Futures grid bot calculator: what one grid earns, and what the lower edge costs

01What to put in the calculator, and where each number sits on the grid screen

On Binance the grid bot lives in the trading bots part of the futures screen, shown in English as Futures Grid. You pick the symbol and the direction (Long, Short or Neutral), then fill in the same five things the calculator asks for. If you have never set one up, how a grid bot actually works is explained on its own page — here we only do the arithmetic.

• Upper and lower price — the top and bottom of your range.
• Number of grids — how many levels sit between them. Arithmetic mode spaces them by an equal amount of USDT, geometric by an equal percentage, and you cannot change the mode once the bot is placed.
• Investment — the margin you give the bot. On Binance the total position the bot can build is this margin multiplied by the leverage.
• Leverage — set in the same window, before you confirm.
• Your fee — the orders waiting in the book are charged the maker rate (0.02% on Binance USDⓈ-M at the base level, or 0.018% if you pay fees in BNB); the ones that fill the instant you start the bot, meaning the starting position and any order placed on the wrong side of the current price, are charged the taker rate, 0.05%.

02Grid count and fees: when one completed grid stops paying

Say you set an illustrative long grid on BTC with a range of 80,000 to 90,000, 10 grids, 500 USDT of margin and 3x leverage. The step is 10,000 ÷ 10 = 1,000 USDT, and the bot has 1,500 USDT of position to spread over the levels — about 0.0018 BTC per level, roughly 150 USDT each at a price near 85,000. Every completed grid buys 0.0018 BTC and sells it 1,000 USDT higher, which is 1.80 USDT gross; the two fees take about 0.06 USDT, so you keep about 1.74 USDT each time a grid closes.

Fees are not the only running cost. While the bot holds a long position you also pay or receive funding — on roughly 1,500 USDT of position, 0.03% a day works out at around 0.45 USDT, about a quarter of one completed grid. Funding changes from day to day and from coin to coin — the current rate is shown on the contract's page in the app, and how funding works explains who pays whom.

Double the grid count and your step halves — and the fee is charged on the value you trade, so what matters is whether the step is still bigger than the round trip fee. Below about 0.04% of the price, a completed grid costs more than it brings in, no matter how much money you put in. The table below pins one order at 0.001 BTC (the smallest BTCUSDT order Binance accepts) so you can see where that line sits.

The break-even point is easy to remember: with 0.02% in and 0.02% out, your step has to be worth more than about 0.04% of the price, which is roughly 34 USDT when BTC trades near 85,000. Anything tighter and the pair of trades costs more than it earns, before funding is even counted. There is a second limit before that one: each order has to meet the symbol's minimum size, so 300 levels of 0.001 BTC would need about 25,500 USDT of position — far beyond 500 USDT at 3x.

Two setup warnings look similar and mean different things. One tells you there is not enough initial margin: each order would be too small in value, so use fewer grids or give the bot more margin. The other says the price difference between your grids is too small: your step has fallen below the smallest price move the contract allows, which you mostly meet on cheap coins whose prices move in tiny increments — widen the range, cut the grid count, or pick a symbol with a coarser price step.

Before you confirm, the setup screen shows you an estimated profit per grid. Read the label and the tooltip next to it in the app to see what that estimate already has taken out, because that is the part people guess at — and run the same range and grid count through the calculator above, which subtracts both fees so you can compare the two figures side by side. Whatever the preview includes, two things it cannot show are the funding you will pay while the position sits open and the size of the position waiting for you at the bottom of the range.

03The lower edge: how big the position gets and what it costs

A long grid buys on the way down, so a falling market does not stop the bot — it fills it. In the example above, a walk from 90,000 to 80,000 leaves you holding roughly all ten levels, about 0.018 BTC, bought at an average somewhere near the middle of the range. The exact average depends on where the bot started, the size of each level and the path price took, so treat the middle as an estimate rather than a promise.

Take an average of 85,000 and a price of 80,000: the open position is down about 0.018 × 5,000 = 90 USDT, against the 500 USDT of margin you gave the bot. That 90 USDT is about 52 completed grids' worth of profit — the clearest way to size up a grid before you start it. The realised grid profit, the unrealised loss on the inventory and the funding you paid along the way sit in different lines on the screen, which is why a bot can show green on one and red overall; that mismatch is unpacked in grid profit vs total result.

Below the lower price the bot simply stops opening new positions — the inventory stays and keeps losing while price falls. That is what the stop trigger is for: a long grid lets you set a take profit above and a stop loss below, by price, by PNL or by ROI%, and you choose whether the position is closed or kept when the grid ends.

04What leverage changes on a grid, and what it does not

Leverage on a grid decides how much position your margin can carry: 500 USDT at 3x gives the bot 1,500 USDT to spread over the levels, at 6x it gives 3,000. Each completed grid then pays roughly twice as much — and so does the funding, while the position waiting for you at the lower edge is twice as big, so the 90 USDT of unrealised loss becomes about 180 USDT on the same 500 USDT of margin. The step between levels, the fee as a share of each trade and the number of grids do not change at all; only the size does, in both directions.

High leverage adds two extra ways for the bot to end early. Your margin balance has to stay above the maintenance requirement or the position is liquidated and the grid stops, and a sharp price rise can push the position's value past the maximum allowed at that leverage, which also ends the grid. A calm way to choose is to pick the leverage that lets you fill the range you want with levels that are each above the symbol's minimum order size, and no more. The quickest way to see your own numbers is to open the Futures Grid screen on Binance, type in a range and read what it estimates per grid, then put the same settings through the calculator above and add the lower-edge figure.