Trading Bot ROI Calculator

Most bot marketing talks about returns. This trading bot ROI calculator focuses on the part you can know in advance: costs. A subscription is a fixed monthly bill, and trading fees grow with every order the bot places. Put both next to a realistic return and you find out quickly whether a paid plan makes sense for your balance. If it does not, our guide to free AI crypto trading bots lists the alternatives.

What to enter

• Capital the bot trades: only the money allocated to the bot, not your whole portfolio.
• Subscription: the monthly price of your plan. Use the annual-billing monthly equivalent if you pay yearly.
• Gross monthly return before fees: your assumption for what the strategy makes before any costs. Try several values, including zero and negative.
• Trades per month: count each buy or sell order as one trade. A grid bot doing 30 round trips a month places 60 orders.
• Average trade size: the typical order as a percentage of the bot's capital.
• Fee per trade: your exchange's fee for that order type, for example 0.05% on Pionex spot or 0.1% at many exchanges' base tier.
• Months: how long to compound.

Fee drag: the cost you do not see

Trading fees are charged on the order value, but what matters is how much of your capital they take each month. That is the fee drag:

fee drag (% of capital per month) = trades per month × trade size % × fee %
example: 60 × 10% × 0.1% = 0.6% per month

Another way to see it: 60 orders each worth 10% of capital means your capital turns over six times a month, and you pay the fee on all of it. Over a year, 0.6% a month is about 7.2% of capital before compounding. Halve the fee to 0.05% and the drag halves. Halve the number of trades and it halves again. For high-frequency strategies like dense grids, fee tier is often the single biggest lever. The grid bot profit calculator shows the same effect per grid.

The break-even capital formula

A subscription is a fixed cost, so it hurts small accounts most. The capital at which the strategy's profit after trading fees exactly pays the subscription is:

break-even capital = subscription ÷ (gross monthly return − fee drag)
example: $29 ÷ (3% − 0.6%) = $29 ÷ 0.024 ≈ $1,208

Below that capital, you lose money even if the strategy performs as you hoped. Above it, the subscription becomes a smaller and smaller share of the profit. If the gross return is at or below the fee drag, the denominator is zero or negative and the answer is "never": the strategy loses money on fees alone.

Break-even examples with real subscription prices

The table uses monthly list prices checked on official pricing pages in October 2026 and the default fee drag of 0.6% a month. Returns are assumptions for illustration; no bot guarantees any of them.

Notice how sensitive the result is to the return assumption. Going from 3% to 1% a month multiplies the capital you need by six. Since nobody can promise 3% a month, the 1% column is the safer planning number.

Stoic's balance-based pricing

Stoic AI prices by balance rather than bot count. Starter ($24/mo or $149/yr) covers balances up to $2,500, Plus ($39/mo) up to $5,000 and Pro ($66/mo) up to $10,000. Above $10,000 you pay Pro plus 5% a year on the excess. At $20,000 that is $66 + $41.67 = about $107.67 a month, or 0.54% of capital monthly. At $50,000 it is about $232.67 a month, 0.47%. So Stoic's cost behaves less like a fixed subscription and more like a management fee once balances grow. Enter it as a subscription at your balance level. More in our Stoic AI review.

A year of costs on three account sizes

Here is the calculator's compounding output for 12 months at a 2% gross monthly return and the default 0.6% fee drag, with no subscription (a free plan), $20/mo and $29/mo.

The $1,000 account is the lesson. The same strategy that earns $182 on a free plan loses $195 on a $29 plan. On $10,000 the subscription barely matters. Trading fees, meanwhile, scale with capital at every size, which is why fee tier and trade count deserve as much attention as the plan price.

When free plans win

For most accounts under a few thousand dollars, a free option beats a paid tier on pure maths. The main choices as of October 2026:

Paid plans start to make sense when three things are true: your capital is well above the break-even level at a conservative return, you need a feature the free tier lacks (more exchanges, futures, more bots), and you have run the strategy in demo mode long enough to trust your return estimate. Our free AI crypto trading bots guide covers the limits of each free plan in detail, and the best AI crypto trading bots ranking compares the paid tiers.

What return should you enter?

Be conservative. Vendor return figures, such as Bitsgap's "11% average 30-day grid return", are marketing claims that cannot be independently verified. The most transparent live-money test of AI traders we know of, Alpha Arena, saw only 6 of 32 model runs finish positive in Season 1.5. The US CFTC has warned that AI will not turn trading bots into money machines and that promises of huge or guaranteed returns are a hallmark of fraud.

A sensible approach: run the calculator at 0%, 1% and your optimistic case, and only commit if the plan is acceptable in the first two. Remember that the calculator applies the same return every month. Real strategies have losing streaks, and a −5% month early on hurts more than the average suggests. Our evidence review, do AI crypto trading bots work?, goes deeper. Nothing on this page is financial advice.