What a launch costs, and what it earns
n=4. 4 launches is not a sample you can draw a rate from, and nothing below should be read as one. It is a record of what happened.
Fees against cost
One axis, linear, every launch on it. The best returned 1,142 times what the worst did — $GREYEDOUT against $PENDING, same method, same venue, launched the same day. 3 of the 4 never earned back the price of launching them.
| launch | venue | volume | fees | net |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $PENDING | bags | $15 | $0.15 | −$12.63 |
| $GREYEDOUT | bags | $17,140 | $171.36 | +$130.97 |
| $ROGUEBOAT | pump.fun | n/a | $0.27 | n/a |
| $LIFTOFF | pump.fun | n/a | $1.26 | n/a |
What the numbers say so far
The creator fee is 1% of volume, paid regardless of whether the coin works — verified twice against recorded volume to within four cents. At a launch cost of about $12.39, a single $171 hit pays for 13 launches. That is arithmetic, not a measured hit rate.
The fees returned $0.15, $171.36, $0.27, $1.26. The coin positions returned −0.0002 ETH, −0.0113 ETH, 0 SOL, with 1 unrecorded.
Every dollar of profit here came from fees, none from a chart, and the dev buys made to prop a chart up lost money every time.
The chart, the table and both figure lists are regenerated from the launch record on every build. One number is not: the $12.39 cost of a launch — the dashed line on the chart and the basis of the break-even arithmetic — is stated as of 6 September 2026. The costs in the record are native ETH and the build has no price feed, so that one cannot be recomputed offline. It is the figure on this page most likely to be out of date.