A basis point is one hundredth of a per cent. Trading costs are quoted in them because the numbers are small and the differences matter; the cost of that convention is that most people cannot feel what one is worth until they see it in money.
Most costs are charged on both sides. A venue advertising "5 bps" charges you ten on a complete trade, and a strategy taking sixty round trips a month pays six hundred basis points a month in commission alone — six per cent of the traded notional, before funding, before spread, before anything moving against you between signal and fill.
That is the arithmetic that decides whether a strategy is viable, and it is why we built the breakeven calculator and then the whole report. Cost a trade list to see all of it at once.