MATIC Gas Fees for Beginners

MATIC gas fees, explained.

If you’re just getting into NFTs with projects like Starbucks, Reddit, or Nike, you might be wondering how to cover Polygon MATIC gas fees. In this guide, you’ll learn how to calculate & track MATIC gas fees, and how to get free MATIC to cover your transactions.

How to calculate MATIC gas fees

To calculate MATIC gas fees, the main piece of info you need to dig up is the gas limit of the transaction you want to do.

You can do this by browsing transactions on Polygonscan. Let’s say the gas limit is 231,697 to buy a Reddit avatar.

To calculate gas fees, here’s what you need to do:

[Gas limit] x [gas price] x .000000001 x [MATIC/USD exchange rate]

You can get the current gas price from https://polygonscan.com/gastracker and the current exchange rate by typing "MATIC to USD" in any search engine.

Here's how we calculate MATIC gas fees, then:

231,697 x 45 x .000000001 x 0.93 = $0.01 USD

You can calculate this at any given time manually or by using an online calculator. Your wallet will also estimate this for you when you’re about to complete a transaction.

Since the gas price goes up or down depending on how busy the Polygon network is, you can actually save money on MATIC gas fees by waiting until the right time to complete your transaction.

But how do you know when it’s the right time? Rather than checking gas prices constantly, let’s go over how to quickly set up a tracker that will alert you as soon as gas fees are low.

MATIC gas fees tracker

Let’s open up a no-code recipe from boto.io that will send MATIC gas fee updates to your email address (you’ll be asked to create an account real quick):

https://boto.io/canvas/editor?templateId=51898&type=recipe

Plug in your email address, save your bot, and now you’ll get an email like this:

Here are a few ways you can customize the alerts:

• Change how often the alerts are sent

• Send them to Discord, Telegram or Slack instead by replacing the email block

• Calculate the gas fee for the kind of transaction you’re after, instead of for a simple transfer with this MATIC gas fees calculator recipe

• Add a filter to only get notified when gas fees drop below a certain threshold

Free MATIC for gas fees

Now that you know how much MATIC you need, how do you actually get MATIC?

Since MATIC is so cheap, buying it doesn’t always make sense. If, for instance, there’s a $10 minimum to buy MATIC with USD, that’ll get you more MATIC than you’ll ever need. The other option is convert another cryptocurrency you already have into MATIC, but that’s also a lot of work for the microscopic amount of MATIC you need.

Fortunately, there are MATIC faucets that will give you small amounts for free, like https://matic.supply/ which will give you .0005 MATIC up to 3 times per day.

If you’re on Reddit and have 500+ karma, you can also use https://theavatarfaucet.com/

Need more MATIC? Check out https://blog.boto.io/30-easy-ways-to-get-a-little-crypto-to-play-with-for-free-2116dbea0e88

Need any help?

Join our Discord or email us: info@boto.io

Explore all of our MATIC gas fees bots, created and shared by people like you: https://boto.io/bots/?search=matic

Check out what we’re up to on Twitter and YouTube!

Sources

• Polygonscan Support Center: What is a gas fee?

Gas Fees

Reddit Avatars

Polygon

Matic

About Krystle

Krystle Blough is the Head of Community at Boto.io and has been working in education & automation for 15+ years. She has presented at CMX Summit and Wikimania conferences about her experience in increasing adoption of emerging technology. She ran a 50k trail marathon once and now people think she runs fast (false).