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Fees & costs: make paper fills cost what real fills cost

Free practice has one systematic lie in it: it tells you small entries are cheap. They are not. Priority fees and tips are flat, which means they eat a rounding error on a 5 SOL entry and a meaningful chunk of a 0.1 SOL one. PaperTrench now charges you for them.

A 0.1 ◎ entry, with costs modelled
Entry size0.1000 ◎
Platform fee · percentage−0.0010 ◎
Priority fee · flat, per transaction−0.0012 ◎
Bribe / tip · flat, per transaction−0.0030 ◎
Cost basis on the buy0.1052 ◎

Illustrative figures only. PaperTrench ships every cost at zero — these are yours to set from your own site settings.

Notice what just happened: before the price moved at all, that trade is down about 5%. The chart has to give you 5% just to get you to break even — and you would never have learned that from a simulator that fills for free.

Now do it forty times in a session, which is what a real trench session looks like.

What the settings card models

The full cost of a real fill, not just the headline one:

Quick fill-in presets give rough starting points, but they are starting points and nothing more: your own site settings are the truth. If you are running an aggressive sniper config on Axiom, the numbers to type in are the ones already in your Axiom settings.

As of v2.7.0, a fees profile (Axiom/Padre bot · aggressive sniper · no costs) is switchable straight from the extension popup mid-session, with the numbers pinned by test to match the dashboard's card. The full form stays on the dashboard.

The accounting is honest end to end

The easy version of this feature would subtract a fee from the P&L display and stop. That would produce a number that disagreed with every other number in the product.

Instead, flat costs join the cost basis on buys and reduce net proceeds on sells. Everything downstream inherits them automatically:

One definition of a fill's cost, used everywhere. There is no view in PaperTrench that shows you a pre-fee number next to a post-fee one and leaves you to work out which is which.

The dust exit

A dust exit can genuinely net negative — you paid gas to leave a worthless bag.

That is not an edge case we tolerated; it is the lesson. Getting out of a dead position costs money. There is a size below which closing a bag is not worth the transaction, and the only way to internalise that is to watch it happen to your own balance.

The alternative — a simulator that lets you exit dust for free — trains you to accumulate positions you will pay real money to escape later.

Nothing changes until you opt in

Defaults are zero, so existing wallets behave exactly as they did before. Turning costs on is a deliberate act, and it is the single fastest way to make your paper record resemble a real one.

Patch notes v2.2.0 August 5, 2026

Fees & costs emulation

A new settings card models the FULL cost of a real fill: the platform percentage (as before), plus a flat priority fee (gas) and a bribe/tip per transaction — the costs that dominate small entries and that zero-cost practice quietly ignores. Quick fill-in presets give rough starting points; your own site settings are the truth.

Honest end to end

Flat costs join the cost basis on buys and reduce net proceeds on sells, so per-sell P&L, rounds, the calendar, the equity curve (still exact to the SOL), and the verification chain all include them. A dust exit can genuinely net negative — you paid gas to leave a worthless bag, which is precisely the lesson.

Defaults are zero

So existing wallets change nothing until you opt in.

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