One trade's fee is too small to notice. The channel that gives you three calls a day gives you ninety chances a month to pay it, and the total is the one number in this arrangement that is known before anything happens.
What is actually charged, and how many times?
A percentage of the position, once when you open it and once when you close it. Both charges are computed on the notional value of the contract, which is the contract size multiplied by the execution price. Your own stake is not the base.
Binance's fee documentation works through it with a regular-tier account. A user buys 1 BTC of the BTCUSDT perpetual with a market order at 10,104 USDT and pays a taker fee of 5.052 USDT. Later the same user sells that 1 BTC with a limit order at 11,104 USDT and pays a maker fee of 2.2208 USDT (Binance Futures Fee Structure & Fee Calculations). Those two figures are 0.05% and 0.02% of the respective notionals, and there are two of them for one trade.
Kraken's published futures schedule sits in the same place: 0.02% maker and 0.05% taker at the lowest volume tier (Kraken fee schedule). Rates differ by venue and by tier, and other exchanges commonly quote a standard taker rate around 0.055%, which we could not confirm from the venue's own page during this run. Read your own account's rate before doing any of the arithmetic below with it.
Three round trips follow from those two numbers, and every trade you take is one of them:
- Maker on both ends: 0.02% + 0.02% = 0.04% of notional.
- Maker in, taker out: 0.02% + 0.05% = 0.07%.
- Taker on both ends: 0.05% + 0.05% = 0.10%.
Which one does following a signal make you?
Usually the expensive one, and the reason is in how the message reaches you.
A maker adds liquidity by resting an order in the book that nobody has yet matched. A taker removes liquidity by hitting an order that is already sitting there. The fee difference exists because exchanges want the book to have something in it.
A signal arrives with a price already printed in it. If you place a limit order at that price and wait, you are the maker. If you look at the chart, see that price has already moved, and press market to get in anyway, you are the taker. The second behaviour is what a message on a phone tends to produce, because the call is only interesting while it is fresh.
The exit works the same way and gets less thought. A take-profit limit resting at the channel's target is a maker fill. A stop, once triggered, is normally a market order, so a stopped-out trade pays the taker rate on the way out. That gives the ordinary shape of a followed trade: maker in on a good day, taker out on a bad one, which is the 0.07% row.
Which ticket produces which fill, and what each one costs in fill probability, is worked through in which order type turns a published entry into a position.
Why does the fee look smaller than it is?
Because it is quoted against the position and paid out of your margin, and leverage separates those two numbers.
Put $100 of margin behind a 20x position and you are holding $2,000 of notional. A 0.05% taker fee on that position is $1.00, which is 1.0% of the $100 you actually committed. Do it on both ends and the round trip costs $2.00, or 2.0% of your margin, from a rate that reads as a twentieth of a percent.
Leverage does nothing to the fee expressed as a share of the position. It multiplies the fee expressed as a share of your stake, by exactly the leverage figure:
| Round trip | Cost, % of notional | At 5x | At 10x | At 20x | At 50x |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maker in, maker out | 0.04% | 0.20% | 0.40% | 0.80% | 2.00% |
| Maker in, taker out | 0.07% | 0.35% | 0.70% | 1.40% | 3.50% |
| Taker in, taker out | 0.10% | 0.50% | 1.00% | 2.00% | 5.00% |
Across our archive, 3,700 of 3,988 parsed signals state a leverage as of 17 August 2026, with a median of 10x and a mean of 16.2x. The bottom-right cell of that table is what a 50x call chased with market orders takes out of the money behind it, before the market has been asked to do anything.
How far does price have to move to break even?
Exactly the round-trip cost, and this is the number worth memorising because it does not move with leverage at all.
