Crypto DCA Calculator

Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) means buying a fixed dollar amount of an asset on a fixed schedule — say $100 of Bitcoin every Friday — regardless of price. When the price is high, your fixed amount buys fewer units; when it's low, the same amount buys more. Over time, your average cost reflects the volatility of the buying window rather than any single moment, which removes the pressure of trying to time the market.

Real DCA returns depend on the exact price at every single buy, which we'd need a full historical series to model. Rather than guess at past prices for arbitrary tokens and date ranges, this calculator takes your best estimate of the average buy-window price as input. For a quick check, use the rough midpoint between the lowest and highest price across the window — or, for a more conservative number, the geometric mean.

Cost basis = total invested ÷ units accumulated. In this constant-price model, that equals your input average buy price by definition — so the field exists mostly to verify the math at a glance. In a real variable-price DCA, cost basis tends to track the geometric mean of the prices you bought at, which is usually below the arithmetic mean (a small but real DCA edge in volatile assets).

For volatile assets, more frequent buys average across more price points, which marginally smooths the entry. The difference between weekly and daily DCA is usually less than the trading fees that more frequent buys incur — so weekly is often the practical sweet spot. Monthly is fine if your exchange charges per-transaction; the smoothing benefit drops but is still real.

Statistically, no — historical research (most famously by Vanguard) shows lump-sum tends to beat DCA roughly two-thirds of the time, because markets trend up more than down. DCA's value is psychological and risk-management: it removes the regret of buying right before a crash, makes investing automatic, and matches the cash flow of someone investing from a regular paycheque. It's a tool for behaviour, not for maximising expected return.

This calculator ignores per-transaction fees. If your exchange charges a flat fee per buy (common on debit-card on-ramps), daily DCA may be eaten by fees. Percentage-based fees affect daily, weekly, and monthly equally. On taxes, every DCA buy creates a separate cost-basis lot, which matters when you eventually sell — keep a record so your tax software can match each disposal to a specific buy.