Trading costs explained: the price tag is not the price you pay

Buy a plane ticket and the fare is only the start: bags, seat, a fee for paying by card. Trading crypto perpetual futures works the same way. The number on the screen is the fare; what leaves your account is the final bill. Here is what is in that bill, and how we measure it.

Finbasis, Cyprus. Measurements: Hyperliquid and Bitget, 162 coins, 12–26 October 2026 (order books) and 18 July–27 October 2026 (funding).

Three costs hidden in every trade

1 · The toll

The fee

The exchange charges a percentage every time you buy or sell. Opening and closing a position means paying it twice. It is the easiest cost to see, and for big coins it is almost the whole story.

2 · The queue

Slippage (price impact)

Prices are not one number; they are a ladder. A bigger order climbs more rungs, and each rung costs a little more. Traders call the gap between the price they expected and the price they got slippage. The part caused by climbing the ladder is price impact.

3 · The rent

Funding

A perpetual futures contract never expires, so exchanges keep it in line with the spot price using a small payment between traders. Hold a position and you either pay that rent or receive it.

The ladder: why a bigger order costs more per dollar

Every exchange keeps an order book: a list of people waiting to sell, each at their own price, cheapest first. When you place a market order you say “buy now, at whatever it takes”. You take the cheapest seller first, then the next cheapest, until your order is filled. Think of buying apples from stalls at a market: the first stall sells at the lowest price, but only so many kilos. Need more, and you walk to the next stall.

A $2,000 buy order fills level 1 and level 2. Half at 100.00, half at 100.04: you paid 100.02 on average. The gap between that and the “middle of the market” (halfway between the best buy and the best sell price) is the price impact. A bigger order reaches level 3 and the average rises further.

Slippage and price impact: what is the difference?

Slippage is the everyday trader’s word for the gap between the price you expected and the price you actually got. It has two sources. The first is the size of your order climbing the ladder: that part is the price impact, and it is the part we measure. The second is time: between pressing “buy” and the fill, the ladder can move, and in a fast market it moves a lot. We do not measure that part, so real slippage can be larger than the numbers on this site.

That is why the same coin can be cheap to trade with $500 and noticeably dearer with $50,000, and why a thin coin costs more than Bitcoin even when the fee is identical.

Market order or limit order?

The numbers above describe a market order (also called a taker order): you take whatever is on offer right now, so you pay the taker fee and the price impact. A limit order (a maker order) works the other way: you name your price and wait in the queue until someone trades with you. It usually pays a lower fee (on some venues even a rebate) and has no price impact, but there is a catch: it may not be filled, and if the price runs away, you are left behind.

Our published tables use market orders on both legs, because that is the cost we can measure from the order book. In the calculator you can switch the entry, the exit or both to a limit order and type in your own fees; it then shows the cost if the order is filled. How likely that is, we do not measure.

The rent: what funding is

A perpetual contract has no end date. To stop its price drifting away from the real coin price, the exchange makes one side pay the other at regular intervals: traders who bet on a rise (longs) pay traders who bet on a fall (shorts), or the other way round, depending on the market. This payment is funding. Hyperliquid settles it every hour; Bitget every 4 or 8 hours depending on the contract.

It looks tiny each time. Over a month it adds up. That is why we show it separately: over a month it can be larger than the trading cost itself.

How we measure it

We look at the real ladder. About every five minutes, for two weeks, our collector asks each exchange for its public order book for each coin. That gives up to 4,032 snapshots per coin and venue.
We try on a $2,000 order. In each snapshot we work out what a $2,000 market order would pay by walking up (or down) the ladder, and how far that average price is from the middle of the market. That is the order-book part of slippage. No order is actually placed.
We take the middle value. Individual moments can be unusually calm or wild, so for each coin we take the median of all snapshots: the typical case, not the best or the worst one.
We add the fee, twice. Taker fee in, taker fee out, plus the price impact: that is the round trip.
Funding comes from the exchanges’ own history. We use the payments that were actually settled over 102 days. A day counts only when its payments are complete, and a 30-day figure needs at least 25 such days; a coin with fewer than 60 usable days shows no funding for that venue.
We skip coins we cannot measure well. A coin needs at least 100 valid snapshots on both venues, and the book may not be too shallow for $2,000 in more than 10% of them. That leaves 162 coins.

A real example: Bitcoin and a smaller coin

Opening and closing a $2,000 market order, using the published numbers on our coin pages:

Coin and venue	Fee, in and out	Price impact	Round trip	On $2,000
BTC, Hyperliquid	0.090%	0.001%	0.091%	$1.82
BTC, Bitget	0.120%	0.000%	0.120%	$2.40
SUI, Hyperliquid	0.090%	0.019%	0.109%	$2.19
SUI, Bitget	0.120%	0.023%	0.143%	$2.86

For Bitcoin the fee is nearly the whole bill; the ladder is so full that climbing it costs almost nothing. For the smaller coin the ladder starts to matter. Now the rent: holding a long position in Bitcoin for a typical 30 days cost about 0.707% ($14.14 on $2,000) in funding on Hyperliquid and 0.496% ($9.92) on Bitget over the period we measured. That is roughly four to eight times the cost of opening and closing the trade. These are past figures, not a forecast; funding moves with the market and can change sign.

What these numbers cannot tell you

Slippage is modelled, not measured from your fills. We walk the ladder on paper and so capture only the order-book part of slippage. A real order also depends on speed, order type and how fast the market moves, and is often worse in a hurry.
Calm weather only. Two weeks of ordinary markets. Sharp moves, new listings and liquidations are not measured and are usually dearer.
One size. The free page uses $2,000. Larger orders climb further.
Base fees only. Discounts, rebates, VIP levels and referral rates are not included.
Funding is the past. The last 102 days are not a prediction.
Thin books are flagged. Where a Hyperliquid book was shallower than $2,000 in some snapshots, the coin is marked “understated”: the true cost is higher than shown.

Who this is for

If you are starting to trade perpetual futures, this is the missing line in the fee table: what the same trade really costs on two venues. If you run a small team or a business that needs to know its trading costs but does not have a quantitative research department, you can check your own size, order type and fee in the calculator and download the numbers as CSV or JSON, without building a measuring system yourself. Researchers already have their own methods; this page just shows ours so you can judge how far to trust a number.

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Words used on this page

Perpetual futures: A contract that follows a coin’s price and never expires. Traders can use leverage, which is why losses can exceed what people expect.
Taker / market order: An order that takes what is available right now at whatever price it finds. Takers pay the taker fee and the price impact.
Maker / limit order: An order that names a price and waits in the order book. Makers pay the (lower) maker fee and no price impact, but the order may not be filled.
Order book: The public list of waiting buy and sell orders at each price.
Slippage: The gap between the price you expected and the price you got. Part of it is price impact; the rest comes from delay and fast markets.
Price impact: The part of slippage caused by the size of your order: how far the average price you pay is from the middle of the market, according to the order book.
Funding: The regular payment between long and short traders that keeps the contract price close to the coin price.
Basis point (bp): One hundredth of a percent: 1 bp = 0.01%. So 0.091% is 9.1 bp.
DEX / CEX: A decentralised, on-chain exchange (Hyperliquid) or a centralised company exchange (Bitget).

Information only. These are historical measurements of trading costs. They are not investment, legal or tax advice and not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any asset or to use any venue. Perpetual futures can lose more than people expect; decisions are yours. Venue names say where the data comes from; Finbasis is not affiliated with any venue. See the privacy note.