A taker round trip costs 0.10% of the position. A price move of 0.10% in your favour produces 0.10% of the position in profit. The two cancel, at any leverage, because both are percentages of the same notional. Strictly the exit fee is charged on the exit notional, which pushes true break-even to 0.10005%, and that fifth decimal is not worth carrying anywhere.
| Round trip | Price move needed to break even | What that move is worth on margin at 10x | At 20x |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.04% | 0.04% | 0.40% | 0.80% |
| 0.07% | 0.07% | 0.70% | 1.40% |
| 0.10% | 0.10% | 1.00% | 2.00% |
Two readings of the same table matter for different reasons. The first column says a trade needs a tenth of a percent of movement before it has returned your costs, whatever multiple you are using. The last two say what that identical tenth of a percent is doing to your balance, which is where leverage lives. Anyone who has decided that fees are negligible has been reading the first column and paying the third.
The related question, what a round trip takes out of the target itself, is a different calculation and it has its own piece: what fees and slippage do to a 2% target.
How many round trips does a channel hand you?
More than most followers estimate, and the spread between publishers is enormous.
Our index holds 3,988 parsed signals from 22 accounts that publish machine-readable calls, as of 17 August 2026. Dividing each account's signal count by the span of days it was active gives a publishing rate:
| Publishing rate, signals per active day | Accounts |
|---|---|
| Above 40 a day | 1 |
| 3 to 6 a day | 7 |
| 1 to 3 a day | 4 |
| Below 1 a day | 10 |
The median account publishes 1.03 calls per active day. Eight of the 22 publish at least three. The busiest produced 1,928 calls across a 42-day span, which is 45.9 a day, and that single account supplies 48.4% of everything in our archive.
One correction before using those figures: three of the 22 accounts republish one feed under three brands, each at 5.4 calls a day. Treating them as one operator gives 20 publishers and a median of 0.90 calls per active day.
Not every call becomes a round trip. Of 3,927 replayed outcomes, 1,958 were cancelled because price reached the target before the published entry ever filled, and 31 more never reached the entry at all. Roughly half of what a channel publishes is therefore something a patient follower never pays a fee on, which is the one part of half the trades never happen that works in your favour.
What does a month of that cost?
Enough to change the answer, and the count matters more than the rate.
Every assumption is stated so you can replace it with your own. The account holds $1,000, and each trade commits $100 of margin at the stated leverage. Fees are standard tier, 0.02% maker and 0.05% taker, with taker fills on both ends. Position size does not change as the balance moves, and slippage and funding are excluded because they have their own pieces.
| Round trips a month | At 5x ($500 notional) | At 10x ($1,000) | At 20x ($2,000) | At 50x ($5,000) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | $10 | $20 | $40 | $100 |
| 45 | $22.50 | $45 | $90 | $225 |
| 90 | $45 | $90 | $180 | $450 |
The bottom right corner is $450 a month of fees against a $1,000 balance. Nothing in that cell depends on whether the channel was right.
Now take one channel at three calls a day, which eight of our 22 accounts clear, and follow it for a month at 20x. That is 90 published calls, and two followers get two different bills:
| How the follower trades it | Round trips | Rate | Notional turned over | Monthly fees | Share of a $1,000 account |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Market order on every call | 90 | 0.10% | $180,000 | $180 | 18.0% |
| Limit at the published entry, limit exit at target | 44 | 0.04% | $88,000 | $35 | 3.5% |
| Limit entry, stopped out at market | 44 | 0.07% | $88,000 | $62 | 6.2% |
The 44 comes from our own fill rate: 49.3% of replayed outcomes reached the published entry. So the patient follower halves the trade count and cuts the rate by more than half again, for a bill roughly a fifth the size.
That saving is real and it is not free. The calls a limit order misses are the ones price ran away from, which our replay shows are disproportionately the calls that reached their target. The cheaper fee schedule buys you a selected subset of the channel's ideas, and the selection was made by the market.
One arithmetic point that is easy to get wrong in the other direction: a six-target ladder does not multiply your exit fee. Each partial exit pays the rate on its own slice, and the slices sum to the position, so six exits at 20% each cost the same as one exit at 100%. What a ladder actually changes is covered in partial take-profit rules.
Where does this sit against the other costs?
