Builder fee

Two people can send the same order, for the same size, to the same Hyperliquid market at the same second and pay different amounts for it. The venue's fee is identical. What differs is the software each of them clicked through, and the builder fee that software attached to the fill.

How it works

Hyperliquid calls the mechanism a builder code. Its documentation describes the whole of it in a few sentences, and every one of them changes what a reader should check.

You approve a ceiling, the front end picks the rate. Before a builder can charge anything, the user signs an ApproveBuilderFee action naming the builder's address and a maximum — and it has to be signed by the main wallet, not by an agent or API wallet, which is why terminals that otherwise trade through an API key still ask for one browser-wallet signature at setup. After that, each order the front end sends may carry a builder parameter, an address and a fee "in tenths of basis points", so a value of 10 means one basis point. The rate is set per order, not per account.

The protocol caps it. "Builder fees charged can be at most 0.1% on perps and 1% on spot." That is ten basis points on perps and a hundred on spot, measured against a perps entry-tier taker fee of 0.045% on the same venue's own schedule. At the cap, the builder would take more than twice what the exchange does.

It is charged where the fee asset is. Builder codes apply only to fees collected in the quote or collateral asset, so they apply to both sides of a perp trade and do not apply to the buying side of a spot trade. A perp round trip pays it twice.

It lands inside the fill's fee. On Hyperliquid's own fill records the fee field is the total, builder included, with a separate builderFee field only when it is non-zero — which is why a fee audit built on fee alone overstates what the venue charged (how to pull Hyperliquid fills).

The builder collects it like a referral reward, and must hold at least 100 USDC in perps account value to be one. Each user can hold ten active approvals at a time and revoke any of them.

Why it matters here

On a Hyperliquid order, "free" in a terminal's pricing means "paid per fill". That changes the comparison from a monthly price to a cost that scales with your volume, and the cards record the rate where the vendor publishes one:

• Velo and Insilico Terminal state one basis point (0.01%). Insilico makes signing the approval a condition of connecting at all.
• Tealstreet says "usually" one basis point, and higher if you signed up through an affiliate who sets their own — so the rate is a property of how you arrived, not of the product.
• WunderTrading waives its Premium subscription for Hyperliquid accounts and charges 0.035% per trade instead, three and a half times the terminals above.
• CCXT adds one basis point by default on seven venues, Hyperliquid among them, and documents the one-line switch that turns it off.
• The Hyperliquid Python SDK ships the approval call and an example for people building a front end of their own; it attaches no builder of its own.

In money, on 10,000 dollars of perps notional taken at Hyperliquid's tier 0: the venue charges 4.50 dollars. Through a one-basis-point terminal the fill costs 5.50; through a 0.035% one, 8.00; at the protocol cap, 14.50. On a strategy that trades its account several times a month, that spread is the difference between a free tool and the most expensive subscription on the site.

So read the builder rate as part of the price, multiply it by the volume you actually trade, and compare that with the flat subscriptions in trading terminals and trading bots. A builder fee is the one way a crypto front end gets paid that comes out of your fill rather than out of the fee you were already paying; the guide to who pays for free trading software sets it beside broker codes and referral links, which do not.