Bitcoin DCA Calculator
What if you'd bought a little Bitcoin every week?
If you'd bought $100 of Bitcoin every week from 1 July 2018 until 30 July 2026, raising it 2.5% each year to keep pace with inflation, you would have turned $46,128.30 into $170,083.61.
Your results
Figures below use each day's closing price, so they'll differ slightly from the live BTC/USD price in the header (why).
Value against what you put in
Value today What you put in The gap is your profit
Illustration only — the interactive chart needs JavaScript.
Why does $100 buy less every year?
You are not imagining it. Rent, groceries, insurance and school fees all cost more than they did five years ago, and your pay has almost certainly not moved as fast. The word for this is inflation, and it is not weather. It is mostly the result of a decision, taken by people you did not vote for, to create more money.
When there is more money chasing the same houses, the same food and the same petrol, each dollar buys a little less. Nobody sends you a bill for it. Your bank balance still reads the same number at the end of the month. It just does less.
That is exactly what the 2.5% box above is doing. Leave it at 2.5% and your contribution grows just fast enough to stand still — you put in more every year to buy the same slice of your life. Set it to 0% and watch the total: the same $100 in 2035 asks far less of you than $100 does today, which is another way of saying it is worth less.
Bitcoin was built with the opposite rule. There will only ever be 21 million of them, the schedule was fixed in 2009, and no committee can vote to print more. That is the whole argument. Whether it holds is for you to judge — this page only shows you what already happened.
Frequently asked questions
What is Dollar Cost Averaging?
Dollar cost averaging means buying a fixed amount on a fixed schedule — say $100 every Friday — no matter what the price is doing. When the price is high your $100 buys less. When it is low it buys more. You stop trying to pick the right moment, which almost nobody does reliably, and you end up paying something close to the average price over the whole period. It is the most boring way to buy something volatile, and that is the point.
Is DCA better than buying all at once?
Not always, and it depends what you mean by better. On an asset that mostly rose, putting everything in on day one has beaten spreading it out more often than not, simply because the money spent longer in the market. What dollar cost averaging buys you is a smaller worst case and a plan you can actually stick to when the price halves.
It is also the more honest question for most people. Very few have a lump sum sitting idle. They have a pay cheque every fortnight, which is exactly what this calculator models.
How do I use this calculator?
Enter the amount you would have bought, how often you would have bought it, and the date you would have started. The page works out every purchase between then and now at that day's actual Bitcoin closing price, adds them up, and shows what the pile would be worth today.
Change any input and everything below updates. The web address updates too, so you can copy it out of the bar and send someone the exact result you are looking at.
Why does the calculator raise my amount 2.5% a year?
Because a flat $100 a week is not really a flat effort. Prices rise, so $100 in ten years' time will ask less of you than $100 does today. Raising the contribution keeps it level in real terms, and it is what most people's saving actually looks like as their pay drifts up.
2.5% is not an official target — the US Federal Reserve's longer-run goal is 2%. It is an approximation of what inflation has actually been: US consumer prices rose about 2.5% a year on average between 1990 and 2018, and about 2.6% in 2025. The same figure is used for every currency, so the default does not shift under you when you switch.
If you would rather model a contribution that never changes, set the box to 0%. Nothing else about the calculation changes.
Understanding your results
Total invested is the sum of everything you put in, converted at the exchange rate on each purchase date rather than on the final total. Value today is all the Bitcoin you accumulated, priced at the most recent daily close. Profit is the difference between the two — the shaded gap on the chart.
Return per year is the money-weighted annual return, not a simple start-to-finish growth rate. Money you added last month has not had the same time to work as money you added in 2018, and a naive growth rate ignores that, which flatters the result. This figure accounts for when each purchase happened. It is the honest number, and it is usually lower than the headline.
Where does the price data come from?
Daily Bitcoin closing prices come from Bitstamp, one of the longest continuously operating exchanges, starting 18 August 2011 — which is why that is the earliest date you can pick. Daily prices before then only exist from Mt. Gox, an exchange that traded thinly, whose records are disputed, and which later collapsed. Headline returns built on that data would not survive scrutiny, so we do not publish them.
Exchange rates for the non-USD currencies are applied on each purchase date, never to the final total. Everything refreshes once a day.
Why does the price at the top differ from my result?
The BTC/USD figure in the header updates live from the market as you read. The calculator below it uses the day's official closing price for every date in the range instead, so the six figures stay exactly the same however many times you reload the page — and a link you share reproduces the same result tomorrow. The two prices will usually differ by a few dollars, more on a fast-moving day. That gap is expected, not a bug.
Does past performance predict the future?
No. Every figure on this page describes something that has already happened. Bitcoin's history contains several falls of more than 70% that took years to recover, and any of them would have felt permanent while you were in it. A result that looks extraordinary over ten years can look very different over the next one.
This is an educational tool, not advice. It knows nothing about your income, your debts or how you would react to losing half of it in a month.