# Smart Contract Fee

In order to bear the costs for maintaining its service up and running DeBets requires a fee which is applied seamlessly at the Smart Contract level.
Services based on the blockchain are quite expensive to run and when compared to other non-blockchain services there are at least three additional sources of cost:

1. you are required to run your own blockchain nodes in order to interact with the blockchain more efficiently
2. you have to pay network fees for any transaction you make on the blockchain
3. you have to pay fees to deploy smart contracts

Point 2. needs a bit of explanation: as explained in Deposit closing mechanism the closing of deposits is a two steps process where the Smart Contract requires both parties, the player and you, to submit a close request. When one party requests to close a deposit then the other party is given a grace period to counter close. DeBets server takes care of sending the close request on your behalf automatically as soon as the player requests to close a deposit. In this way the player does not have to wait for the other party and the closing of the deposit is finalized within seconds. Because DeBets is calling the Smart Contract on your behalf it is also bearing the cost for the fee of the underlying transaction.
Similarly, when you use the Backoffice to set criteria for automatically closing player deposits that are in loss, it is again DeBets server that based on your criteria calls the Smart Contract to request it to close the deposits that match your criteria and even in this case it is DeBets that bears the cost of the transaction fee.

The fee applied by the Smart Contract corresponds to 1% of the amount loss by the player any time a losing deposit gets closed. This means that the fee is only applied when you are actually making a profit, and corresponds to 1% of your profit amount.
No fee is applied on winning deposits.