Break-even is not the price you paid
This is the single most useful number on the page and the one most calculators get wrong. If you buy at $100 and sell at $100, you have not broken even — you have lost money twice, once on the way in and once on the way out.
The instinct is to add the two fee rates to the entry price. With 1% charged on each side, that suggests $102. It is wrong, and it is wrong in the same way that grossing up a withheld payment is wrong. The sell fee is a percentage of the sale, which is the number you are trying to find. Raise the price to cover the fee, and you have just raised the fee.
The correct relationship divides rather than adds:
break-even = entry × (1 + buy fee) ÷ (1 − sell fee)
At 1% per side that gives $102.0202, not $102. Selling at $102 leaves you two cents down per unit — small, real, and repeated on every trade you ever close. The gap scales sharply: at 0.1% exchange fees it is a rounding error, at 1.49% card-purchase fees it is a meaningful chunk of a short trade, and at 4% it is the difference between a trade that works and one that never could.
The calculator shows the naive figure directly underneath the real one, with the difference in cash per unit, because that is the only way to make an invisible error visible.
Average entry is weighted by quantity, not by price
Almost nobody buys once. Positions are built across several purchases at different prices, and the average of those purchases decides everything downstream: break-even, profit, and the target price.
The trap is averaging the prices. Buy 0.1 units at $100,000 and 1.9 units at $50,000 and the simple average of the two prices is $75,000. Your actual average is $52,500 — total spend of $105,000 divided by the two units you hold. The simple average is not slightly off; it is off by 43%, and it is off in the direction that makes a winning position look like a losing one.
The rule is always the same: add up the money, add up the units, divide one by the other. That is why this tool takes one line per purchase instead of a single field labelled "average price" — a single field invites you to work the average out yourself, and working it out yourself is where the mistake happens.
Your return is not the price move
| Measured on | Includes fees | |
|---|---|---|
| Price move | The coin | No |
| Return on capital | Your money | Both sides |
A 10% rise in price with 1% charged on each side is a 7.82% return, because the capital you committed included the buy fee and the cash that came back was net of the sell fee. Roughly a fifth of the move disappeared without the price doing anything wrong.
This is the arithmetic that quietly decides whether frequent trading is worth doing. A strategy that captures 2% moves at 0.5% per side keeps about half of what it appears to make. The same strategy on a platform charging 1.5% per side does not make money at all, no matter how often it is right. Both numbers are shown side by side here, along with how much of the move the fees consumed.
A loss shows up as a loss
A calculator that only knows how to display profit is not a calculator, it is marketing. When the sale is below break-even this page changes the label from "net profit" to "net loss", shows the figure in red with its minus sign intact, and reports a negative return. Nothing is hidden behind an absolute value.
That matters because most positions spend part of their life underwater, and the useful question at that point is a precise one: how far does the price have to move to get back to flat? The break-even line answers it in cash and in percentage terms, without any opinion about whether waiting is a good idea.
Capital gains: short-term versus long-term
In the United States the IRS treats digital assets as property, not currency. Selling, swapping one coin for another, converting into a stablecoin, or paying for something with crypto are all disposals that realise a gain or a loss. Simply buying and holding is not.
The holding period decides the rate. Held for one year or less, the gain is short-term and taxed at ordinary income rates. Held for more than a year, it is long-term and taxed at the preferential capital gains rates. The dividing line is a real one — the same trade can face materially different treatment depending on which side of the anniversary it closes on, which is worth knowing before you close it, not after.
Your gain is measured against cost basis, and cost basis includes what you paid plus acquisition fees. That is the same figure this calculator calls "total capital in", which is a useful coincidence and not a substitute for proper record keeping. Losses offset gains, and net capital losses can be applied against ordinary income up to an annual limit, with the remainder carried forward.
The wash sale rule works differently here
For stocks, Section 1091 disallows a loss if you buy a substantially identical security within thirty days either side of the sale. Digital assets have historically sat outside that definition, since the rule names stocks and securities specifically. That is the origin of the tax-loss harvesting patterns that are common in crypto and not available in equities.
Treat this as a moving target rather than a settled fact. Proposals to extend the rule to digital assets appear regularly, and the answer that was right for one filing year is not automatically right for the next. Confirm the current position before relying on it.
