Crypto costs fall into two families that behave differently. One is charged when you act. The other is charged while you wait. Adding them up correctly starts with knowing which is which.
Trading costs
Spread, fees, markup and price impact are trading costs. You pay them when you enter and again when you exit. They do not care how long the position was open. A trade held for a minute and a trade held for a month pay the same toll, if the size and the conditions are the same.
Holding costs
Funding on a perpetual contract is a holding cost. It is a payment between longs and shorts at set intervals, hourly on some venues and every several hours on others. When it is positive, longs pay shorts. It accrues for as long as the position is open and stops when it closes. Crypto funding rates explained covers the mechanism.
Funding has a feature the toll does not: it has a sign. A holder on the paying side has a cost. A holder on the receiving side has an income. So the same position can be charged rent in one week and paid it in the next.
Which one dominates
For a short trade, the toll is nearly everything. A position open for an hour pays at most one or a few funding intervals, and that is small next to the spread crossed twice.
For a long hold on a perp, the balance turns. The toll was paid once and is behind you. Funding keeps arriving. Held through a long stretch of high funding, the rent can pass the toll and keep going. Funding is rent, and being early pays it works through what that does to a correct call held too long.
Spot has no rent, and that is a choice
A coin bought outright has no funding. Its costs are the toll and nothing after. That makes spot the cheaper way to hold for a long time when funding is steadily positive, and it is one reason the same view can be better expressed in one instrument than the other depending on the horizon.
Leverage changes the comparison, because a perp ties up less capital. That is a separate question from cost, and it comes with liquidation risk that spot does not have.
Putting both in one figure
The honest cost of a perp trade is the toll plus the expected rent over the time you plan to hold. The second part is an estimate, because funding changes. A plan that states its holding period can at least state its rent at the current rate, and notice when the rate moves.
On the NoVo Crypto Market Map, the round-trip ranking drawn from Robinhood’s own disclosed markup covers the toll on spot coins. Funding on the stock and index perps, now and averaged, is on the map’s Stocks On-Chain tab.