The Solana Terminal Fee Index: Photon vs Axiom vs GMGN, Normalized

Almost every Solana terminal opens at 1 percent. That is the whole reason the rate cards are useless: they all say the same thing, and the comparison content built on top of them ends up ranking platforms on a number none of them differ on.

Two things do separate them, and no rate card puts them side by side. How far the platform's own documentation lets you push that 1 percent down. And how much of what you pay is a percentage at all, rather than a flat network charge that costs the same whether you trade 0.1 SOL or 100.

Both are below. Platform rates come from each platform's own documentation with the date we read it. Anything derived from those rates is our arithmetic, and it says so at the point where it appears.

The short answer

At a notional size large enough for the platform fee to dominate, the ranking is the rate card, and GMGN is the cheapest terminal at a documented 0.70 percent per side with a referral code, ahead of Axiom at 0.75 percent at its top tier and BONKbot at 1 percent with up to 25 percent cashback. Photon is the most expensive of the group at a flat 2.00 percent per round trip, because it is the only one of the four that publishes no way down at all.

At small notional the ranking inverts into irrelevance. On a 0.1 SOL round trip the flat network cost is a larger share of the trade than the entire difference between the cheapest and most expensive platform here, so the terminal you pick is not what is costing you the money.

And a caveat that belongs in the answer rather than a footnote: Jupiter charges 0 to 10 basis points and beats every terminal in this index on price by an order of magnitude, but it is an aggregator. It gives you execution and no launch feed, so it is only the right answer if discovery is not what you came for.

The index

Round-trip platform cost, normalized. The "per side" column is each platform's own published rate. The round-trip columns are this site's arithmetic, at exactly twice the per-side rate, because every platform here charges the same percentage on the buy and on the sell.

Rates read August 2026. Photon's and GMGN's fee pages are linked; Axiom's, BONKbot's and Jupiter's figures were read from each platform's own documentation but no permanent URL for them is recorded in our source brief, so they are marked official without a link rather than pointed at a secondary write-up. "Not published" means no fee schedule exists in that platform's documentation at all, and those two rows should be read as unverified.

What the round-trip gap is worth

The gap between Photon's 2.00 percent and GMGN's documented 1.40 percent floor is 0.60 percentage points per round trip. That is this site's subtraction, not a claim either platform makes.

It is invisible once. Across twenty round trips recycling the same position, it is roughly 12 percent of the notional, which on a memecoin feed built to produce exactly that pattern of trading is the difference between a flat month and a losing one. This is the arithmetic behind the fee drag section of our main fees guide, applied across platforms rather than across time.

Where the flat costs change the ranking

Platform fees scale with your position. Network costs do not, and that asymmetry is the part no rate card shows.

Solana charges a base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature, which is 0.000005 SOL. On top of it your preset attaches a prioritization fee, and if you use Jito routing, a tip. All three go to validators. No platform in this index receives any part of them, they are identical across every terminal at the same setting, and you configure them yourself.

The table below models a round trip as two transactions and assumes a 0.001 SOL priority fee on each with no Jito tip, which is a mid-range setting rather than a measured one. Every figure in it is this site's model, not an observation, and it moves the moment you change your preset.

Read the last column and the practical rule falls out. Under about 1 SOL of notional, roughly half your cost is a network charge that every terminal shares, so switching platform to save on the rate saves you very little. Over 10 SOL the network charge rounds to nothing and the rate card is essentially your whole cost. The traders for whom Photon's flat 1 percent hurts most are therefore not the small ones, they are the frequent ones trading in size.

Where the terminals disagree on what a fee is

Three platforms can quote "1 percent" and mean three different things, which is why a normalized index has to say what each rate does and does not include before it compares them.

• Photon applies its 1 percent to the initial token used, on every buy and every sell, with the fee collected in SOL. Its documentation gives the worked case directly: a 5 SOL buy incurs a 0.05 SOL fee. Wallet-to-wallet transfers are not charged.
• Axiom publishes a tiered net rate where the reduction arrives as SOL cashback rather than as a smaller charge at the moment of the trade. The gross debit stays 1 percent; the 0.75 percent is what you are left with afterwards. That distinction matters for anyone sizing a position off available balance.
• GMGN publishes a straight reduction to between 0.70 and 0.90 percent applied with a referral code, and it reaches seven chains rather than one, so a per-side rate is not the whole comparison against it.
• BONKbot quotes 1 percent with up to 25 percent cashback, which is the same shape as Axiom's arrangement and lands at a similar effective floor by a different route.
• Jupiter is not a terminal and its 0 to 10 basis points is an aggregator's routing fee, rising to 50 basis points on tokens under 24 hours old.

What this index does not measure

The boundary of this page is wide, and pretending otherwise would undo the point of building it.

Realized slippage is the big one. On a thin launchpad pool it routinely costs more than every platform fee in the table combined. It follows pool depth and your position size rather than which terminal routed the order, and nothing above models it.

Routing quality is the one we would most like to have. Two terminals sending the same order at the same moment can come back with different fills, and that gap is real money in either direction. Measuring it needs simultaneous live orders on funded accounts on each platform. We have not run that.

Nor is execution speed here. The claim that Photon confirms 100 to 300 milliseconds faster than Axiom turns up on several sites with no benchmark and no attribution behind it, so this page neither repeats it nor invents a replacement figure.

MEV outcomes are missing for the same reason: Photon's Smart-MEV Protection and its rivals' equivalents change what a sandwich attempt costs you, and no amount of reading rate cards produces that number.

Which leaves the figure a reader actually wants, a measured all-in cost per platform, as the one thing this page cannot honestly give. That takes funded wallets and real round trips on three platforms. Until somebody runs them, this is published rates and arithmetic over published rates, labeled as such every time.

Methodology and sources

Platform rates were read from each platform's own documentation in August 2026 and are re-read whenever this page is updated. Where no fee schedule exists in a platform's documentation, the row says so and the figure is flagged unverified rather than quietly filled in from a third-party article.

Derived figures are marked in the text. Round-trip percentages are twice the published per-side rate. The gap figures are subtraction. The network-cost model uses Solana's documented 5,000 lamports per signature plus a stated 0.001 SOL priority-fee assumption, two transactions per round trip, and no Jito tip, and it is a model rather than a measurement.

Market-share and revenue context for the same platforms comes from the DefiLlama fees API and is set out with its pull date on the comparison hub. The full standard this site holds every figure to is on the methodology page, and the procedure for reading an individual trade's real cost off a block explorer is in the fees guide.

Cite this page

Quote any figure above with the anchor next to it so a reader can check the derivation rather than take the number on trust.

Related reading: what Photon's flat 1% actually costs over a month of trading, Photon against Axiom on fees and features, and Photon against GMGN on rate and chain coverage.