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Bitcoin DCA calculator
Enter the amount per buy, the frequency and the plan length, and it gives you how much the plan commits in total, how many buys that is and what it comes to per month. Pick an assumed drawdown and it gives the upper bound of the paper loss. This is a plan calculator: it reads no market data and works out no historical returns.
How it's worked out: total invested = per-buy amount × number of buys; the number of buys converts your plan length at the frequency you picked (daily ≈ 30.44/month, weekly ≈ 4.33/month, every two weeks ≈ 2.17/month, monthly = 1). This just lays your plan out into a few numbers; it fetches no live prices and predicts no coin price or return.
How it's worked out: maximum paper loss = total invested × the drawdown you assume. This is an upper bound: it is what you would see if all the money had been bought at the highest price and the price then fell by the full amount. A real DCA plan buys in installments, with the later buys at lower prices, so under the same fall the paper loss would be smaller than this. If the number makes you uneasy, lower the amount first.
Total invested and maximum paper loss: how to read the two numbers
Start with what the whole plan adds up to. $200 a month for two full years is $4,800. With the total in front of you, you can see how much of your overall finances this plan takes up. Whether it should go above a certain figure is a question for your cap: work that out with the Position sizer; the method is in How much should I invest in bitcoin?
Watch the frequency field. With the amount per buy unchanged, switching from monthly to weekly multiplies both the number of buys and the total by about 4.33. To keep the total budget the same, lower the amount per buy when you change the frequency. For choosing between weekly, every two weeks and monthly, see Should you DCA weekly or monthly? Daily, weekly and monthly buys compared.
For which drawdown to pick in the second block, a recent stretch gives a reference point. On BTCUSDT monthly closes (UTC) from Binance's public market data API, September 2025 closed at 114,048.93 and June 2026 at 58,624.71, a fall of 48.6% in nine months, close to the 50% option. Start only if you can accept the number it gives you, rather than finding out during a real fall that you can't.
This calculator doesn't work out returns or average cost
It reads no market data and doesn't know what price each of your buys filled at, so it can't give you an average cost or a return, and it can't backtest what DCA would have made over past years. If you've been buying for a while and want to know where you stand, the method and a 10-round month-by-month example are in How to calculate your DCA return.
It doesn't judge whether you should DCA either. Buying in installments spares you from guessing the starting point, but it doesn't guarantee a profit, the account still shows a paper loss when prices fall, and in a rising market it earns less than a lump sum. Two market stretches are compared in Is bitcoin DCA worth it? DCA vs lump sum in two real markets.
Risk warning: crypto prices are extremely volatile and you can lose your entire principal. The content on this site is investor education and a roundup of common practices, not investment advice, and is not responsible for any investment outcome. Past performance does not indicate future returns.
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