What a transaction costs
Every Inscribe action that writes to Bitcoin shows its full cost before your wallet opens. Nothing is signed or paid until you approve the amounts on the confirmation screen.
This page explains the numbers on that screen.
The three parts of a total
Section titled “The three parts of a total”Network fee. What miners are paid to include your transaction. It is the fee rate you pick, in satoshis per virtual byte, times the size of the transaction. A larger inscription costs more because it is bigger, not because Inscribe charges more for it.
Service fee. A flat 1,500 satoshis for most actions, charged once per order rather
than per item. Some flows differ and say so on the confirmation screen: an op_names
batch pays the flat fee once per name, and Mezcal quotes its own amount. Splitting a batch
across separate outputs charges the fee per output rather than once. Fixing a stuck
payment and recovering padding sats charge no service fee at all.
The inscription output. Your inscription lives on a satoshi, and that satoshi has to sit in an output of its own. The default is 546 satoshis, and 330 is offered as the smaller standard size. This is not a fee. It stays with your inscription, and you still own it.
The confirmation screen lists these separately and then adds them up. On screen the labels read Network Gas Fee, Mint UTXO Value where the protocol carries an output, Service Fee, and Total Cost.
A quote, as the confirmation screen itemises it
| Line | Goes to | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Network Gas FeeFee rate times transaction size | Miners | 1,500 |
| Service FeeFlat, once per order | Universe | 1,500 |
| Mint UTXO ValueThe satoshi your inscription sits on | You | 546 |
| Total Cost | 3,546 sats |
The example is a small inscription at 10 sat/vB. Your own network fee moves with the size of what you are inscribing and the rate you choose. The other two lines do not.
How big is the transaction?
Section titled “How big is the transaction?”The size is decided by what you are inscribing, not by a setting. Inscribe estimates it from the actual script it is about to build, so the figure on screen describes a real transaction rather than a flat guess.
Two things worth knowing:
- Inscribing a child under a parent adds about 101 virtual bytes, because the parent output has to be spent and returned.
- The service fee output costs bytes too. It is a real output on the transaction, so you pay a little network fee for carrying it. That is already inside the total.
The figure shown before you create the order is a preview. The order the backend builds carries the authoritative price, and that is the amount the payment screen asks for.
Choosing a fee rate
Section titled “Choosing a fee rate”Inscribe offers three tiers, quoted from Universe’s own Bitcoin infrastructure and refreshed every 30 seconds.
| Tier | What it targets |
|---|---|
| Normal | A place in the blocks mined over roughly the next half hour |
| Fast | A place in the next block, roughly ten minutes |
| Custom | Any rate you type |
Normal is selected when you arrive, and it is the tier marked Recommended. The default is never the more expensive option.
The wait shown on each tier is the wait its rate has earned, not a label fixed in advance. Bitcoin block times are random, so these are averages rather than promises.
Rates are accepted between 0.1 and 10,000 sat/vB. Some protocols raise that floor or round to whole satoshis, and the fee control uses the protocol’s own minimum where it has one.
When Normal and Fast cost the same
Section titled “When Normal and Fast cost the same”Blocks are not always full. When there is room in the next block, the rate that gets you into it is the same rate that would have got you in within half an hour, and both tiers quote the same number.
Inscribe says so, on both tiers, rather than printing a shorter wait next to the higher-sounding option:
Blocks have room right now, so Normal costs the same as Fast and confirms just as soon.
Two prices that are the same number are the same purchase. Paying more for one of them would buy nothing, so the screen does not offer it as if it would.
Some protocols round fee rates up to whole satoshis or apply a higher relay floor. That can also land both tiers on one rate, and the same note appears for the same reason.
Rates below 1 sat/vB
Section titled “Rates below 1 sat/vB”The Sub 1 control accepts rates under one satoshi per virtual byte. These are real rates that real miners sometimes accept, and they can take a long time or never confirm. The control is marked Beta, shows the exact rate you have chosen, and never becomes the default.
Choosing the output size
Section titled “Choosing the output size”The satoshi your inscription sits on defaults to 546. You can lower it to 330, or type a value of your own.
330 is not an arbitrary floor. Bitcoin relays refuse outputs below a dust threshold that depends on the address type, and for the Taproot and P2WSH addresses inscriptions use, that threshold is 330 satoshis. An order asking for less falls back to the computed dust limit rather than building a transaction the network would reject.
| Address type | Dust threshold |
|---|---|
| P2WPKH | 294 sats |
| P2WSH and Taproot | 330 sats |
| Legacy or unrecognised | 546 sats, used as a safe fallback |
Lowering the output saves 216 satoshis and makes that output harder to move later, because a smaller output leaves less room to pay a fee out of it. That is why 546 is the default.
Why the cost is shown first
Section titled “Why the cost is shown first”An inscription is not reversible. Once a transaction is signed and broadcast, the fee is spent whether or not the result is what you wanted. Showing the amounts before the wallet opens is the only point at which the choice is still yours.
The same rule shapes the rest of the flow:
- The content preview shows exactly what will be inscribed, before payment.
- The confirmation screen names the receiving address and the operation type.
- No automatic funding flow picks an output holding an inscription, Rune, or token balance to pay a fee. Read asset safety.
If you overpay
Section titled “If you overpay”Pay more than the quote and the surplus comes back. The reveal transaction adds a third output sending the extra to the address that funded the order, as long as that surplus is large enough to survive the extra bytes it costs and still clear the dust threshold. If it is not, it is added to your inscription output instead, where you still own it.
This matters most for manual payments, where it is easy to send a round number rather than the exact quote.
If you underpay
Section titled “If you underpay”The order is not lost. It stays waiting, records that the payment was below the quote, and keeps checking. Top the address up to the quoted amount and the flow resumes. Nothing is cancelled and no key is discarded. See recovery routes.
Reading a cost with a screen reader
Section titled “Reading a cost with a screen reader”Each fee tier is a button whose accessible name carries the tier, the rate in satoshis per virtual byte, and the wait, so the price is available without reading the visual card. The recommended tier says that it is recommended.
When fee data is unavailable
Section titled “When fee data is unavailable”Fee rates come from Universe-operated Bitcoin infrastructure. If that source stops answering, the fee control says Cached fees instead of counting down to the next refresh, so you can see that the number in front of you is not fresh. A stale quote is never presented as a live one.
On networks where a made-up rate would be worse than no rate, Inscribe refuses to quote at all rather than serve a fallback price. Read where the data comes from.
Related
Section titled “Related”- The life of an order, which spends this money
- Fee tiers, as a reference table
- Asset safety, which decides what pays the fee