# Photon Fees Explained - The Flat 1% and What It Really Costs | PhotonGuides
> Complete breakdown of Photon trading costs: the flat 1% buy and sell fee straight from the docs, why priority fees and Jito bribes are not Photon fees, and how a round trip actually stacks up.
Source: https://photonguides.com/guides/fees
# The Flat 1%, Explained
Photon charges 1% on every buy and 1% on every sell. No tiers, no discounts, no referral rate. Here is exactly what that costs, what else stacks on top of it, and where it leaves Photon against terminals that do publish discounts.
Reviewed by [Concept211](https://photonguides.com/about), active Solana trader|Last verified: August 2026|Quoted verbatim from the [official Photon fee docs](https://pies-organization.gitbook.io/photon-trading/photon-on-sol/photon-fees-sol)
## Photon Cost Quick Reference
Buy
1%
0.05 SOL on a 5 SOL buy
Sell
1%
0.01 SOL on a 1 SOL sell
Round trip
2%
Before anything else
**Volume tiers:** none documented · **Referral discount:** none published · **Withdrawal fee:** none documented
**Priority fee & Jito bribe:** set by you, paid to validators, not to Photon
## What Does Photon Charge?
One number, applied twice. Photon's documentation puts it in a single sentence: *"Photon fees are collected in SOL and it is 1% of the initial token used for every buy and sell transaction."* The worked examples in that same doc are a 5 SOL buy incurring a 0.05 SOL fee, and selling 100 tokens that generate 1 SOL incurring a 0.01 SOL fee. The Ethereum side of the product documented the same 1%, and stated that wallet-to-wallet transfers are not taxed.
What makes this notable is not the rate, which is the category standard, but the absence of anything underneath it. No volume tier table. No loyalty program. No published referral discount. No documented fee change since launch. Whether you traded 0.5 SOL last month or 5,000, Photon takes the same 1%.
### Cost Summary
- **Buy:** 1% of the SOL amount (official docs)
- **Sell:** 1% (official docs)
- **Wallet-to-wallet transfer:** not taxed by Photon
- **Volume discounts:** none documented
- **Withdrawal fee:** none documented
- **Referral discount:** none published
**On the BNB Chain and Base deployments:** no published fee schedule was found for either. They exist and share Photon's account system, but their rates are not part of the documented set. Treat 1% parity as a working assumption, not a confirmed figure.
## Priority Fees and Bribes Are Not Photon Fees
This is the distinction most Photon content collapses, and getting it wrong makes every cost estimate downstream wrong too. In Photon's Settings you configure a **priority fee**, which is extra payment to Solana validators for faster confirmation, and a **bribe**, which is payment to Jito validators for block-space priority. Both come out of your SOL balance. Neither goes to Photon.
They are still real money, and on a congested day they can exceed Photon's 1% on a small trade. Photon's Smart-MEV Protection routes them differently depending on size: in Fast Mode, bribes below 0.001 SOL go directly to Jito and larger ones route via Bloxroute, and Secure Mode applies the same split at 0.002 SOL. An Auto Speed option sets them from recently successful transactions instead of a fixed value. See the [trading features hub](https://photonguides.com/guides/trading) for how each mode behaves. The point for a fee page is narrower: budget for them separately, and do not let anyone fold them into "Photon charges X%."
## How Photon Compares to Other Terminals
Photon's 1% is in line with the category headline rate. The problem is the floor. Axiom and GMGN both publish documented ways to pay less, and Photon publishes none, which means an active trader on identical volume pays Photon more than either. Every row below is sourced to the platform's own documentation, or explicitly flagged where no documentation exists.
| | Terminal | Headline fee | Best achievable | Source
| Photon | 1% buy and sell | 1% (no discount published) | Official docs
| Axiom | 1% | 0.75% + 0.25% SOL cashback, 10% off via referral | Official docs
| GMGN | 1% | 0.70–0.90% with referral | Official docs
| BONKbot | 1% | 1% with up to 25% cashback | Official docs
| Trojan | ~1% | ~0.9% (widely quoted) | Not published
| Jupiter | 0–10 bps | 0 bps; up to 50 bps on tokens under 24h old | Official docs
Read August 2026. "Not published" means no fee schedule exists in that platform's own documentation, so the figure comes from secondary sources and should be treated as unverified. Jupiter is an aggregator rather than a terminal, included because it is the honest low-cost alternative for anyone who only wants execution.
