The Terminal Cashback Ledger

What the cashback actually is

The rate on its own tells you very little. What it pays against, when it is set, and how you collect it are the parts that decide what it is worth.

• It pays on Terminal's fee, not on your trade. 35% of 1% is 0.35% of what you traded, not 35% of anything else. The venue fee underneath earns nothing back.
• The rate is set once, at signup. The app reads a referral code out of browser storage when the account is created. Nothing in the bundle we read lets you attach one afterward, so this is a decision made before the first trade rather than a setting.
• You claim it by hand. Cashback accrues per trade and sits in the rewards panel until you claim it to a SOL or EVM rewards wallet you set yourself. It is not netted off the fee at trade time, so the headline cost of a trade reads 1% either way.

Our referral page covers how the code is stored and why the timing matters. Terminal's full rate and fee breakdown puts the 1% next to everything else you pay.

Worked examples at common volumes

Same arithmetic as the calculator, at four sizes people actually trade. A round trip is a buy and the sell that closes it, so Terminal's 1% is charged twice. The last column assumes 40 round trips a month, which is a working number rather than a typical one: substitute your own, because it moves the result more than the trade size does.

Our arithmetic, from the rates in the methodology below. Nothing here is read off a settled payout, and the dollar value of a SOL rebate moves with the SOL price between accruing and claiming.

What the number does not include

Cashback pays against one line on your trade. Everything else you are charged is untouched by it, and on a small position that everything else outweighs the rebate by a wide margin. Rate comparisons tend to skip this part.

• The venue fee. pump.fun takes 1.25% on a bonding curve trade and as little as 0.30% on a mature PumpSwap pool, published on its own fee page. That is charged separately from Terminal's 1% and earns no cashback whatsoever, so it is often the larger of the two.
• Priority fees and builder tips. Around 0.001 SOL and 0.0001 SOL respectively at Terminal's defaults, paid per transaction, rising to 0.012 SOL for the tip under the Inferno presets. Network costs, not platform fees, and no rebate applies.
• Slippage. The largest number on this list and the one nobody collects. Terminal ships with tolerance at 20% in the normal interface and 50% under Inferno. A 20% ceiling on a $1,000 buy permits a $200 worst case, against a $2.50 cashback gap. See why slippage settings lose money.
• Anything Terminal has not published. We found no stated minimum claim amount, no stated expiry on accrued cashback and no published schedule for the rewards panel. Absence in the sources we can read is not proof of absence in the product, and this page does not treat it as such.

To price all of it at once rather than the rebate alone, the fee calculator stacks the venue fee, the priority fee and the tip on top of Terminal's 1% and subtracts the cashback at the end.

How this compares to paying the default rate

Read as an effective fee, the 1% costs 0.65% once 35% comes back and 0.90% at the 10% rate. The whole referral question is worth 0.25% of trade value per leg. That is a real number and it is a smaller one than the venue fee sitting underneath it, which is worth saying plainly on a page that stands to profit from the comparison.

Two things move that figure in opposite directions. Cashback sits in the rewards panel until someone claims it, so an account that never claims is paying the full 1.00% whichever rate it carries. Against that, the rate cannot be changed later, so anyone planning to stick around for a year is settling a year of rebates in the seconds before the account exists. For how Terminal's costs sit against a competitor rather than against itself, Terminal versus Axiom puts the cited rates side by side.

Methodology and sources

Every rate on this page, where it came from, and how far we would push it. Terminal has no live official documentation: the Padre GitBook went offline in spring 2026 and the only official page still up is pump.fun's fee schedule, which covers the venue and not the terminal. So the strongest evidence available is the shipped application itself, and that is what the fee figure rests on.

Cite this page

Quote any figure above with the date attached. Deep links land on the section they belong to: #what-the-cashback-is, #worked-examples, #versus-the-default-rate and #methodology. A clean markdown copy of this page is served at /tools/cashback-ledger.md.