Want to launch your own NFT on the blockchain or an NFT marketplace? In this guide, we cover everything you need to know about the costs of launching or minting an NFT on the blockchain.
Table of Contents
What Is Minting An NFT?
Minting an NFT means storing your NFT on the blockchain. The NFT stored can be in a form of an image, video or music. You can mint your NFTs on different blockchains such as Ethereum, Polygon and Solana. Once the NFT has been minted, that’s where the magic happens. You can trade, transfer or showcase on different platforms such as NFT marketplaces or decentralized Web3 applications.
What Is The Cost Of Minting An NFT?
To know the cost of minting an NFT, it’s important to understand how the NFT is minted, aka— The mechanism. For example, an NFT can be minted by yourself, or it can be minted by others through a minting website. Usually, the latter method is used when you want to launch an NFT project and put in on a public sale. The former method is used if you don’t want others to mint directly from your website or contract, but instead buy on a secondary NFT marketplace.
Minting your own NFTs (From a smart contract)
If you want to mint your own NFTs, you have to pay a gas fee for each NFT minted. The fee will depend on the blockchain and the miner fee. Popular blockchains such as Ethereum are typically more expensive and can cost anywhere from 0.01 to 0.05 eth per transaction (per mint).
For Solana and Polygon chains, the cost of minting an NFT is much cheaper and usually less than a dollar.
It is worth noting that your smart contract could also be coded in a way that allows you to mint multiple NFTs in 1 transaction (bulk minting) to save on gas fees.
Letting Others Mint Your NFT
If you have setup a minting website that allows other people to mint your NFTs, great news— you don’t have to pay a single cent for each NFT minted. You could even set a mint price and have the proceeds go to your wallet! You may want to check out our guide on how to launch your NFT project with no coding experience if you’d like to build a minting website.
How Much Does It Cost To Mint An NFT on OpenSea?
Minting an NFT on the blockchains such as Ethereum and Polygon will automatically result in it appearing on the NFT marketplace, as OpenSea reads the blockchains for any NFT tokens created. Hence, you don’t need to pay any extra fees to OpenSea to have it listed. Most standard NFT smart contracts will also automatically create an OpenSea collection which displays the metadata of your entire NFT collection.
You can also manually mint an NFTs on OpenSea via this link. It is free of charge (no gas-fees), the only downside is you have to do it 1-by-1.
How Much To Deploy A Smart Contract For NFTs?
If you are building your own NFT minting website so you can sell your NFTs to the public, you will need to develop and deploy a blockchain smart contract.
The cost of actually deploying the contract varies depending on the miner fee. During periods of high demand, the costs of deploying your contract could skyrocket to 0.2 eth. If the gas fees are cheap, deploying a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain could go as low as 0.06 eth, so be sure to wait for the right timing to deploy your contract! You can check the current gas price on Etherscan.
In Solana, smart contracts are called Programs. The cost of deploying a new program to Mainnet will vary from 2 – 20+ $SOL depending on the size of your program.
How Much To Develop A Smart Contract?
Before you can deploy your NFT smart contract you will need to first code the smart contract. You can hire a Blockchain Developer on Upwork who can build it for you. Rates vary from anywhere between $50 per hour to $200 per hour. Be sure to hire only reputable developers with good reviews and a proven track record as NFT security is very crucial to avoid any mishaps.
There are also plenty of no-code tools out there which can help you create simple NFT minting contracts. Some are paid tools while others are free, they just take a small cut out of each transaction. Be sure to factor these into your costs.
What Is The Cost Of Developing NFT Art?
Similarly, before launching your NFT project you will need to have your NFTs designed. You can hire freelancers on Upwork or draw it yourself. Rates vary depending on quality so be sure to allocate a good budget if you want to launch a stunning NFT collection.
Summary
There are a lot of hidden costs when launching an NFT project and it is important to do proper cost analyses to avoid making a loss. We hope this article has provided a good breakdown on the costs of minting NFTs, developing and deploying smart contracts.
