"Which exchange is cheapest" has no single answer — but the honest version has a twist: at the base tier, the fee differences between venues are small. What changes dramatically is which cost even matters for you. A second-scalper and a multi-week position holder are optimizing two completely different numbers.
A scalper crosses the spread constantly and holds too briefly for funding to matter. Their entire cost is the taker fee. At VIP 0, per $1M of volume:
| Exchange | Taker fee | Cost / $1M |
|---|---|---|
| Binance / OKX / Gate | 0.050% | $500 |
| Bybit | 0.055% | $550 |
| Bitget / KuCoin | 0.060% | $600 |
Winner: a three-way tie — Binance, OKX and Gate all sit at 0.05%, the lowest base-tier taker of the six. The gap to the priciest (Bitget/KuCoin at 0.06%) is $100 per $1M — real for a high-frequency scalper doing millions a day, but far smaller than the "one venue is way cheaper" myth. Among the three tied leaders, pick on liquidity and funding, not fees.
Here the venue is irrelevant on fees: every major exchange charges the identical 0.02% maker fee. Per $1M of pure maker volume you pay $200 on all six. There is no maker rebate to chase at the base tier — so for a maker, the fee decision isn't which venue, it's whether you're actually resting orders instead of crossing the spread.
| Exchange | Maker fee | Cost / $1M (100% maker) |
|---|---|---|
| All six major venues | 0.020% | $200 |
Winner: none, on fees — so choose on funding for the coins you trade and on where your limit orders actually get filled. Discipline (maker vs taker) saves you far more than venue choice: moving from all-taker to all-maker cuts your cost from $500–600 to $200 per $1M.
Here fees are almost irrelevant — you pay them once — and funding is everything. Over the last 12 months, a BTC long paid cumulative funding of roughly +3.4% on Binance, +3.3% on Bybit and +2.5% on KuCoin; those are annual holding costs 60–90× the one-off taker fee on the same position. The "cheapest venue" for a position trader is simply wherever funding is least unfavorable to your side of the coin you actually hold — and that changes by coin and by month.
| BTC long, 12-month realized funding paid | Cost per $100k held |
|---|---|
| KuCoin (+2.5%) | ≈ $2,450 |
| Bybit (+3.3%) | ≈ $3,310 |
| Binance (+3.4%) | ≈ $3,380 |
Winner: whichever venue's funding favors your direction — a decision you make per trade from the live board, not once for all time. A short would rank these in reverse (collecting the most on Binance). The fee difference between venues, at most $100 per $1M, is noise next to a funding bill in the thousands per $100k held.
Model your own split in the fee calculator, and check current funding per coin on the live monitor.