DCA Calculator

How It Works

Dollar-cost averaging means committing a fixed amount of money on a fixed schedule no matter what the price does. Each purchase buys amount ÷ price tokens, so a cheap day adds more units and an expensive day adds fewer, and your average cost per token ends up below the simple average of the prices you paid. This tool replays that strategy over real history and shows what it would have produced.

The DCA math

Every buy spends the same USD amount and receives units = amount ÷ that day's price. Total invested = amount × number of buys. Final value = total units × the last price in the series. Return % = final value ÷ invested − 1, and the average buy price is total invested ÷ total units (a harmonic-style mean of the sampled prices).

Where the prices come from

Pressing Compute fetches the daily UTC closing-price history for the selected coin from CoinGecko's public market_chart API. The simulator then samples that daily series at your frequency: daily uses every candle, weekly takes every seventh candle, and monthly jumps to the same day-of-month in each following month (or the first later candle when that day is missing). The first candle of the range is always your first buy.

DCA vs lump-sum

The comparison row shows the same total capital spent as a single purchase on the first day of the window. In a steadily trending-up market lump-sum usually wins, because all the money rides the entire climb while DCA's later buys miss the early gains. DCA tends to win in choppy or falling-then-recovering markets, where the cheap candles it keeps buying accumulate extra units. The difference is shown honestly in points.

What is not modeled

Trading fees, spread, slippage, partial fills and taxes are all ignored, and intraday timing is approximated by daily closes. All amounts are in USD. Real executions will always land a little away from these numbers.

Frequently Asked Questions