Maker fee

The charge for providing liquidity with a resting order — on Kalshi, an order that never crosses the spread pays no trading fee.

Most venues charge takers more than makers, to pay participants for supplying the liquidity everyone else consumes. The prediction-market case is simpler than the equities case, and worth knowing precisely.

Kalshi's trading fee is a taker charge. An order that rests on the book and is filled because somebody else crossed to you avoids it. That is exactly what the maker toggle in the sizing calculator models — the same fee-aware arithmetic with the taker charge removed, while everything else stays on the Kalshi schedule, so you can see whether a marginal trade only clears as a maker. Polymarket charges no trading fee to either side; what a Polymarket leg costs is on-chain gas plus whatever the spread takes, modeled here at roughly two tenths of a cent per share.

The catch is that being a maker is an intention, not a state. Your order may never fill. The ones that do fill are disproportionately the ones you would rather have missed, because the market crosses to you when it has learned something you have not. Treat the saved fee as compensation for that risk rather than as free money, and always confirm the current published schedule before you build a strategy on it.

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Definitions describe how Polymarket and Kalshi behave and how WhaleTracks models them; venue rules and fee schedules can change, so confirm anything you size a position on with the venue itself. WhaleTracks is informational analytics, not financial advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results.