# 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.

Source: https://photonguides.com/guides/fees/photon-fees-explained

[Photon's](/ecosystem/what-is-photon) fee schedule is one line long, and almost every page written about it gets the surrounding
context wrong. The platform charges **1% of the SOL amount on every buy and every sell**. That is the
whole schedule. No tiers, no volume breakpoints, no published referral discount, and no documented
history of it ever being anything else.

What gets muddled is everything sitting next to that 1%. Priority fees, Jito bribes, network fees and
slippage all show up on your transaction, all reduce what you keep, and none of them are Photon fees.
This page separates them, quotes the source for each number, and then does the arithmetic on what a 2%
round trip actually does to an account over a hundred trades.

*Disclosure: this site carries referral links to Photon. Signing up through them costs you nothing extra,
because Photon publishes no referral discount and applies no surcharge either.*

Photon takes 1% in and 1% out. A round trip that ends flat before fees still loses you 1.99% of the
balance, and the token has to move up about 2.03% before the trade breaks even. Everything else on your
transaction receipt, the priority fee and the Jito bribe especially, is set by you and paid to somebody
other than Photon.

## What Photon actually charges

Straight from Photon's own GitBook, the Solana fee page reads:

> "Photon fees are collected in SOL and it is 1% of the initial token used for every buy and sell
> transaction."

You do not have to take our word for it. Here is that page as Photon publishes it:

One detail that page carries and no competitor mentions: it is stamped **last updated two years ago**. The 1% is not a recent repricing, and there is no fee history to compare it against, because this is the only fee schedule Photon has ever published.

The docs give two worked examples, and they are worth reading closely because they show which side of
the trade the fee attaches to:

- A **5 SOL buy** incurs a **0.05 SOL fee**.
- **Selling 100 tokens that generate 1 SOL** incurs a **0.01 SOL fee**.

So on the buy, the 1% comes off the SOL you spend. On the sell, it comes off the SOL your tokens
generate. That asymmetry is why a round trip costs slightly more than a naive "1% plus 1%" reading
suggests once you account for the sell fee landing on your exit proceeds. More on that below.

Two more things the docs settle:

- **Wallet-to-wallet transfers are not taxed.** Moving SOL between your own addresses does not trigger
  the 1%. Only buys and sells do.
- **The Ethereum-side docs state the same 1%.** Photon's ETH deployment now redirects, so treat that
  page as legacy, but it is consistent rather than contradictory.

And four things the docs do **not** contain:

| Item | Status in Photon's documentation |
|---|---|
| Volume tier discounts | None documented |
| Withdrawal fees | None documented |
| Fee change history | None documented |
| Published fee schedule for the BNB and Base deployments | None found |

Source for all of the above: Photon's [Solana fee page](https://pies-organization.gitbook.io/photon-trading/photon-on-sol/photon-fees-sol)
and its [Ethereum fee page](https://pies-organization.gitbook.io/photon-trading/photon-on-eth/photon-fees).
You can open the terminal itself at [photon-sol.tinyastro.io](https://photon-sol.tinyastro.io/@Concept211)
and check the SOL deducted on your next fill against the number above.

### The referral discount that does not exist

You will find pages claiming Photon costs 0.9% with a [referral code](/referral). That figure is not in Photon's
documentation. There is no referral or affiliate page in the GitBook at all, and it does not appear in
the docs index. Independent competitor research reaches the same conclusion: no published Photon
referral tier exists.

What Photon does document is a [**Points Leaderboard**](/ecosystem/photon-token-airdrop) on the ETH side, where referring someone who then
trades earns you points, and the top hundred point holders receive a share of a weekly jackpot. That is
a points mechanic, not a discount on your own trading fee. Our referral page covers what is
and is not verifiable about it.

The practical read: assume you pay 1%. If somebody quotes you 0.9%, ask them for the Photon-authored
page it comes from, because there isn't one.

## What is not a Photon fee

This is the section most competing pages skip, and skipping it makes Photon look either cheaper or more
expensive than it is depending on which way the author leaned.

When you submit a trade on  Solana through Photon, several separate charges can
apply. Only the first goes to Photon.

