Lesson 5 of 6

The Money: Costs, Timeline & Odds

This is the lesson where I ask you to be honest with yourself. Let's look at what you'd actually spend, when things happen, and, most importantly, what's realistically likely to come out of it.

What You'd Actually Spend

ItemRequired?Typical Cost
Creating the coin (network fee)Required~$2 (Solana) or a tiny fraction of a cent (Gate Layer)
Logo and descriptionRequired$0: free tools like Canva
Locking up trading funds yourselfNot needed$0: these platforms handle this automatically (Lesson 1)
Buying some of your own coin, as a signal (not to fund graduation)Optional$0 – $500
Paid promotion (your only real lever for better odds)Optional, if you're serious$500 – $5,000+, with no guarantee
A simple spreadsheet to track fee income for taxesOptional$0
Bare minimum: about $2. A realistic budget if you want an actual shot at getting noticed is more like $500–$5,000, almost entirely spent on promotion: and even that comes with no guarantee. One important thing: reaching the size needed to "graduate" (roughly $8,300–$8,800 of real buying, explained below) has to come from strangers choosing to buy, not from your own wallet. If you fund it yourself, you're not earning anything: you're just spending your own money to inflate a number.

The Timeline, at a Glance

WhenWhat Happens
Day 0You prepare (Steps 1–6 from Lesson 4) and launch (Step 7).
Days 0–2The critical window: most coins either get some early attention here or go quiet for good.
Days 2–7If it's still alive, this is the window where a coin either builds toward "graduating" or fades out.
If it graduatesYou start earning small, automatic creator fees on real trades: track every one for taxes.
OngoingFee income typically shrinks over time as attention moves on: that's normal, not a sign you did something wrong.

The Honest Odds

These come from a real study of 18.67 million coins created on Pump.fun: not a guess.

Never trade past day 1
~69%
Most coins, including well-intentioned ones
Still trading after 90 days
~4.55%
The large majority fade out well before this
Ever "graduate"
Under 2%
And this number moves around a lot month to month

Four Realistic Scenarios

ScenarioWhat HappensEst. Monthly IncomeHow Likely
Most LikelyNever graduates.$0 (minus the ~$2 you spent)~98%
A Small WinGraduates, gets a short burst of activity, fades within days.$20–$150 once, then close to nothing~1.5%
A Real WinGraduates and keeps a genuinely engaged community trading for weeks.$300–$1,500, shrinking over time~0.4%
A Rare BreakoutGoes genuinely viral and stays culturally relevant for a while.$3,000+ for a limited window<0.1%
Please read this twice: the single most likely outcome, by far, is that nothing happens and you're out about $2. Doing everything in this guide "right" (honest disclosure, no exit, a genuine story) makes this a legal, low-cost, low-stakes experiment. It does not make it a reliable way to earn money. Treat it like buying a $2 raffle ticket you understand completely, not like a business plan.

Try the Numbers Yourself

If your coin does graduate, here's roughly what different levels of ongoing trading activity would earn you in fees.

Your Daily Earnings
$0.00
Total Over That Period
$0.00
If It Kept Up for a Month
$0.00

This only estimates earnings after your coin has already graduated. It doesn't include the roughly $8,300–$8,800 in real buying needed to graduate in the first place, or the under-2% odds of getting there: keep those numbers from above in mind while you play with this.