Maker vs Taker Fees Explained: Why It Changes Everything

A maker order rests on the order book and adds liquidity; a taker order crosses the spread and removes it. That distinction, not which exchange you picked, is usually the single biggest lever on the final bill — maker fees run roughly a third of taker fees on nearly every major exchange, from centralized venues to perpetual DEXs. Choosing limit orders over market orders moves the bill more than shopping between platforms does.

What Maker and Taker Mean

Every exchange's order book is a list of resting buy and sell orders waiting to be matched. A maker places an order that doesn't immediately match anything — it sits in the book, adding to the available liquidity, until someone else's order fills it. A taker places an order that matches something already sitting in the book immediately — a market order almost always takes, and a limit order takes if it's priced to fill right away instead of waiting.

Exchanges charge less for maker orders because makers are doing the exchange a favor: they're the reason there's liquidity for anyone else to trade against. Takers pay more because they're consuming that liquidity rather than providing it. The mechanic is the same everywhere; only the specific numbers differ.

Real Rates, Across Eight Exchanges

These are base-tier, non-VIP rates as already published across Bitsgap's own exchange coverage — not new research, just gathered in one place for the first time. Bitget appears twice, once for each of its own markets, since — as the note below shows — that turns out to matter:

The pattern holds across seven of eight rows here: maker costs somewhere between a third and a half of taker. Bitget's spot market is the outlier, charging the same rate regardless of order type — but its own futures market follows the same 3x pattern as everywhere else. The exception isn't really "Bitget," it's specifically Bitget's spot product; the same exchange behaves differently across its own markets, which is a reminder that the maker/taker gap is a property of a specific market, not a fixed trait of a whole platform.

Why This Matters More Than Which Exchange You Pick

A trader deciding between two exchanges with a 0.005-percentage-point difference in headline taker fees is optimizing something smaller than the choice sitting right in front of them: whether their bot places resting orders or crosses the spread. On Hyperliquid, maker versus taker is a 0.03 percentage-point gap — six times larger than what separates Hyperliquid's own taker rate from Binance's. The venue comparison and the order-type comparison aren't the same size of decision, and the second one is usually bigger.

This compounds with frequency. A strategy placing a handful of trades a month barely notices the difference. A grid bot generating dozens of fills a week pays that maker-versus-taker gap dozens of times over, which is exactly the scenario where 4 basis points repeated constantly outweighs almost any other cost line on the bill.

A Worked Example

A $10,000 position, opened and closed once, on a 0.02% maker / 0.05% taker fee schedule — a rate roughly in line with several venues in the table above:

The same trade, same size, same exchange — a $6 difference based entirely on whether the orders rested in the book or crossed it. Scale that across dozens of trades and the gap stops being a rounding error.

Why It's Not That Simple

Always trying to fill as a maker isn't automatically the right call. A limit order priced to only fill as a maker might not fill at all if price moves away first — and a missed entry or exit has its own cost, sometimes larger than the fee saved. Fast-moving markets are exactly when taker orders matter most, because that's when waiting in the book risks missing the move entirely. The maker discount is a real lever, not a rule to follow unconditionally.

Some exchanges add further wrinkles on top of the base maker/taker split. Aster zeroes its maker fee entirely but still charges meaningful funding costs that dwarf the commission line over time — a venue can win decisively on maker/taker structure and still not be the cheapest place to hold a position. Fee structure is one input into total cost, not the whole calculation.

What Actually Splits Maker From Taker on a Bot

The intuitive assumption — that a GRID bot fills mostly as a maker while a DCA bot fills mostly as a taker — doesn't hold up against how Bitsgap's own bots are built. Both place limit orders by design: a GRID bot's buy and sell levels sit on the book waiting for price to reach them, and a DCA bot's base order and averaging orders work the same way, resting at set prices rather than chasing the market. Neither bot type defaults to taker fills for its core entries.

Where taker orders actually show up is at the exit, and it's the same for both bot types: a triggered stop-loss or an emergency close needs a market order to guarantee the position actually closes, not a limit order that might not fill in time. A manual "close by market" option works the same way. The maker/taker split isn't a property of GRID versus DCA — it's a property of entry versus exit, and of which order type a trader picks for the base order in either bot's settings.

Turning the Pattern Into a Setup

Backtesting a strategy that pulls real maker/taker fees from the connected exchange — rather than assuming a flat rate or ignoring fees entirely — shows whether a configuration's actual fill pattern leans maker or taker, and what that costs over a realistic run, before real capital confirms it the expensive way.

Stop guessing what a strategy actually costs. Bitsgap pulls real maker/taker fees and funding costs straight from your connected exchange — in backtesting and in demo mode — so the numbers you see before funding a bot are the numbers you'd actually pay.

FAQ

What's the difference between a maker fee and a taker fee? A maker fee applies to orders that rest on the order book and add liquidity — typically limit orders that don't fill immediately. A taker fee applies to orders that match something already in the book and remove liquidity — typically market orders, or limit orders priced to fill right away. Exchanges charge less for maker orders because they provide the liquidity other traders trade against.

Is a maker fee always cheaper than a taker fee? On nearly every major exchange, yes — maker fees typically run a third to a half of taker fees. The exception is exchanges with flat-rate schedules that don't distinguish between order types at the base tier, which do exist, so it's worth checking a specific exchange's fee page rather than assuming the discount applies everywhere.

How much can maker vs taker fees save on trading costs? On a $10,000 position with a 0.02% maker / 0.05% taker schedule, filling as a maker on both sides costs $4 versus $10 as a taker — a $6 difference on one round trip. For a strategy generating many fills, like a grid bot, that gap compounds significantly over time.

Do grid bots and DCA bots pay different maker/taker fees? Not by default. Both place limit orders for their core entries — a GRID bot's buy and sell levels and a DCA bot's base and averaging orders all rest on the book rather than chasing the market. The maker/taker split comes from entry versus exit, not bot type: stop-losses and emergency closes use market orders on either bot, because guaranteeing the close matters more at that point than the fee saved.

Which exchanges have the biggest gap between maker and taker fees? Among commonly compared venues, Gate.io's spot market and Aster's perpetuals show some of the widest gaps — Aster charges 0% maker versus 0.04% taker, making the maker side entirely free. Bitget is a notable exception at its base spot tier, charging the same rate for both order types.