**1. Photon's platform fee.** 1% of the SOL amount, collected in SOL, on the buy and again on the sell.

**2. The priority fee.** Extra SOL paid to Solana validators to get your transaction included faster.
Photon exposes this in Settings and inside each of the S1, S2 and S3 presets, and limit and DCA orders
carry their own per-order priority fee. You choose the number. Photon does not receive it.

**3. The Jito bribe.** A payment to Jito validators to encourage them to pick your transaction up. Also
user-configured, also not revenue for Photon. Photon's **Smart-MEV Protection** determines how the bribe
is routed rather than how large it is:

| Mode | Routing rule |
|---|---|
| Fast Mode | Bribes under 0.001 SOL go direct to Jito; larger bribes route via Bloxroute |
| Secure Mode | Same logic, with the threshold set at 0.002 SOL |
| Default Speed | Standard priority and bribe handling |
| Auto Speed | Adjusts priority fee and bribe automatically from recent successful transactions |

Source: Photon's [Smart-MEV Protection](https://pies-organization.gitbook.io/photon-trading/photon-on-sol/smart-mev-protection)
and [Settings](https://pies-organization.gitbook.io/photon-trading/photon-on-sol/settings) pages. The
[trading guides](/guides/trading) go into how the presets interact with these settings.

**4. The Solana base network fee.** Charged by the network per signature. Small enough that it rarely
changes a decision, but it is the reason a wallet holding exactly the token you want to sell and no
spare SOL cannot sell it. That failure mode shows up constantly in
[troubleshooting](/troubleshooting), and our [failed transactions guide](/troubleshooting/photon-failed-transactions) walks through the fix.

**5. The venue's own fee.** Photon routes into whatever pool the token lives in. On a fresh launch that
is frequently  PumpSwap, whose fee starts at 1.25% and
tapers toward roughly 0.30% as market cap grows. Photon's 1% stacks on top of that, not instead of it.

**6. Slippage.** Not a fee at all, but the largest cost on thin liquidity. A wide slippage tolerance on
a shallow pool can cost more than every other line item combined.

Total cost of a trade = Photon's 1% + your priority fee + your Jito bribe + the Solana network fee + the
venue's pool fee + slippage. Traders who benchmark terminals on the platform fee alone routinely lose
more to an aggressive preset and a thin pool than the 1% ever took from them. Photon's fee is the
predictable part. The rest is the part you control, and the part that varies most.

## The fee drag math

Because the buy fee comes off what you spend and the sell fee comes off what you receive, a round trip
does not cost exactly 2%. Start with a balance of B. The buy takes 1%, leaving 0.99B deployed into the
token. If the position exits flat, it generates 0.99B of SOL, and the sell takes 1% of that. You end
with 0.99 x 0.99 = 0.9801 of what you started with.

**Each break-even round trip costs 1.99% of the balance.** And to actually break even, the token has to
rise: you need gross proceeds of B / 0.99 = 1.0101B from an entry of 0.99B, which is a move of
**2.0304%**. Before any priority fee, any bribe, and any slippage.

### Cumulative cost over 10, 50 and 100 round trips

Two ways to read the damage, both on a 5 SOL position, both assuming every trade ends flat before fees:

| Round trips | Fees paid, holding size constant at 5 SOL | Balance left from 5 SOL, compounding | Share of starting balance lost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.10 SOL | 4.9005 SOL | 1.99% |
| 10 | 1.00 SOL | 4.0895 SOL | 18.21% |
| 50 | 5.00 SOL | 1.8302 SOL | 63.40% |
| 100 | 10.00 SOL | 0.6699 SOL | 86.60% |

The middle column is the fee bill if you keep topping the account up to trade a constant 5 SOL: 0.05 SOL
on the buy plus 0.05 SOL on the flat sell, ten times, is 1 SOL. The third column is what happens if you
just let the balance ride, which is closer to how most memecoin accounts actually work: 5 x 0.9801^n.

At a hundred round trips, a trader who picked tokens exactly as well as a coin flip has handed over
**86.6% of the account** without ever being wrong about a single trade. Photon's own user complaints
about fee drag are describing this table.