## What a Real Round Trip Costs
Photon's 2% round trip is the floor, not the total. On a token that has not yet left the launchpad, the venue underneath charges its own fee: PumpSwap starts around 1.25% and tapers toward roughly 0.30% as market cap grows. Add your priority fee, your Jito bribe, and whatever slippage the fill costs you on thin liquidity.
| | Action | What it costs | Who receives it
| Buy | 1% of the SOL amount | Photon
| Sell | 1% of the SOL generated | Photon
| Priority fee | Set by you in Settings | Solana validators
| Jito bribe | Set by you in Settings | Jito validators
| Venue fee on a fresh launch | PumpSwap ~1.25%, tapering by market cap | The AMM
| Wallet-to-wallet transfer | Not taxed by Photon | Network cost only
Photon rows verified against the [official Photon fee documentation](https://pies-organization.gitbook.io/photon-trading/photon-on-sol/photon-fees-sol). Priority fee and bribe amounts vary entirely with your settings and network conditions.
## The Referral Does Not Discount Anything
Photon publishes no referral or affiliate page anywhere in its documentation, and its fee doc lists no discount of any kind. So the honest position is the one we take on our [referral page](https://photonguides.com/referral): the @handle link format is confirmed, including by DefiLlama's own Photon referral URL, but there is no rate to quote and no discount to pass on. If you see "0.9% with a Photon referral" anywhere, that number was invented by whoever published it.
## Does the 1% Suit How You Trade?
It depends almost entirely on frequency. A trader taking a handful of positions a week and holding them will barely notice the difference between 1% and 0.75%. A trader flipping ten launches a day at a 50% win rate is paying 2% per round trip on every one of them, and the compounding cost of that is the difference between a profitable edge and a break-even one. That arithmetic is why Photon's fee revenue has fallen from $84.6M in January 2025 to $507,610 across the 30 days to 6 August 2026, per DefiLlama, while Axiom, which publishes tiers, took 55.3% of the cohort in the same window.
None of which means Photon is unusable. It means the fee is the trade-off you are accepting for Memescope and the execution around it, and you should price that trade-off deliberately. The [comparison hub](https://photonguides.com/compare) runs the numbers against each live alternative, with the DefiLlama pull date attached to every one.
## Frequently Asked Questions
What are Photon trading fees?+A flat 1% on every buy and every sell, collected in SOL. Photon's own documentation states it as "1% of the initial token used for every buy and sell transaction." A 5 SOL buy incurs a 0.05 SOL fee; a sell generating 1 SOL incurs 0.01 SOL. There are no volume tiers, no published referral discount and no documented withdrawal fee, and wallet-to-wallet transfers are not taxed.
Do priority fees and Jito bribes go to Photon?+No. The Solana priority fee goes to validators and the Jito bribe goes to Jito validators. You set both yourself in Photon's Settings and both come out of your SOL balance, but neither is a Photon platform fee. Photon's revenue is the flat 1% and nothing else that it documents. Content that lumps these together makes Photon look either cheaper or far more expensive than it actually is.
How much does a round trip cost on Photon?+At minimum 2%: 1% going in and 1% coming out. On a fresh Pump.fun launch that sits on top of PumpSwap's own fee, which starts around 1.25% and tapers toward roughly 0.30% as market cap grows, plus your priority fee, your Jito bribe and slippage. For a trader winning about half their trades, a 2% platform drag before any of the rest is the single largest structural cost in the strategy.
