Solana priority fees that stop agents overpaying

Sample recent priority fees and return low, medium, and high tier recommendations with plain-English advice so agents pay the right amount every time.

Solana priority fees change every 10 seconds. Agents that hardcode a fee either fail during congestion or overpay by 3x during quiet periods. This endpoint samples the current network, buckets fees into low/medium/high tiers, and returns plain-English llm_advice your model can act on directly.

Paid endpoint. Pass your key in the x-api-key header. See Get an API key.

Why agents use this

• Fees move constantly. A static value is either wasteful or broken. There’s no correct hardcoded number.
• LLM-native output. llm_advice is a plain sentence like “Network is quiet, use low tier to save 60%.” Feed it straight into your prompt.
• Three-tier structure matches user intent. “Get me in fast” (high), “reasonable” (medium), “I’m patient” (low). Match to user preference or agent urgency.
• Live congestion signal. current_congestion is a stable classifier your bot can log and monitor over time.

Use cases

• Dynamic fee per trade. Loop your bot: call optimal-fee, use the tier that matches urgency, submit. Typical savings: 30-50% versus a fixed conservative fee.
• Time mints to congestion dips. Poll every minute; auto-mint the moment current_congestion flips to LOW.
• CI/monitoring alert. Slack notification when fees spike above a threshold so ops knows to pause automated batches.
• Per-user fee preference in a DEX UI. Show the three tiers with description and estimated_time from the response. Users pick, bot executes.
• Fee attribution in analytics. Log the recommended tier at trade time so you can compare theoretical optimum versus what you actually paid.

Recipe: adaptive fee selection for a trading bot

adaptive-fee.ts

const API_KEY = process.env.API_KEY!;
const GATEWAY = "https://solana-pulse-gateway-1021990235790.us-central1.run.app";

type Urgency = "low" | "medium" | "high";

async function selectPriorityFee(urgency: Urgency = "medium") {
  const res = await fetch(`${GATEWAY}/api/solana/optimal-fee`, {
    headers: { "x-api-key": API_KEY },
  });
  const { current_congestion, tiers, llm_advice } = await res.json();

  const tier = tiers[urgency];
  console.log(`Congestion: ${current_congestion}. ${llm_advice}`);
  console.log(`Using ${urgency}: ${tier.lamports} lamports (${tier.estimated_time})`);

  return tier.lamports;
}

// In your tx builder:
const priorityFee = await selectPriorityFee("high"); // sniper mode

Combine with Blockhash to build fully-configured transactions client-side without your own RPC. Two calls, no infra.