Where the live price comes from, and what happens when it fails
The optional market price button reads a public, key-free endpoint from CoinGecko. It fires only when you click it, sends only the name of the coin you selected, and fills in the sell price field — which then stays fully editable, because the price you care about is often not the current one.
If that request fails, the page says so in red and falls back to the last price it saved on this device, clearly labelled with when it was captured. It never silently blanks a field. A sibling tool on this network once lost its entire currency list when an upstream API went offline, and the failure was invisible: the page still loaded, the dropdowns were simply empty. That is the failure mode this tool is built to avoid — with the network completely off, every number here still calculates.
What this tool does not do
- It gives no investment advice. It describes a trade you typed in. It does not suggest what to buy, when to sell, or whether any position is a good idea, and it makes no forecast of any price.
- It does not calculate your tax. The tax sections above are general background, not a computation and not advice.
- It models one position, one exit. Partial sales, staged exits, leverage, funding rates, liquidation prices and futures are all outside its scope.
- It ignores network and withdrawal fees unless you fold them into the percentages yourself. On-chain gas is a fixed cost, not a percentage, and it varies by the minute.
- It does not track your portfolio. Nothing is stored except, if you use the market price button, the last quote cached on your own device.
Privacy
Quantities, prices and fees never leave your browser. There is no account, no analytics on what you type, and no server-side calculation — which matters here more than on most tools, because what you enter is the size and cost basis of a position you actually hold.
Frequently asked questions
What is the break-even price on a crypto trade?
It is the sell price at which your net result is exactly zero after both fees, and it is always higher than what you paid. The formula is entry price × (1 + buy fee) ÷ (1 − sell fee). Buying at $100 with 1% on each side breaks even at $102.02, not $102: the sell fee is charged on the sale, so it has to be divided out rather than added on. The difference looks trivial at 0.1% exchange fees and stops being trivial at the 1.5% to 4% that card purchases and retail brokerages charge.
Why is the break-even not just my purchase price plus both fee rates?
Because the sell fee is a percentage of the number you are solving for. Raise the price to cover the fee and you have raised the fee. Adding the two rates together always lands short, and the gap grows with the square of the rate — at 1% per side it is about 0.02% of the entry, at 5% per side it is roughly 0.3%. Selling at the naive figure produces a small guaranteed loss on every single trade, which is why it matters more to frequent traders than to anyone holding one position.
How do I calculate my average price when I bought at several prices?
Weight each purchase by its quantity, never by averaging the prices. Total money spent divided by total units bought. Buying 0.1 units at $100,000 and 1.9 units at $50,000 gives an average of $52,500, because almost all the money went into the second purchase. A simple average of the two prices says $75,000 — a figure that would tell you that you are deep in the red when in fact you are ahead. This calculator takes one line per purchase precisely so the weighting is done for you.
Is my ROI the same as the percentage the price moved?
No, not once fees exist. The price move is measured on the coin. Your return is measured on your money, and your money includes the buy fee you paid on the way in and excludes the sell fee taken on the way out. A 10% price rise with 1% charged on each side returns 7.82%, not 10%. The calculator shows both numbers side by side because the gap between them is the whole cost of trading.
Do I owe tax on a crypto trade even if I never converted to dollars?
In the United States, yes. The IRS treats digital assets as property, so trading one coin for another, spending crypto on goods, or converting to a stablecoin are all disposals that realise a gain or loss. Only buying and holding is not a taxable event. This calculator works out the economics of a trade; it does not compute tax, and cost-basis rules, holding periods and reporting requirements should be confirmed with a professional or with current IRS guidance.
Does the wash sale rule apply to cryptocurrency?
The wash sale rule in Section 1091 is written for stocks and securities, and digital assets have historically fallen outside that definition — which is why selling at a loss and immediately rebuying has been treated differently for crypto than for shares. This is an area under active legislative attention and the position can change. Nothing here is tax advice; check the current rules for your filing year.
Are the numbers I type sent anywhere?
No. Every calculation is arithmetic performed in your browser, and there is no account, no logging and no upload. The only network request the page can ever make is the optional market price lookup, which happens only when you press the button, sends only the coin name, and is not required for anything else on the page to work.