Second, and it is the only one of the three that is fully known before you place the order.
| Cost | Known in advance? | Where it is covered |
|---|---|---|
| Slippage between the published price and your fill | No, depends on the book at that second | What fees and slippage do to a 2% target |
| Exchange fees | Yes, printed in your account before you trade | This article |
| Funding on anything held through a settlement | Rate is visible, holding period is not | Funding rates explained |
Fees are the boring one. They are also the one you can compute to the cent for a whole month before subscribing to anything, which makes them the natural first line of the budget.
What happens when you add the subscription?
The two fixed costs land on the same balance in the same month, and together they set the hurdle the channel has to clear.
A commonly quoted floor for a paid Telegram group is $80 a month, and what an $80 subscription costs your account works through what that means against different balances. On the $1,000 account modelled above, it is 8% a month on its own.
Put it beside the fee arithmetic from the same assumptions:
| Follower on a $1,000 account | Fees | Subscription | Total known monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Market orders on 90 calls at 20x | $180 | $80 | $260, or 26.0% of the balance |
| Limit entries, 44 fills, target exits | $35 | $80 | $115, or 11.5% |
Both figures are the cost of participation. They are charged in a losing month and a winning one, and neither appears in any percentage a channel publishes about itself.
What this does not prove
The fee rates here are standard-tier figures from two venues whose own pages we could open in August 2026. VIP tiers, exchange-token discounts, maker rebates and referral arrangements all change them, sometimes by half. A reader on a discounted tier should redo every table above with their own rate, because these tables are arithmetic and not measurement.
Every monetary figure in the monthly tables is hypothetical and follows from the assumptions named beside it: a fixed $100 of margin per trade, a fixed leverage, taker or maker fills as labelled, no compounding and no change of size. Real accounts do none of those things consistently. The purpose of the tables is the shape of the relationship, which is that the bill scales with the number of round trips and with the leverage behind each one.
The publishing rates are computed by dividing each account's parsed signal count by the days it was active, so they describe average intensity while a channel is running and say nothing about bursts. Our archive covers the 22 accounts of 47 in the index whose posts we can parse, three of which are one feed under three brands, and one of which supplies nearly half of the whole corpus. It is not a random sample of the market.
Nothing here recommends a fee tier, a venue, an order type, a leverage or a channel, and nothing here is financial advice. High fees are not evidence of misconduct by anyone. An exchange charging for execution is an exchange doing what it exists to do, and a channel that posts often is not thereby doing anything wrong.
The practical read
Three questions turn a fee schedule into a number you can compare against a subscription price.
What is my actual maker and taker rate, on the venue and tier I am on? How many round trips a month does this channel realistically produce for me, once the calls that never fill are taken out? And at the leverage I use, what share of my balance does that many round trips represent before anything else happens?
The third answer is the one to hold on to, because it is fixed and knowable while everything else about following a channel is neither. Publishing frequency for the channels we can score is on their pages at Signal Providers.
Sources
- Binance Futures Fee Structure & Fee Calculations — opened and read in August 2026. It gives the 0.05% taker and 0.02% maker regular-tier rates for USDⓈ-M futures. It also states that position value is contract size multiplied by execution price. The worked example quoted above is from that page: 1 BTC bought at 10,104 USDT with a 5.052 USDT taker fee, and the same 1 BTC sold at 11,104 USDT with a 2.2208 USDT maker fee.
- Kraken fee schedule — opened and read in August 2026. Futures tier 1 at 0.02% maker and 0.05% taker, used as an independent second venue for the same standard-tier rates.
- Bybit's and OKX's own fee pages returned nothing to the tool used for this run and were not opened. The standard taker rate of about 0.055% quoted on other venues is therefore attributed and not verified here; it would move the taker round trip from 0.10% to 0.11%, and every table above by a tenth.
- ChainRated archive as of 17 August 2026: 3,988 parsed signals and 3,927 replayed outcomes from 22 publishing accounts of 47 indexed. Publishing rates are each account's signal count divided by its active span; leverage figures cover the 3,700 signals stating one. Cancelled outcomes 1,958 and entries never reached 31, giving the 49.3% fill rate used in the monthly tables.
- All monetary figures in the monthly and comparison tables are computed from the stated assumptions, not observed on any account.