True Cost Calculator

Why small bots lose to fees

Every trade pays its costs up front. Buy and sell straight back at the same price, and you get back less than you put in. The gap is the hurdle the trade has to clear before it makes a penny.

• Pool fees come off every swap, on the way in and on the way out.
• Price impact grows with your trade compared with the pool. In a small pool, even $100 moves the price against you, on both legs.
• Network fees are flat, so they swamp tiny trades. A 2p fee is nothing on $100 but 2% on $1.
• The price gap between a small pool and the big exchanges is a hidden cost if your signals come from elsewhere.

Put together, small pools give you a U-shaped cost curve: tiny trades lose to network fees, big ones to price impact. A bot that trades often pays the hurdle every time. A strategy that "wins" by 0.5% a trade before costs is a losing strategy on a pool where the round trip costs 3.6%.

Fee updated 10 Oct 2026 from 0.1% to 0.3% after checking against live router quotes. The Klever presets use 10 Oct 2026 reserves at 0.3% per swap.

The fix isn't a cleverer signal. It's knowing your true cost first, and only testing ideas that can clear it, with realistic costs in the backtest.