Three different things get called free
Search for a free Solana sniper bot and you get 3 categories of result with almost nothing in common. Telling them apart before you download anything saves a lot of trouble.
- 1Open source repositoriesReal code, usually on GitHub, usually written by 1 person scratching their own itch. The licence is free and the code is readable, which is exactly what you want. Everything around it costs money or time.
- 2Free tiers on paid botsA hosted bot that lets you run without paying, with limits somewhere. Sometimes the limit is honest and sometimes the free tier takes a percentage of every fill, which makes it the most expensive option on the page.
- 3Wallet drainers wearing a bot's clothesAn executable, a browser extension or a Telegram bot that asks for a seed phrase or a signature and empties the wallet. These are common enough in this search term that the section below is dedicated to them.
Only the first category is genuinely worth your attention, and only if you can code. Most of this page is about what that first option really costs, because the number isn't zero and it's rarely written down anywhere.
Every launchpad you support is a program that can change under you. These pages cover what each one asks of a bot:
- Pump.fun sniper botthe original curve and what changes at graduation
- LetsBonk sniper botBonk.fun on LaunchLab rails, graduating near 85 SOL
- LaunchLab sniper botRaydium's configurable curves, read per launch
- Bags sniper botMeteora curves and a royalty that never stops
- Believe sniper botthe venue that charges you for arriving first
- Boop.fun sniper bota 400 SOL curve and a 5% airdrop at graduation
What a self-hosted sniper actually needs
A sniper bot is 4 systems pretending to be 1 program, and cloning a repository gives you the fourth one only.
| Piece | What it does | Can you get it free? |
|---|---|---|
| RPC connection | Delivers program logs in the slot they land and submits your transactions | Public endpoints exist and are rate limited, shared and too slow for this |
| Always on host | Keeps the process alive while you sleep, restarts it when it dies | Free tiers exist and usually sleep, which is the one thing you cannot allow |
| Program decoders | Turns each launchpad's instructions into something you can screen | Free in the repo, expensive to keep correct |
| Screening and exits | Decides what to buy and closes the position without you | This is the part most repos barely have |
That last row is where most free bots quietly end. Plenty of repositories detect a mint and fire a buy competently, then stop. Your position sits there with no take profit, no stop loss and no 30 minute time cap, so the automation covered the easy half and left you watching a chart at 3 in the morning anyway.
Where the money actually goes
Vendor prices change, so we won't quote them and you should check them yourself. Naming the line items is more useful anyway, because those 4 don't change and most comparisons leave them out entirely.
- A dedicated RPC endpoint. Public endpoints are shared and rate limited, so you see logs late and land transactions late. Paid Solana node plans bill by request volume, and a sniper watching 10 launchpads across a 400 millisecond slot is a high volume application by design.
- A websocket subscription that stays up. Log subscriptions are the expensive part of most node plans, and they're the only way to see a mint in the slot it happens rather than 1,000 milliseconds later.
- A small server that never sleeps. Cheap, but not 0, and free hosting tiers that suspend on idle are worse than useless, because they suspend exactly when nothing has happened for 20 minutes.
- Your time. This is the line item people forget and the one that ends most self-hosted projects.
One comparison is worth doing before you decide. Add up what a fast endpoint plus a host costs you monthly, convert it to SOL at whatever the price is when you read this, and put it next to a 1 SOL plan. For plenty of people those 2 numbers land close enough that the decision comes down to whether you enjoy maintaining infrastructure, which is a perfectly good reason to pick either one.
Those numbers miss the failure mode entirely. A hosted engine that breaks is somebody else's incident at 2 in the morning. A self-hosted one that breaks at 2 in the morning is yours, and it usually breaks during exactly the kind of market activity you built it for.
The maintenance treadmill
One thing never makes it into a readme. Launchpads ship changes, and when they do, a bot that decodes their instructions stops working.
A new program version, a changed account layout, a renamed instruction, a migration to a different AMM at graduation: any 1 of those 4 turns a working sniper into a process that logs errors quietly and buys nothing. No alert arrives. You notice a week later that the log is empty, and by then you've paid for a node connection that watched nothing.
Ten launchpads means 10 of those relationships to keep current. Add the 26 AMMs and 3 routers you follow after graduation and you're maintaining 39 integrations as a side project, forever, in a market that changes faster than most software you've worked on.
Abandoned repositories are common here for exactly that reason. Look at the last commit date before you clone anything. A sniper bot untouched for 6 months isn't stable software. It's software that stopped tracking a moving target, and the launchpads it decodes have almost certainly moved.