### The win rate you need

Fees also raise the win rate you need to stay level, and they raise it most for traders taking small
moves. Modeling a trader who rolls the full balance into each trade and
takes symmetric wins and losses, the geometric break-even win rate looks like this:

| Typical move captured | Break-even win rate, zero fees | Break-even win rate after 1% in and 1% out | Extra hurdle |
|---|---|---|---|
| +10% / -10% | 52.50% | 62.52% | +10.02 points |
| +20% / -20% | 55.03% | 59.99% | +4.96 points |
| +50% / -50% | 63.09% | 64.92% | +1.83 points |

Read the first row twice. A scalper working 10% moves needs to be right **62.5%** of the time on Photon
to stand still, against 52.5% with no fees. The 1% each way is a ten point handicap on that style. A
trader holding for 50% moves barely notices it.

That is the honest answer to "is Photon expensive": it depends entirely on your average holding period
and target move. High-frequency flipping on a 1% platform fee is close to unplayable. Taking a handful
of larger positions a week, the fee is a rounding error next to your entry quality.

These numbers assume no priority fee, no bribe and no slippage, so treat every one of them as a floor.

The 1% scales with turnover, not with how much capital you hold or how long you hold it. Cutting your
round trip count in half cuts your fee bill in half. No setting inside Photon does that for you.

## How Photon's 1% compares in 2026

Fee claims in this category are mostly copied between review sites without a source. Here is the cohort
with each figure marked by where it actually comes from.

| Platform | Headline fee | Discount path | Source quality |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Photon** | 1% buy and 1% sell | None published | Official docs |
| Axiom | 1%, tiering down to 0.75% at Champion level | 0.25% SOL cashback, plus a further 10% off via referral | Official docs |
| GMGN | 1% handling fee | 0.70% to 0.90% with a referral code (10% to 30% off) | Official docs |
| Trojan | Around 1%, best achievable around 0.9% | Referral-linked | Not in official docs, secondary sources only |
| BONKbot | 1% | Up to 25% cashback | Official docs |
| Jupiter | 0 to 10 bps, up to 50 bps on tokens under 24 hours old | n/a | Official docs |

 [**Axiom**](/compare/photon-vs-axiom) is the one that matters most, because it is
where Photon's users went. Its published schedule tiers down to 0.75% and pays 0.25% SOL cashback on top,
with an additional 10% off through a referral. That is a cheaper round trip than Photon's flat 2%, and it
is documented rather than rumored. Our sister site
[axiompedia.com](https://axiompedia.com) covers Axiom's tier structure in detail, and the
[comparison cluster](/compare) here runs the head-to-head from Photon's side.

 **GMGN** documents 1% reducible to 0.70% to 0.90% with a
referral code. Note that some review sites quote GMGN at 1.5%. That number contradicts
[GMGN's own fee documentation](https://docs.gmgn.ai/index/gmgn-fees-settings) and should not be used.

 **Trojan** is widely quoted at 1%, with 0.9% via
referral. We could not find a fee schedule page in Trojan's own documentation, so that figure is
secondary and we are labeling it as such rather than presenting it as confirmed.

**Bloom, Sigma, Dexcelerate and Slerf Tools have no DefiLlama fee adapter.** Searching the obvious slugs
returns nothing, which means their revenue figures cannot be independently verified that way. Any fee or
volume number circulating for those four is unconfirmed. Sigma's claim of 0% on Solana in particular
deserves scrutiny: a terminal with no visible protocol revenue is monetizing somewhere else, whether
through spread, order flow or a priority fee markup.

Photon's position in this table is the uncomfortable one. It charges the category's standard headline
rate and is the only major terminal here with no route to paying less.

## What the revenue collapse says about the fee

Photon is a real business with real numbers attached, and those numbers are public.
 [DefiLlama's](https://defillama.com/protocol/photon)
fee adapter for Photon (slug `photon`, protocol id 4981) has tracked it since launch. Pulled 2026-08-06
from `api.llama.fi/summary/fees/photon`:

| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Lifetime gross fees | $440,842,744 |
| Peak month (January 2025) | $84,588,376 |
| Trailing 30 days | $507,610 |
| Trailing 24 hours | $18,578 |
| 30-day change | -28.1% |
| Share of the named terminal cohort's 30-day fees | 1.26%, 7th place |

Photon launched in January 2024, ramped hard through that year, peaked in January 2025 at roughly $84.6M
of monthly fees, and now runs around half a million dollars a month. That is a drawdown of about **99.4%
from peak**. Over the same stretch, Axiom took 55.3% of the cohort's 30-day fees and GMGN took 23.0%.

