Most sniper bots lose money. Not because the strategy is wrong, but because they are three blocks late and buying honeypots. Both problems are solvable.
Why polling loses
If you are calling getProgramAccounts in a loop to detect new pools, you have already lost. By the time your poll returns, the pool has been open for hundreds of milliseconds and the people who matter are already filled.
Geyser changes the game
Geyser is a plugin interface that streams account and transaction updates directly from a validator as they happen. Subscribing to Raydium and Pump.fun program accounts over gRPC gets you pool creation events in real time, not on your next poll cycle. This is the single biggest latency win available.
Landing the transaction
Detecting fast is useless if your buy does not land. Jito bundles let you submit an atomic set of transactions with a tip, giving you priority placement. Tip sizing is a live auction — too low and you do not land, too high and you eat your edge.
Rug checks are not optional
Before any buy fires, verify: mint authority is revoked, freeze authority is revoked, LP is burned or locked, top holder concentration is below your threshold, and a simulated sell actually succeeds. That last one catches most honeypots. Skipping these checks is how sniper bots turn into donation mechanisms.
Position management
Entry is the easy part. Define your exit before you enter: a take-profit ladder that scales out in tranches, a trailing stop that locks gains, and a hard stop-loss that does not negotiate. Bots that only know how to buy are just a slower way to lose.
The Solana Sniper Bot source implements all of this if you would rather start from working code.
