.
- Step 2: 0.95% of 500 SOL is 4.75 SOL to the creator that day.
- Step 3: Traders paid 1.20% in total, so 6 SOL left their pockets in launchpad fees alone, before any platform fees.
Global fees paid
Some trading tools show a number called global fees paid: the total fees every trader has spent on one coin. Depending on the tool it can include network fees, priority fees, tips and pool fees, so the same coin can show very different numbers on two sites.
Traders use it as a lie detector for volume. A real crowd fighting to get into a coin pays real priority fees and tips. A handful of bots trading with each other to paint a busy chart tends to pay as little as it can. Big volume with tiny global fees is a warning sign. The clue is clearest when the tool counts only network fees, priority fees and tips, because pool fees grow with volume whether the buyers are real or not. It is a clue, not proof, so check what your tool counts.
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This guide is for learning. It is not financial advice. Most memecoins go to zero and most people who trade them lose money. Only ever trade what you can afford to lose.