Methodology

How we measure what a trade actually costs

Every number on FeeFloor is the answer to one question: if you sent a market order to this venue right now, at this size, how many dollars would leave your pocket beyond the price of the asset itself? We publish that as a single figure — the all-in cost — and this page explains precisely how each part of it is measured.

The formula

All-in cost = fee + spread + slippage, expressed in basis points of the trade size (1 bps = 0.01%). A 4.00 bps all-in cost on a $100,000 order means the trade costs you $40 on top of the asset’s mid price. Nothing else on the page is editorial: the ranking is this number, sorted ascending.

“All-in” here means all-in for the executionof a single market order — fee, spread and slippage. It deliberately excludes costs that depend on how long you hold or how you move money: funding on perpetuals, borrowing, withdrawal and network fees, and fiat on/off-ramp or conversion spreads. For venues that price from an oracle rather than an order book, FeeFloor does not compute book spread or slippage and reports the protocol cost components that venue’s model exposes.

Fee: verified, never scraped from memory

The fee component is the venue’s published taker or maker rate for its standard account tier. Fee tables are maintained by hand against each venue’s official fee page and re-verified on a schedule — a comparison site that quotes a wrong fee is worthless in a way an ordinary content site is not, so fees are treated as facts to be checked, not values to be recalled.

Spread: half the cross, because that is what you pay

When your market order fills, you cross from the mid price to the best quote on the other side of the book. That costs you half the bid-ask gap — not the whole gap, which is what a round trip would cost. The spread component in every total, and the spread figure displayed in every breakdown, is that half-cross, sampled from the live book at measurement time. Venues with tight, competitive books show spreads well under a basis point; thinner venues can carry more spread than fee.

Slippage: walking the real order book

Slippage is where fee pages stop and real costs continue. For each venue and trade size we take the live order-book depth and simulate filling your entire order against it, level by level. The volume-weighted average price of that simulated fill, compared with the mid price, is the slippage in basis points. It is why the cheapest venue for a $10,000 order is often not the cheapest for $10,000,000: fees are flat, but depth is not. When a book is too thin to absorb the requested size at all, the row is flagged rather than extrapolated.

Oracle-priced venues

A handful of decentralised venues (GMX, Jupiter, Gains, Avantis, Ostium, and similar designs) do not run an order book — they price fills from an external oracle. For these venues zero slippage is structural, not a measurement: your size does not move your fill. They are measured on fee alone, and marked accordingly on their pages.

Referral discounts

Many venues cut their fee when you sign up through a referral link. Where FeeFloor has a live referral code, the discounted fee is applied by default and the original is shown struck through — the toggle in the control panel removes all discounts and shows list prices. Two honesty rules apply: a discount is only ever applied to the fee component (spread and slippage are paid to the market, and no code discounts them), and a discount is never claimed for a link that does not actually carry a working code.

Cadence and caching

Order books are re-sampled continuously and every published number refreshes at least once per minute. Trade sizes snap to fixed buckets ($1K to $10M) so results are comparable across venues and over time. Because books move, the floor moves: the same venue can be cheapest at 14:02 and third-cheapest at 14:03. That is not noise — it is what execution cost actually does.

Limitations

These are estimates of immediate execution cost, not guarantees. Real fills can differ: books change between measurement and your order, some venues apply funding or withdrawal costs outside the scope of this measurement. VIP fee tiers ARE supported in the main table — set your 30-day volume in the control panel — while per-exchange pages show the standard tier. Numbers are measured from European infrastructure; venues that geo-price may quote differently elsewhere.

Sources & further reading

FeeFloor computes its own numbers from live order books, but the concepts and the regulatory context come from primary sources. These are non-affiliate references, offered for verification:

• ESMA registers & databases — the European authority's official registers, including MiCA CASP authorisations (the basis, unverified by us, for our EU filter).
• DefiLlama — perpetual DEX volume — independent DeFi analytics; a useful cross-reference for on-chain venue activity (they rank volume/TVL; we rank cost).
• CoinGecko — exchange directory — broad exchange coverage and reported volume for context on the venues we measure.
• Investopedia — maker vs. taker fees — a plain-language primer on the fee model underlying every venue's schedule.