I've recently chatted with NFT project founders getting shocked by the "hidden" costs of launching a new collection.

Building & launching an NFT project has countless costs. For example, creators need to take into account the artists & developer salary, primary & secondary sale royalties, gas fees during the mint, and marketplace fees.

One fee that often surprises creators though is the gas fee for the smart contract deployment to the blockchain.

How to Calculate Deployment Cost

If you don't take away anything else from this essay, just remember the following equation:

Deployment cost = Units of gas *price of gas * value of ETH

In other words, deploy cost is the product of these three variables:

• UNITS of gas used by the transaction deploying your smart contract (gas)
• PRICE per gas based on current network traffic (ETH per gas or gwei)
• VALUE of Ether (ETH) based on fiat market rate (eg USD per ETH)

Example: WOW Galaxy Contract

Let's take the contract deployment transaction from recently launched World of Women Galaxy.

Deploying this contract cost a total of $249.51 USD.

How'd we arrive at this total?

• Units = 3,776,292 units of gas
• Price = ~20.62 gwei or 0.000000021 ETH per gas
• Value = $3,146.36 USD / ETH

3,776,292 * 0.000000021 * $3146.36 = $249.51

Is this deploy cost high or low?

Honestly, I'd say it's pretty efficient for today's level of network congestion.

More NFT Project Benchmarks

Here's a selection of NFT projects I’m involved in or follow in chronological order:

• Cryptopunks (2017): deployed for $7.56
• Crypto Coven (Nov 2022): deployed for $2,565.51
• Curious Addy's Trading Club (Nov 2022): deployed for $2,080.88
• Azuki (Jan 2022): deployed for $1,085.60
• Meta Angels (Feb 2022): deployed for $1,100.03
• WOW Pixies (Jan 2022): deployed for $1,736.29
• Wandernauts (Mar 2022): deployed for $590.87

Takeaways:

• Smart contract deployment costs have increased 100-300x since 2017 as networks have gotten more congested (duh!)
• During the first few months of 2022, projects saw smart contract deployment costs in the range of $500-$1700.

Recommendation

If you're a creator working on a NFT project, I'd recommend setting aside $2000 to cover for future smart contract deployment gas fees.