The flat 1% is not the only reason, but it is a large one. Traders in this category are price sensitive
and mobile, the switching cost between web terminals is close to zero, and the two platforms that took
Photon's share both publish a way to pay less. Photon answered with the same rate it launched with.

None of that means the terminal stopped working. It processes trades, the Memescope and order tooling
are intact, and there is $440M of lifetime fee revenue behind the operation. It means Photon is no
longer the default choice on price, and pages that present it as the cheapest option are not reading the
same documentation everyone else can.

## Cutting your actual cost on Photon

You cannot negotiate the 1%. You can change everything around it.

**Trade less, size more.** This is the only lever that moves the number much. The fee is proportional to
turnover, not to time held. Twenty round trips a week at 5 SOL costs 2 SOL in platform fees. Five round
trips at 20 SOL costs the same 2 SOL, and gives you four fewer chances to be wrong.

**Stop paying for speed you do not need.** The priority fee and bribe are yours to set. On an illiquid
launch where inclusion order decides the fill, paying up is rational. On an established pool with deep
liquidity, an aggressive preset is money spent on nothing. Auto Speed exists precisely so you are not
guessing, since it adjusts from recent successful transactions rather than from a number you picked once
and forgot. The trading guides walk through configuring S1, S2 and S3 for different
situations.

**Treat slippage as a cost line, not a setting.** Set a 20% tolerance on a shallow pool and you have
written a blank check to whoever is on the other side. Check pool depth before you widen it.

**Do not round-trip through a transfer.** Wallet-to-wallet moves are untaxed, so consolidating across
your wallets does not cost you the 1%. Selling in one wallet to buy in another does.

**Count the pool fee.** On a fresh PumpSwap launch you are paying Photon's 1% plus the venue's fee plus
your bribe. Established tokens on deeper pools are cheaper all-in, which the [markets](/markets) pages
can help you identify.

Photon's 1% is fixed and easy to predict. The variable costs sitting next to it are where most traders
actually lose money, and every one of those is under your control in Settings.

## The verdict

Photon's 1% on every buy and every sell is documented, unambiguous, and applied the same way to everyone.
There are no tiers to chase, no referral code that shaves it down, and no hidden withdrawal charge
waiting at the exit. In a category full of unsourced numbers, that clarity counts for something.

It is also, in 2026, simply more expensive than the alternatives that publish a discount path. If you
turn over your balance dozens of times a month, the arithmetic above decides your year. If you take a
few considered positions and hold them through real moves, the 1% is a cost you will barely notice next
to your entry timing.

Read the fee page, run your own round trip count through the table, and pick accordingly. If you are new
to the platform, [getting started](/guides/getting-started) covers the signup and the one-time private
key reveal, [security](/security) covers verifying you are on the real domain rather than a clone, and
the rest of the [fee guides](/guides/fees) go deeper on each cost line. The full
[guide library](/guides) and [about page](/about) explain how this site sources its numbers.

## FAQ

### How much does Photon charge per trade?

One percent of the SOL amount on every buy and every sell, per Photon's own documentation. A 5 SOL buy incurs a 0.05 SOL fee. Selling tokens that generate 1 SOL incurs a 0.01 SOL fee. Wallet-to-wallet transfers are not taxed.

### Does Photon have fee tiers or a referral discount?

No. Photon's documentation contains no volume tiers, no referral discount, no withdrawal fee schedule and no record of past fee changes. The 0.9 percent referral rate that circulates on review sites is not sourced to anything Photon published, so treat it as unverified rather than as a rate you can rely on.

### Are priority fees and Jito bribes part of Photon's 1%?

No. Priority fees go to Solana validators and bribes go to Jito validators. You set both yourself in Photon's Settings, per preset or per order. They are real costs to you, but they are not Photon platform fees and Photon does not collect them.

### What does a round trip on Photon actually cost?

About 2 percent before slippage, priority fees and bribes. Because the sell fee applies to your exit proceeds rather than your entry, a token has to rise roughly 2.03 percent before a round trip breaks even on Photon's fees alone.

### Is Photon's flat 1% competitive in 2026?

No. Axiom's published schedule tiers down to 0.75 percent with SOL cashback, and GMGN documents a 0.70 to 0.90 percent range with a referral code. Photon has no discount path at all, which is one reason its fee revenue has fallen roughly 99 percent from its January 2025 peak.