The part most repositories get wrong
A sniper bot has to sign transactions without you, which means it holds a private key. How a repository handles that key is the fastest way to judge how seriously it was built.
| Pattern | What it means | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Key pasted into a config file | Plaintext on disk, often committed by accident | Common, and the reason so many keys leak through public repositories |
| Key in an environment variable | Plaintext in the process and in your shell history | Better, still readable by anything running as your user |
| Key encrypted at rest with a passphrase | Needs a human to unlock after every restart | Safer, and awkward for something that must restart unattended |
| Key never leaves a separate signer | The bot asks a signing service rather than holding the key | Rare in free repos, and the only pattern that genuinely limits the blast radius |
Whichever of those 4 patterns you end up with, 1 rule holds. Fund a wallet that exists only for this, keep it topped up rather than loaded, and never point a bot at the wallet holding everything else you own. That applies just as much to us as it does to a repository you found last night.
Check 1 more thing before you run anything: whether the code sends the key anywhere. Search the repository for network calls near the key handling. A legitimate sniper reaches an RPC endpoint and nothing else, so any request to an unfamiliar domain is worth understanding before you fund the wallet.
What free tiers usually cut
Hosted bots with a free tier are a different proposition. The infrastructure problem is solved and the question becomes what got removed to make the price zero.
- Screening. The most common cut, because it's invisible from the outside. A free tier running 2 checks, mint authority and freeze authority, does nothing at all on a Pump.fun launch, where the program revokes both on every single token.
- Exits. Take profit sometimes survives, trailing stops and liquidity triggers usually do not, and those are the two that protect a position rather than close it.
- Speed. Free users get the shared queue and paying users get the good one, which is legitimate and worth knowing before you conclude the bot is slow.
- Nothing, because it takes a percentage instead. A free tier charging 1% per trade isn't free, and at 200 round trips a month on 0.25 SOL entries it costs more than a 1 SOL plan.
None of that makes free tiers bad. It makes them a way to see an interface rather than a way to trade. If you use one, read what it screens before funding anything, and check whether the fee just moved from a subscription line into your fills.
How to spot a wallet drainer
This search term attracts them, so being specific about the pattern beats being vague about the risk. Five signs, any 1 of which is enough to walk away.
- It asks for a seed phrase or recovery words. There is no legitimate reason, ever, for any trading tool to want those. A signing wallet needs one key, not the phrase that generates all of them.
- It's a downloadable executable with no readable source. A sniper bot is a few thousand lines of readable code, so a compiled binary you can't inspect is asking for a lot of trust for something that could have been a repository.
- It asks you to approve a transaction to activate, verify or unlock. Connecting a wallet costs nothing and signs nothing. A required approval before you have traded anything is the drain itself.
- It arrived in your direct messages. Nobody legitimate opens a conversation with you about a bot. This is worth repeating because it is how most of these actually reach people.
- It promises a return. A guaranteed percentage, a doubling, a no loss claim. Software that could do that would not be given away in a Telegram group.
When free is genuinely the right answer
Rather than pretend the paid option suits everyone, we'll say this plainly. Self-hosting is the better choice for 4 kinds of people.
- You can read and modify the code, so a broken decoder is an afternoon rather than a dead end.
- You already run infrastructure for something else, so the node and the host are marginal costs rather than new ones.
- You want a strategy nobody sells. Custom entry logic, a private signal source, a rule that only makes sense for your own thesis.
- You care more about the key never leaving your machine than about anything else on the list. That is a legitimate preference and no hosted engine can offer it.
The opposite case is just as clear. If you can't fix the code, a free bot isn't cheaper than a paid one. It's a slower way to find out that it stopped working 3 weeks ago. Somebody has to maintain 10 launchpad integrations, watch a node connection and keep the exit logic correct, and paying for a bot is paying for that person to be somebody other than you.
Our own plans start at 1 SOL a month with 0% taken from a trade, and that's the number to weigh against a node plan plus a host plus your evenings. If it favours self-hosting for you, do that. It's a better outcome than paying for something you'd have enjoyed building.
Questions people ask
These come up in the ticket queue often enough to answer once, properly. If yours is not here, send it over and it probably ends up on this page.
Yes, in the sense that open source ones exist and the code costs nothing. Running one is not free: a fast RPC connection, a host that never sleeps and ongoing maintenance are all real costs, and the last one is usually the largest.
Key takeaways
- Open source Solana snipers are real and the code genuinely costs nothing.
- The cost is a fast RPC connection, a host that never sleeps, and the hours spent re-decoding launchpad programs.
- Most free repositories automate the entry and stop, leaving positions with no take profit, stop loss or time cap.
- Check key handling before anything else. A plaintext key in a config file is how keys leak through public repositories.
- A free tier that charges a percentage per fill is not free, and for an active trader it is often the most expensive option.
- Self-hosting is the right answer if you can fix the code, already run infrastructure, or want the key never to leave your machine.