Most fee-reduction advice is "trade more volume to reach the next VIP tier" — which tells you to spend more to save a little. Here are five levers that lower your actual cost without increasing your turnover, ordered by how much they typically move the needle.
Every major venue charges 0.02% to make and 0.05–0.06% to take. Shifting flow from taker to maker roughly halves (or more) your fee per trade, and it costs nothing but patience — using limit orders that rest on the book instead of market orders that cross it. A trader who moves from 0% to 70% maker on Bitget cuts fees from $600 to $320 per $1M. That 30-point behavior change saves more than switching venues.
Maker fees are identical (0.02%) across the major venues, but taker fees are not: Binance, OKX and Gate charge 0.05%, Bybit 0.055%, Bitget and KuCoin 0.06%. For the portion of your flow that has to cross the spread, being on a 0.05% venue instead of a 0.06% one saves $100 per $1M of taker volume — small, but free. It's a weaker lever than order type (below), because the venue spread is only a basis point; don't switch venues for it alone, but prefer the cheaper takers when other things are equal.
For anything held beyond a day, funding dwarfs the trading fee. A $100k BTC long paid $287–474 in funding over a recent month across venues, versus ~$50–60 to open it. "Cutting fees" for a position trader really means holding on the venue whose funding favors your side of that coin, and being aware that funding accrues every 1–8 hours whether or not price moves. Check the current number per coin on the live monitor.
Liquidation is a fee you pay once and completely: your margin, plus a liquidation charge. Over- leveraging turns normal volatility into a total loss on the position. Lower leverage doesn't cut your per-trade fee, but it removes the tail cost that outweighs every other line item (how liquidation costs stack).
Most exchanges shave a fixed percentage off if you pay fees in their platform token or hold a balance of it. That's a genuine discount, but it introduces token-price exposure and lock-ups, so count it only if you'd hold the token anyway. Promo coupons and fee-free campaigns are real too, but temporary — don't build a strategy around them.
Before optimizing anything, know your own maker/taker split and monthly volume — they decide which lever matters. Put both into the fee calculator to see your cost on each of the six venues side by side, then apply the levers above in order.