A token threshold is not a price

Three products in this catalogue open their better half without ever charging you. DEXTools opens its Premium tier to anyone holding 100,000 DEXT. Gunbot's licence is a balance of its own token sitting in a wallet you control. Bubblemaps reserves four of its research features for holders of BMT and does not say how many.

None of those is a fee, and every comparison that treats one as a fee is wrong before it starts. This page is about what the arrangement actually is, what it costs, and the questions that get you a useful answer out of a vendor who has chosen it.

How it works

A subscription and a holding threshold diverge at the first step, and everything else follows from that step.

Under a subscription, money moves from you to the vendor. There is a charge, a receipt, a merchant on the other end of it and a billing system in which your entitlement is a row. You can stop paying. If something goes wrong there is a transaction to point at, and in most countries some mechanism attached to it.

Under a threshold, nothing moves to the vendor at all. You buy the token on a market, from whoever happens to be selling, and the vendor's software reads your balance. Entitlement is not a row in a database the vendor maintains for you; it is a number on a public ledger, which the product re-reads. Gunbot's wiki puts the consequence in one sentence: "Hold these tokens at all times to be sure your Gunbot can run."

Four things follow, and all four are the reason this is a different kind of thing rather than a different way of paying for the same thing.

1. There is no transaction with the vendor. No invoice, no receipt, no subscription to cancel, no refund, and nobody to dispute a charge with, because no charge happened.
2. The position stays yours, and can be sold. That cuts both ways: Gunbot's wiki names it as a feature, saying a licence can be sold to others, which is genuinely more than a subscription gives you.
3. Access is conditional and continuous. A subscription lapses on a date you know. A threshold lapses when a number falls, which can be any minute of any day, including one on which you did nothing.
4. The cost is a price difference between two dates, one of which has not happened. Until you sell, there is no amount.

DEXTools is worth reading closely because it shows the hybrid. Its plans page opens Standard two ways — hold 1,000 DEXT, or take a monthly subscription it quotes at $19.90 and settles in DEXT — so even the door with a dollar sign on it routes through the token. Premium has one door and no dollar sign anywhere.

What the vendors actually publish

Read from each vendor's own pages on 21 September 2026. None of the three pages carries a date of its own, which is itself worth knowing before you plan around any figure below.

DEXTools

Three tiers, and only one number on the page is a fee. Free is listed at "0 DEXT". Standard is listed as "1,000 DEXT / Hold" or "$19.90 paid in DEXT / Monthly Subscription". Premium is listed as "100,000 DEXT / Hold", and there is no second door and no fiat figure beside it anywhere on the page.

The first benefit listed against Standard is "No Advertisement". The others are Telegram and mail price alerts, 12 hot pairs instead of 10, a private holders' group, more trade analytics, wallet info and a positions tracker. Premium adds Dext Force Ventures, exclusive info, 15 hot pairs and governance marked "SOON". Whatever else a hundred-thousand-token position is buying, the published list of what it buys is short.

Gunbot

Here the threshold is the licence rather than a tier of it, and the vendor's two surfaces do not quite agree.

The shop's plans page sells three lifetime licences — €199, €299 and €499 at list, heavily discounted on the day this was read — and describes the token as a bundled component: "Your license includes 500 Gunthy tokens for the blockchain-based license system", 750 for the middle tier, 2,500 for the top one.

The wiki explains the mechanism the shop does not. "Your wallet address, combined with a number of tokens, is your Gunbot license key." Tokens are airdropped to the address you register, generally within 24 hours. An exchange deposit address will not work, because it does not reflect a balance on the chain. And the requirement is continuous: hold them at all times, or the bot does not run.

The mismatch is in the numbers. The wiki lists four licence types — Starter 400, Standard 1,000, Pro 1,500, Ultimate 2,500 — against three on the shop, with different names and, for two of them, different counts. The wiki adds that discounted licences carry lower token requirements than the figures it lists, which explains part of the gap and not the tier names. The safe reading is that the wiki documents a lineup the shop has since changed, and that the count attached to your licence is whatever was airdropped to your address rather than whatever either page says.

What neither page says is what happens in the minute after the balance drops: whether the bot stops at the next licence check, whether there is any grace period, and whether the licence can be re-armed by topping the wallet back up. "Hold at all times" is the whole of the published answer.

Bubblemaps

The most extreme version, because there is no number at all. The vendor's wiki lists four features as accessible only to BMT holders: P&L computation, cross-chain analytics, AI models to interpret clusters, and bubble maps of the top 1,000 holders rather than the top 250. Those four are most of what turns the product from a viewer into an instrument you would actually investigate with.

No holding threshold is published. Not a token amount, not a dollar equivalent, not a tier table. So the price of those four features cannot be stated in dollars, and cannot be stated in tokens either — the figure a reader needs in order to decide is not one the vendor has printed.

Why a vendor arranges it this way

The mechanism, not the motive. Each of these is observable from the arrangement itself, and none of them requires anyone to be acting in bad faith.

It creates demand for the token that is not speculative. Every user who wants the gated feature is a buyer who then does not sell, for as long as they want the feature. A subscription produces revenue; a threshold produces holders.

It removes the payment rails. No acquirer, no merchant account, no card fees, no card-data compliance scope, no per-country registration for charging a subscription. For a small team this is a real amount of work that simply does not exist.

It removes the billing operation with it. No failed cards, no dunning, no proration, no refunds, no chargebacks — because no payment took place. The support queue that a subscription business spends most of its time on is not there.

