The subscription, and why it is the small number
Subscription is the number every comparison page leads with, because it is the only one that is easy to quote. In this category it ranges from nothing at all to a few SOL a month. Free tools usually take a percentage of each trade instead, which is a subscription with the label removed.
What the subscription buys is access: how many venues are watched, whether private submission is available, how many positions can run at once. It does not buy speed on its own, and it is not the thing that determines whether a month is profitable.
| Model | What you pay | Where the real cost hides |
|---|---|---|
| Free tool | Nothing up front | A cut of every trade, often 1% each way |
| Flat subscription | Fixed SOL per month | Per-trade fees you set yourself |
| Percentage fee | Share of volume | Scales with success, unbounded |
| Self-hosted | Server and RPC | Your time, plus a paid RPC endpoint |
Priority fees: the line that actually scales
Every Solana transaction pays a base fee of 5000 lamports per signature. That part is trivial. The part that is not trivial is the priority fee, which you set yourself as a price per compute unit, and which decides whether your transaction is picked up early in a contested slot or late.
Sniping is the contested case by definition. When a launch draws attention, everyone submitting is raising their compute unit price at the same moment, and the fee needed to be early rises with the crowd rather than staying at some configured constant.
What this means for a monthly number
- A quiet launch may fill at a priority fee small enough to ignore entirely.
- A contested launch can cost multiples of that for the same compute, because you are bidding against everyone else who saw the same mint.
- Your monthly priority fee total is therefore a function of how many contested launches you chase, not of how many days you were subscribed.
This is why a cost estimate that does not ask how you trade is not an estimate. Ten careful entries a week and eighty aggressive ones a week produce completely different bills on identical software.
Jito tips and what you are paying for
A Jito tip is separate from the priority fee. It pays a block engine to include your transaction as part of a bundle, which gets you two things: submission that does not sit in a public queue where it can be read, and all-or-nothing execution of the transactions in the bundle.
For a sniper the first property is the valuable one. A buy sitting visibly in a public path on a thin new pool is information other people can act on before you land.
| Public submission | Jito bundle | |
|---|---|---|
| Extra cost | None beyond priority fee | Tip, set per bundle |
| Visible before landing | Yes | No |
| Partial execution | Possible | All or nothing |
| Worth it when | Quiet launch, thin competition | Contested launch, thin pool |
Slippage is a cost, not a setting
Slippage tolerance is written in the configuration as a percentage, which makes it feel like a safety limit rather than a price. It is a price. On a bonding curve with almost no depth, your own buy moves the curve, and the difference between the quote you saw and the fill you got is money you spent.
It is also charged twice. The sell has the same problem in reverse, and on a shallow pool the exit is usually the worse of the two, because by then you are selling into whatever depth remains.
How to keep it honest
- 1Size against depth, not against your balanceA position that is modest relative to your wallet can still be large relative to a pool holding a few SOL. The pool is what sets your slippage.
- 2Read your fills, not your settingsThe only number that matters is the difference between expected and actual. If you never compare the two, slippage stays invisible in your accounting.
- 3Widen tolerance deliberately, not by defaultA wide tolerance is a decision to accept a worse price in exchange for landing. Sometimes correct, never free.
Failed transactions still take your money
This is the line that surprises people. On Solana, a transaction that fails during execution still pays its fees. You are charged for the attempt, not for the outcome.
Sniping produces failures structurally. You are submitting into a moment where the pool state is changing under you, so slippage checks trip, the pool moves, or the bundle loses its race. Every one of those is a charged attempt.
The practical response is not to avoid failure, which is impossible, but to count it. A bot that reports attempts against fills is giving you the number you need. A bot that reports only wins is not.
A worked month, line by line
The numbers below are an illustrative structure, not a promise or a measurement. They exist to show the shape of the bill, which is the part most cost pages leave out. Your own figures depend entirely on how often you chase contested launches.
| Line | Light month | Active month | Scales with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription | Fixed | Same fixed amount | Nothing |
| Base fees | Negligible | Negligible | Transaction count |
| Priority fees | Small | Often the largest line | Contested launches |
| Jito tips | Zero if unused | Grows with bundles sent | Bundles sent |
| Slippage | Small | Large on thin pools | Position size vs depth |
| Failed attempts | Few | Many | Aggression and fill rate |
Read the right-hand column rather than the middle two. Four of the six lines scale with how you trade and only one is fixed. That is the entire answer to the cost question: the subscription is the number you can look up, and the other four are the number you actually pay.
Where the cost decisions get made in practice
- The full sniper bot guideDetection, screening, execution and exits end to end
- Free Solana sniper botsWhat free actually charges you instead
- How to judge a sniper botThe questions that separate coverage claims from coverage
- Avoiding rug pullsThe cheapest cost saving is the trade you do not take
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.
Subscriptions in this category run from nothing to roughly 5 SOL a month. That figure is the smallest part of the bill for anyone trading actively, because priority fees, Jito tips, slippage and failed attempts all scale with how often you submit.
Key takeaways
- A sniper bot has five cost lines and only one of them is fixed.
- Priority fees rise with competition, so contested launches cost multiples of quiet ones for identical compute.
- A Jito tip is separate from the priority fee and should be a per-launch decision, not a global default.
- Slippage is charged on both the entry and the exit, and the exit is usually worse on a thin pool.
- Failed transactions are charged on Solana, so a low fill rate pays fees on attempts that produced nothing.
- Compare tools on total cost per filled position, never on monthly price alone.