Crypto Profit Calculator
Crypto profit is what you sold for minus what you paid, after the fee is deducted on both the buy and the sell. Quoting the price difference alone overstates the result, because two fees and any spread come out before the money is yours.
What the trade actually returned
Defaults are half a coin bought at 30,000 and sold at 45,000 on a venue charging 0.5% a side.
The fee is applied to the buy and to the sell, which is why the breakeven price sits above the buy price rather than on it. Withdrawal and network fees are not included — those are charged per transfer, not per trade.
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How the number is built
The gross move is the easy part. The number that reaches your account is the gross move minus a fee charged when you bought and a second fee charged when you sold.
Profit = (sell × amount × (1 − fee)) − (buy × amount × (1 + fee))
The plus sign in the second half is the one people drop. You did not pay the buy price — you paid the buy price and the fee on it, and that is the figure the return is measured against.
A worked example
Take the defaults: half a coin bought at 30,000 and sold at 45,000, at 0.5% a side.
The buy costs 30,000 × 0.5 = 15,000, plus 75 in fees, so 15,075 leaves the account.
The sell returns 45,000 × 0.5 = 22,500, minus 112.50 in fees, so 22,387.50 arrives.
The profit is 7,312.50 and the return on what you laid out is 48.51% — against a headline price move of 50%.
That 1.49-point gap is the whole point of the calculator. It is small on a 50% winner and it is decisive on a 2% one, because the fee does not scale with how good the trade was.
Breakeven is above your entry
On the defaults, breakeven is 30,301.51, not 30,000. To recover both fees the price has to rise about 1.01% before you are level, and every fraction below that is a loss no matter how the chart looks.
The formula is buy × (1 + fee) ÷ (1 − fee). It rises quickly with the fee rate: at 1% a side the breakeven is 30,606, at 2% it is 31,224.
Which is why short holding periods and high fee venues combine badly. A strategy that turns over weekly at 0.5% a side is paying roughly 52% of the position in fees over a year, and that is before a single trade is judged right or wrong.
What sits on top of the fee
The spread is a second cost and it is not on the fee schedule. On this site’s shared series the round trip measures 0.0098 — about 2% of the median bar range of 0.493 — and it exceeds 10% of the bar on 15 of 576 bars. In a thin crypto book at an illiquid hour, that share is larger.
A sale is also generally a disposal for tax, including a swap of one coin for another, which many people do not treat as a sale at all. This calculator does not model that and cannot — the treatment depends on where you live. It is educational, not financial or tax advice.
The one lever that reliably reduces fee drag is holding longer. The same 1% round trip against a 3% move is a third of the result; against a 40% move it is negligible. Nothing about the fee changed — the denominator did.
The original data
Of the 24,971 unique videos in research/search-study-corpus.jsonl, 6 have an instruction-shaped
title about crypto profit, at a median of 155,946 views across 6 channels — and 0% of them are
calculator-shaped. That is the second highest median of any tool subject measured and the coverage
is six videos. Crypto tax appears in 8 at 34,984 and staking yield in 6 at 35,757. The counts come
from site/rank_tools2.py.
155,946 median views across six videos, and not one of them hands the viewer the arithmetic. The demand is for a number and the supply is commentary, which is the pattern behind every tool on this site.
The answer to the question on that chart is no, and the distinction costs people real money. An unrealised position has paid one fee and owes another, has not been tested by the spread on the way out, and can give the whole move back. Profit is what the venue credits you, not what the screen says — and the gap between those two is exactly the second half of this formula.
When it fails
A range is where this arithmetic quietly ruins an account. Price oscillates, a strategy takes many small trades, each is roughly a coin flip, and the fee is charged on every one regardless of outcome. The trades can be individually reasonable and the account still falls, because 1% a round trip compounds against you in a way no single trade ever makes visible.
The second failure is using the maker fee when you paid the taker fee. They are different numbers and a market order pays the higher one.
A third is ignoring the withdrawal fee. It is charged per transfer and it is not in this formula.
A fourth is quoting the gross move. On the defaults that is 50% against a real 48.51%.
A fifth is forgetting the spread. It is a genuine cost and it appears on no statement.
And a sixth is treating a coin-to-coin swap as not a sale. It is two trades, two fees, and in most places a disposal.
Where the fee actually comes from
The fee rate in the calculator is a venue’s number, not a market constant, and it varies by more than most people expect between exchanges and between maker and taker orders. Check the live schedule on whichever venue you use rather than assuming. The venues linked at the foot of this page publish theirs, and the maker and taker figures are usually far apart.
Read the jurisdiction terms before you fund anything — several large venues exclude US persons in their own terms of use, and finding that out after depositing is an expensive way to learn it.
Related
Crypto covers the asset class itself. Trading fees is where the fee input comes from and why maker and taker differ. And spread is the cost that never appears on the schedule.
The habit worth building is quoting yourself the net number from the start. It is very easy to remember a trade as the price difference, because that is the figure on the chart, and then to be quietly confused about why the account does not agree. The account is right. It has paid two fees you did not count.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money. Some links on this page earn a commission if you buy through them. It costs you nothing and it does not decide what appears here or in what order — how these pages are made is set out in our methodology.