ApeX fees explained: what you actually pay

Every perp order that fills on ApeX Omni pays a trading fee based on how it interacts with the order book. If your order rests on the book and provides liquidity — a limit order that waits to be filled — you pay the maker fee of 0.02% of the position size. If your order takes liquidity — a market order, or a limit order that crosses the spread — you pay the taker fee of 0.05%.

Fees are deducted in USDT at the moment of execution, which keeps the accounting clean: no separate gas payment per trade, no fee tokens to manage. ApeX also charges nothing for placing or cancelling orders — you only pay when something actually fills.

This is the fee the save20 referral code discounts. With the 20% reduction applied, you effectively pay 0.016% maker and 0.04% taker. On a $50,000 market order, that's the difference between a $25 fee and a $20 fee — every fill, automatically.

ApeX runs a seven-level fee schedule (effective October 1, 2025). Level 1 is the base 0.02%/0.05%. From there, maker/taker rates step down as your trailing 14-day volume grows — reaching 0% maker at Level 5 ($500M+ volume) and bottoming out at 0% maker / 0.025% taker at Level 7 ($2B+).

A distinctive ApeX twist: for Levels 2 through 4 you can qualify by volume or by staking APEX tokens — or esAPEX, the escrowed form you earn from staking (25,000 / 100,000 / 250,000 combined, respectively). Whichever route is better for you wins; the top three levels are volume-only.

The honest caveat we repeat across this site: VIP discounts do not stack with referral discounts. ApeX's docs are explicit — only the single best rate applies. If you're a Level 1–2 trader, save20's 20% off beats the early VIP steps; at very high volume the VIP schedule takes over. Either way you never do worse by having the code on your account.

Perpetual contracts have no expiry, so exchanges use funding to keep the perp price tethered to the index. On ApeX Omni, funding settles every hour, on the hour (UTC). Your payment is Position Size × Index Price × Funding Rate — and depending on the rate's sign and your side, you either pay it or receive it.

The rate combines a premium component with an interest component, and ApeX caps the result at ±0.05% per hour — anything beyond the cap is absorbed by the exchange rather than passed to traders. In calm markets, hourly funding is typically a tiny fraction of that cap.

Two things to internalize: funding is exchanged between longs and shorts (ApeX isn't collecting it as revenue), and no referral code discounts it. If you hold positions for days, funding — not the trading fee — usually becomes your dominant cost, so factor it into carry trades.

Alongside perps, ApeX Omni offers Spot Swap — buying tokens by ticker or contract address across chains, with routing handled for you. This is not an order-book spot market: it's a swap product, and it carries its own fee of 0.9% plus network fees, paid in USDT.

The 20% perp-fee discount from save20 does not apply to swap fees. ApeX does run a separate official spot-swap referral program (10% off spot fees for referred users), but the headline benefit of the save20 code is on the perp side, where active traders generate most of their fee bill.

Deposits: you can fund ApeX Omni from Ethereum, Arbitrum One, BNB Chain, Base and Mantle, and post nine different tokens as cross-collateral (USDT, USDC, WBTC, WETH, ETH, cbBTC, USDe and Mantle's mETH/cmETH). ApeX doesn't document a deposit fee of its own — you pay your chain's gas for the deposit transaction, as with any on-chain transfer.

Withdrawals come in two speeds. A normal withdrawal costs nothing beyond gas but waits for the next Layer-2 (L2) settlement batch, which ApeX's docs say is typically mined every four hours — so plan for up to a few hours of delay. A fast withdrawal routes through liquidity providers and lands near-instantly: on non-Ethereum chains it costs a flat 2 USDT, while on Ethereum the fee tracks actual gas costs (ApeX's own worked example lands around 3.5 USDT). Fast withdrawals are available on Ethereum, Arbitrum and BNB Chain.

None of these transfer costs are affected by referral codes — but they're also small and mostly avoidable if you're not in a hurry.

Pulling it together: the save20 code applies a 20% discount to your perp trading fees — the 0.02%/0.05% maker/taker charges. That's an elevated affiliate-tier rate; most ApeX referral codes give a 10% trader discount, so save20 is double that. The discount binds at sign-up and applies automatically on every fill, with no claims process.

It does not discount funding payments, the 0.9% spot-swap fee, gas, or withdrawal fees. And it doesn't stack with VIP rates — you simply always get the better of the two. For the overwhelming majority of traders, who sit at fee Level 1, that means save20 is a straight 20% reduction in the one cost paid on literally every trade.

If you want the number in dollars rather than percentages, our savings calculator does the arithmetic at your volume.