Break-Even Price Calculator

You bought into a position three times on the way down, the average cost basis on your exchange dashboard doesn't include trading fees, and you want to know the actual price the market needs to hit before you walk away whole. Most exchange UIs show "average buy price" and stop there — fees, spreads, and the sometimes-significant slippage on larger orders disappear from the math.

Feed in each entry: the amount, the price you paid, and the fee. The output is the true break-even — the price at which selling everything covers your cost basis plus all the fees on the way in and the fee you'll pay on the way out. Useful before you set a stop-loss, before you tell yourself you'll "just exit at break-even," and before you assume the exchange's average is the number that matters.

The math: total cost basis = sum of (amount × price) + sum of all entry fees. Break-even price = (total cost basis + estimated exit fee) / total amount held. The exit fee depends on the price itself, which creates a tiny circular calculation — the calculator solves it by iterating once or twice (the convergence is fast). For percentage-based exchange fees, the result lands within a fraction of a percent of the true value after one iteration.

A worked example: you bought 100 USDC of a token at $0.40, then 200 USDC at $0.30, then 300 USDC at $0.20. Total spent: 100 + 200 + 300 = $600. Total tokens received: 100/0.40 + 200/0.30 + 300/0.20 = 250 + 666.67 + 1,500 = 2,416.67 tokens. Average cost basis (without fees): 600 / 2,416.67 = $0.2483 per token. Add fees: each entry charged 0.1%, so $0.60 in entry fees. Add expected exit fee at 0.1%: about $0.60 more. Adjusted break-even: 601.20 / 2,416.67 = $0.2488 per token. The fee impact is small at 0.1% — at higher fee tiers (1% on some DEXes, plus slippage), the gap balloons.

Where the calculation is incomplete: it doesn't account for slippage on the way out, which is the biggest unknown for thinly traded tokens. If you hold 5% of a token's daily volume, dumping the whole position into the order book moves the price down significantly before your sell completes. The break-even shown assumes you can exit at the calculated price; in practice, large positions need to walk the order book and the realized exit price is lower than the screen price. For perpetual futures, funding rates compound during the holding period and need to be added to cost basis on top of trading fees — that's a separate calculation worth doing if you've held for more than a few hours.