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- Base fee: 5,000 lamports per signature, half burned. Priority fee: compute-unit limit x price in micro-lamports / 1,000,000, rounded up.
- Fianto, as built on 15 October 2026: 5,060 lamports for a one-off payment, 10,400 for a subscribe, 5,100 for a portal action.
- The priority fee is charged on the limit you request, not on what the transaction uses, so the limit matters more than the price.
What is a Solana transaction fee made of?
A Solana transaction fee is made of a base fee for each signature and an optional priority fee for compute. Solana's fee documentation, read on 15 October 2026, says: "Every Solana transaction requires a fee paid in SOL. The fee has two components: a base fee and an optional prioritization fee."
| Part | How it is calculated | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Base fee | 5,000 lamports x number of signatures | 50% burned, 50% to the validator |
| Priority fee | ceil(compute-unit price x compute-unit limit / 1,000,000) lamports | 100% to the validator |
| Account rent | Not a fee: a minimum balance for any account the transaction opens | Stays in the new account; returned if it is closed |
A lamport is one billionth of a SOL. A compute unit measures the work a transaction asks validators to do; without an explicit limit, each instruction gets 200,000 by default (3,000 for a builtin one), and a transaction can ask for at most 1,400,000. The compute-unit price is quoted in micro-lamports, millionths of a lamport, which is why the formula divides by a million.
How much does a typical Solana transaction cost?
A typical Solana transaction with one signature and no priority fee costs exactly 5,000 lamports, 0.000005 SOL. Solana's payments overview gives a dollar figure for payments as of 15 October 2026: "Median fee ~$0.001 per transaction." The figure moves with the SOL price and with how much priority fee senders add when the network is busy.
Solana's learning page on transaction fees says priority fees typically stay under $0.01 even when demand is high, and that wallets usually set them for you. That is the number most people actually see change: the base fee per signature is fixed. When the payment itself is a fraction of a cent, as with per-request API pricing, those fees and the charge of a facilitator are worked through in x402 vs subscriptions for APIs.
What does each transaction in a Fianto payment cost?
Each transaction in a Fianto payment has a fee fixed by its signatures and the compute budget Fianto's code sets when it builds it. These are the constants in the backend on 15 October 2026, run through Solana's formula:
| Transaction | Signatures | CU limit x price (micro-lamports) | Priority fee | Total fee | Fee payer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| One-off USDC payment | 1 | 60,000 x 1,000 | 60 lamports | 5,060 lamports | Customer |
| Subscribe (first period paid) | 2 | 400,000 x 1,000 | 400 lamports | 10,400 lamports | Customer |
| Cancel, reclaim rent or re-authorise in the portal | 1 | 100,000 x 1,000 | 100 lamports | 5,100 lamports | Customer |
| Renewal, first try, typical wallet | 1 | 40,000 x 1,000 | 40 lamports | 5,040 lamports | Fianto's charging key |
| Renewal at the price cap | 1 | 40,000 x 50,000 | 2,000 lamports | 7,000 lamports | Fianto's charging key |
The subscribe transaction carries two signatures, the customer's and the key Fianto uses to collect renewals, so its base fee is 10,000 lamports before compute. The one-off payment is the cheapest thing Fianto builds: two compute-budget instructions and one or two USDC transfers. The note beside its 60,000-unit limit in Fianto's code says two such transfers cost well under 20,000 units.
Renewals are signed by Fianto's charging key, which is the fee payer on chain. The customer covers those running costs through the flat 0.01 USDC network fee charged with every subscription charge today, on plans created since 6 October 2026. The merchant pays no part of any row in the table. How the costs split between the three parties is in who pays the fees in a crypto payment.
The checkout shows every fee before the wallet opens: the USDC, the network fee and the SOL.
See the checkoutWorked example: the fee on a first subscription
The fee on a first subscription through Fianto is 10,400 lamports. Step by step:
- Base fee: 2 signatures x 5,000 lamports = 10,000 lamports.
- Priority fee: 400,000 compute units x 1,000 micro-lamports = 400,000,000 micro-lamports, divided by 1,000,000 = 400 lamports.
- Total: 10,400 lamports, or 0.0000104 SOL.
- At a SOL price of $200, chosen only to make the arithmetic easy, that is about $0.0021. The checkout's "under $0.01" line stays true until SOL passes about $960.
Your wallet may raise the priority fee before you sign. Fianto allows for that: when it checks whether your wallet holds enough SOL, it adds a 10,000-lamport margin on top of the fee. That margin is a check, not a charge. The full SOL a wallet needs, including its own minimum balance, is in why you need SOL to send USDC.
Why does the compute-unit limit matter more than the price?
The compute-unit limit matters more because the priority fee is charged on the units a transaction requests, used or not. Solana's fee structure page says: "The priority fee is based on the requested CU limit, not actual CU usage." It adds that "Setting a higher limit than needed means paying for unused compute units."
Fianto's renewals show why this matters. Measured on 5 October 2026 by running the mainnet Subscriptions program binary in LiteSVM, a lightweight Solana test runtime, a renewal used 6,331 compute units with one transfer and 12,280 with two. A renewal used to request 400,000. It now requests 40,000 for a typical wallet, about three times the measured cost, plus 2,000 units per transfer for each extra try the program needs to find that customer's token account. The effect is ten times less priority fee for the same transaction.
The price per unit moves only when a renewal is retried. The first try bids 1,000 micro-lamports per unit and every try after one that was actually sent bids 15,000 more, up to a cap of 50,000, because the usual reason for a retry is that the last try did not land. Before sending, Fianto simulates the renewal without a signature, so a charge the simulation shows would fail is not sent and pays no fee. The retry schedule itself is on stablecoin auto-renewal.
Is account rent part of the Solana transaction fee?
Account rent is not part of the transaction fee: it is a balance moved into a new account, which the account keeps for as long as it exists. A one-off Fianto payment opens no account, so it pays no rent. A subscription opens one account, and the first subscription from a wallet opens a second; the checkout shows each as its own line with the live amount.
Measured on mainnet on 15 October 2026, the subscription account's rent was 1,437,640 lamports, about 0.00144 SOL, returned when the customer reclaims it after the subscription ends. The wallet setup account, opened once on a wallet's first subscription and not returned, was 1,188,720 lamports, about 0.00119 SOL. Both are falling as Solana cuts rent in phases, with more steps expected in November 2026, which is why Fianto reads the amount from the network at subscribe time. What each account is and how the reclaim works is in account rent and reclaim.