Does a referral code reduce Photon fees?+No. Photon's fee documentation lists no referral discount, no volume tier and no promotional rate, and Photon publishes no referral or affiliate page anywhere in its docs. Any site quoting "0.9% with a Photon referral" is repeating a figure that does not appear in a Photon-authored source. You pay 1% with a referral link and 1% without one.
Is Photon cheaper than Axiom or GMGN?+No, and that gap is documented on both sides. Axiom publishes tiers running from 1% down to 0.75% at its top tier plus 0.25% SOL cashback, with a further 10% off via referral. GMGN publishes 1% reducible to 0.70% to 0.90% with a referral code. Photon publishes a flat 1% with no way to pay less. On identical volume Photon is the more expensive of the three, and it is the one losing share fastest.
What does Photon charge on BNB Chain and Base?+No published schedule was found for either deployment. Photon's BNB Chain and Base terminals exist and share the same account system as the Solana one, but their fee pages are not part of the documented set. Assume parity with the Solana 1% only as a working guess, not as a confirmed figure, and check in the interface before you trade size on either.
Are there withdrawal fees on Photon?+None are documented. Photon's fee pages list no withdrawal charge and no deposit minimum, and state that wallet-to-wallet transfers are not taxed. You still pay ordinary Solana network costs on any transfer, which are small but nonzero.
## Cite this page
These figures are free to quote. Copy the citation or the link below.
Plain-text citation
PhotonGuides. "Photon Trading Fees Guide." Published August 6, 2026, updated August 6, 2026. https://photonguides.com/guides/feesCopy
HTML link
Photon Trading Fees Guide, PhotonGuidesCopy
Embed the fee comparison table
Solana trading terminal fees (each platform's own documentation)
| Terminal | Headline fee | Best achievable | Source |
|---|
| Photon | 1% buy and sell | 1% (no discount published) | Official docs |
| Axiom | 1% | 0.75% + 0.25% SOL cashback, 10% off via referral | Official docs |
| GMGN | 1% | 0.70–0.90% with referral | Official docs |
| BONKbot | 1% | 1% with up to 25% cashback | Official docs |
| Trojan | ~1% | ~0.9% (widely quoted) | Not published |
| Jupiter | 0–10 bps | 0 bps; up to 50 bps on tokens under 24h old | Official docs |
Source: Photon Trading Fees Guide, PhotonGuides. Rates read 2026-08-06.
Copy
The attribution line is part of the snippet. Please keep it.
### Methodology and reuse
The Photon rates on this page are the flat 1% buy and sell fee quoted verbatim from Photon's own documentation, alongside the user-set priority fee and Jito bribe that are paid to validators rather than to Photon. They were read from the [official Photon fee documentation](https://pies-organization.gitbook.io/photon-trading/photon-on-sol/photon-fees-sol) on August 6, 2026 and re-verified against the live app. Exchanges change their schedules, so treat any figure older than that date as needing a fresh check. The date above is the one to compare against.
You may republish these figures with attribution and a link to [https://photonguides.com/guides/fees](https://photonguides.com/guides/fees).
Cost Quick Reference
Photon on Solana
Buy fee1%
Sell fee1%
Round trip2% minimum
Volume tiersNone
Referral discountNone published
Priority fee & bribeYours, not Photon’s
### Know the Number Before You Fund
Photon takes 1% on the way in and 1% on the way out, with or without a referral link. If that suits how often you trade, our link costs you nothing extra and keeps these pages updated.
[Open Photon](https://photon-sol.tinyastro.io/@Concept211)
[Fees11 min
### Photon Fees Explained (2026): The Real Cost of Every Trade
Photon charges a flat 1% on every buy and sell, straight from its docs. Here is what that costs over 10, 50 and 100 round trips, and what is not a Photon fee.](https://photonguides.com/guides/fees/photon-fees-explained)