It makes the entitlement portable. Gunbot's licence can change hands without the vendor administering a transfer, because the licence is a balance and balances move.

It is worth putting beside the other way software in this market gets paid for without billing you, which is who pays for your free trading bot — there the venue pays and the cost reaches you through your fills. Here nobody pays, and the cost reaches you through a position.

What the arrangement also does is move the price risk. Under a subscription the vendor carries the revenue risk and you carry a known cost. Under a threshold the vendor has realised its value at issuance and sale, and the holder carries a price movement that has nothing to do with whether the software is any good.

What it costs

The honest answer is that nobody can tell you, including the vendor.

A subscription costs the fee times the number of months. A threshold costs the token's drawdown over however long you hold it, plus the spread, slippage and network fees on the way in and on the way out, and none of it is known until you sell. The downside is not bounded by anything connected to the product: nothing ties a token's price to whether the screener is useful. And it can be negative — you may come out ahead, which is the other half of the same fact and exactly why this is an investment decision wearing a pricing page's clothes.

Multiplying today's token price by 100,000 does produce a number. This page will not print it, for three reasons. DEXTools has never charged it. It would be wrong by the time you read this. And the vendor's own site does not agree with itself about the supply the number rests on — on 19 September 2026 its front page gave DEXT's circulating supply as 85,544,654 and its token page gave 69,344,654, against a total supply of 140,551,255 on both.

Two costs that appear on no plans page anywhere:

Tax. In the United States, virtual currency is treated as property, and general tax principles for property transactions apply. Your basis is what you spent to acquire it including fees and commissions; when you sell, you recognise a gain or loss equal to the difference between that basis and what you receive. Exiting a threshold is a disposal of property, not the cancellation of a subscription, and whether what you spent is a deductible software expense at all is a question for your own adviser. A $19.90 invoice raises none of this. Other jurisdictions differ, and the point that survives translation is that a holding is an asset you own and a subscription is a cost you incurred, and tax systems treat the two differently everywhere.

Accounting, if a company is holding it. Under US GAAP, ASU 2023-08 requires crypto assets within its scope to be measured at fair value, with gains and losses from remeasurement included in net income each reporting period. That means the position sits on the balance sheet and moves the income statement every quarter, which is a different conversation with a finance team than a recurring software line item. The scope test at 350-60-15-1 lists six criteria, and criterion (b) is the one to read twice: the asset must "not provide the asset holder with enforceable rights to or claims on underlying goods, services, or other assets". Whether a token-gated software feature amounts to such a right is not a question this page answers; it is one somebody has to answer before booking the position.

Why this catalogue leaves those tiers blank

The cards for these three products carry no price amount on the token-gated tiers. That is a decision rather than an omission, and it is the same decision every time: publishing a conversion would print a figure the vendor has never charged, computed at a rate that is stale the moment it is written.

The price field on a card exists for exactly one reason — so that prices can be sorted, filtered and compared. A converted threshold cannot honestly be any of the three. It would sort against real fees as though it were one, it would filter into a price band the vendor never set, and a reader comparing it with a $19-a-month competitor would be comparing a fee with a position. The blank is the accurate answer, and the card says in words what the blank means.

Where a vendor does publish a fee — DEXTools' Standard subscription, Gunbot's licence price, Bubblemaps' separately sold API and embed — that number is on the card, because that one is a price.

What you can do about it

Separate the two decisions, and take them in order. Do you want the software, and do you want to own this token. If the second is a no on its own merits, the first does not turn it into a yes; it turns a software purchase into a position you did not want, sized by someone else.

Ask for the fiat door, in writing. DEXTools publishes one on Standard and not on Premium, which is proof that vendors in this position can bill in money when they choose to. A vendor that will invoice you is a vendor you can expense, cancel, budget and dispute. The answer is either a price or an explanation, and both tell you something.

Ask what happens when the balance falls below the line. At what moment, checked how often, with what grace period, and what happens to your configuration, your saved work and your alerts. None of the three vendors publishes this. It is a two-sentence question and the reply is worth keeping.

Ask for the number when there is not one. For Bubblemaps the threshold is simply unpublished. "How much BMT unlocks these four features" is a fair question, and so is "can that amount change, and will you announce it before it does". An unpublished threshold can be raised.

Treat the wallet as the licence, because it is. For Gunbot the licence is an address plus a balance, and the setup wizard will write the credentials of a wallet it generates into a text file. Back that up the way you back up money, not the way you back up a licence key, and never register an exchange deposit address — it does not reflect a balance on the chain and the bot will not run.

Check your own side's policy before the demo, not after. Funds and compliance departments frequently have a rule about holding the token of a vendor whose output you rely on, and that rule bites hardest on exactly the research tools where these thresholds turn up. If the policy says no, the gated features are not available to you at any price, and the evaluation should start from there.

Work out whether the free tier already covers you, because it often does. Most of what people open DEXTools for sits on its free tier, and the first thing Standard sells is turning the advertising off. Bubblemaps' core map is free to open without an account. If you can do the job on the free tier, none of this applies to you at all.

Price the alternatives that charge money. In the same job, DEX Screener and GeckoTerminal take no token position to use, and for automation Freqtrade is open source with no licence to hold. The rest of the field is in Crypto Charting Platforms & Libraries. A tool you can simply pay for, or simply run, is worth a slightly worse feature list when the alternative is an unbounded position in someone else's token.