How Cheetah Trading Fees Work

The Cheetah platform fee

Every memecoin trade has more than one cost, so it helps to separate what Cheetah charges from what the network and market charge. Cheetah’s own fee is the greater of $0.95 and 0.5% of the trade value. Very small trades pay the floor rather than the percentage. This is the only fee Cheetah itself takes. New to the platform? Start with getting started with Cheetah.

Referrals

A referral does not change what the trader pays. The fee is still the greater of $0.95 and 0.5% of the trade. The referrer earns a share of that fee. There is nothing extra to toggle.

Why network and priority fees are separate

The reason Cheetah’s fee is only part of what you pay comes down to who does the work. Cheetah routes and executes your order, but it is Solana’s validators that actually write the transaction to the chain, and they are paid directly, not through Cheetah. That is why a base network charge and an optional priority fee show up alongside the platform fee: they are the network’s cost, passed through at cost rather than marked up.

The priority fee is the one you have a lever on. Think of it as bidding for blockspace: when the chain is quiet a minimal bid confirms fine, but during a hyped launch, hundreds of traders compete for the same block and a higher bid is what gets your order included rather than dropped. It is conceptually a market, not a fixed toll, which is why no single number can be quoted for it in advance.

Why slippage isn’t a fee at all

Slippage is the easiest cost to misread as a charge, because it comes out of your result, but conceptually it is nothing like a fee. No one collects it. It is simply the gap between the price you were quoted and the price you actually filled at, and it exists because your own order, in a shallow pool, moves the market while it executes. Your slippage tolerance is really a risk setting, not a price: it draws the line past which you would rather the trade fail than fill at a worse number.

How the costs stack up

Put together, a trade’s total is the fixed platform percentage plus two moving, pass-through components: what the network charges to confirm, and whatever the market takes in slippage. The first is knowable in advance; the last two shift with congestion and liquidity, which is why the honest way to describe a memecoin trade’s all-in cost is a range, not a single figure. For a concrete worked example with real dollar amounts, and the full side-by-side of every cost, see the fees page.

Keeping costs down

Because the fee is charged per trade, the biggest avoidable cost is frequency. Over-trading, or copying a hyperactive wallet, multiplies the fee far more than the rate itself. Trading with intent beats hunting for a lower percentage. A referral does not lower what the trader pays.

Risk disclosure

Related