Hi there,
I have been a long-time supporter of Zapper, I love the product and I am certainly in favour of the app charging a fee to remain sustainable in the long run, this is a necessity.
That being said, I was quite shocked by the level announced on Medium earlier this week. 0.4% on all zap-in and zap-out, and saving deposit/withdrawal seems outrageously high to me. This is more than the typical 0.3% fee a user pays for a trade on an AMM, except that there is not liquidity provider that put capital at risk to remunerate here, it all goes to Zapper. And this is on top of the other fees users were already paying to the other protocols involved in a zap + gas fees. I also seriously doubt this is outweighed by any saving enabled by a zap vs. doing the operations manually, but I would love to see data that prove me wrong.
Personally, this put me off and I would reluctantly stop using Zapper under those terms. But it must be a better way, one that does not turn Zapper into a significant rent-extracting layer of the DeFi ecosystem.
Zapper is a great product that already managed to integrate with a significant part of the DeFi ecosystem and simplified the life of thousands of users. This is just my opinion but I think the business model should be to target the largest possible volumes with a very narrow fee that users will not feel/be happy to pay for the convenience. I have in mind 0.05% max, but I would even recommend going lower, like 0.02%. The lower the fee, the less people will mind and the higher the volumes. This is pure profit to Zapper anyway and it should grow beautifully as DeFi continue gaining adoption.
On a side note:
  • It would have been nice to ask the community what they feel is a reasonable % fee they would be happy to pay for using Zapper.
  • It would have made sense to make this "turning on of the fee switch” announcement coincide with the launch of a governance token empowering the community and giving them an economic interest in the project; this would be a good way to mitigate the proposed fee
Again, I reiterate my appreciation of the Zapper team who very much deserve to be paid for their effort, my post is just about finding the right balance.
I would love to hear what other community members think.