Stripe fees: the real cost of every card you process

Quick answer

Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 per domestic card transaction with no platform fee. International cards add up to 2.5% more, chargebacks cost $15 each, and subscription billing adds 0.7%.

Stripe advertises 2.9% + $0.30 per online card sale, and unlike most platforms in this series, that headline is basically true. Stripe takes no platform cut on top of processing — what you see is close to what you pay.

The catch isn't the base rate. It's the four line items that ride on top of it: international cards, currency conversion, chargebacks, and recurring billing. Here's where each one lands.

The two cards you'll actually process

Every charge looks the same on your dashboard, but a card issued in another country costs you more than a domestic one — automatically, with no warning on the payment screen.

A domestic card — issued in the same country as your Stripe account — costs the standard 2.9% + $0.30. A foreign-issued card adds 1.5% on top, and if the customer pays in a currency different from your payout currency, Stripe adds another 1% to convert it. For a global creator audience, "international" is not an edge case — it's a meaningful slice of every month.

What a sale actually nets you

Use the calculator to see your real take-home at any price, on either card type.

Where the fixed $0.30 bites

Stripe's percentage is gentle; the flat $0.30 is not. On a $100 sale it's a rounding error. On a $3 sale it's 10% of the price before the percentage even applies. If you sell low-ticket items or micro-subscriptions, the per-transaction fee — not the rate — is what erodes your margin.

The fees that don't show up per-sale

Chargebacks cost $15 each — win or lose. If a customer disputes a charge, Stripe charges you a $15 dispute fee regardless of how the dispute resolves. The fee is refunded only if you win, so a fraudulent $9 sale can cost you $15 net.

Recurring billing adds 0.7%. If you use Stripe Billing for subscriptions, there's a 0.7% pay-as-you-go fee on recurring charges on top of processing. For a membership business, that 0.7% compounds every single month.

Refunds don't return your fees. When you refund a customer, Stripe keeps the original 2.9% + $0.30. A refunded sale costs you the full processing fee — so a high-refund product is more expensive than its sticker rate suggests.

The thing Stripe does not do

Stripe is a payment processor, not a merchant of record. It moves money — it does not collect or remit sales tax, VAT, or GST on your behalf. That liability is yours. If you sell digital products into the EU, UK, or US states with economic nexus, you're responsible for registering, collecting, and filing — or pairing Stripe with a tax tool or an MoR platform like Paddle or Lemon Squeezy.

This is the quiet cost that never appears in any fee table: the hours and risk of handling tax yourself. For more on fees that platforms don't surface in their headline rates, see the real cost of platform fees.

What $5,000/month actually looks like on Stripe

Say you sell a $29 product and hit $5,000 in gross revenue this month — about 172 transactions.

• Gross revenue: $5,000
• Processing (2.9% + $0.30 per tx): 172 × $1.14 = $196.25
• Platform fee: $0 — Stripe has no platform cut
• Total fees: $196.25
• You keep: $4,803.75
• Effective rate: 3.9%

At $5,000/month Stripe keeps you more per sale than any other platform on this list. The trade-off is everything Stripe doesn't do — no tax handling, no hosted storefront, no checkout page. You're paying less because you're building more yourself.

If you sell on Stripe and other platforms

Most creators run Stripe alongside something else — Gumroad for one-off products, Patreon for memberships, Teachable for courses. Each takes its own cut, runs its own dashboard, and shows you its own version of your revenue. None of them show what you actually kept across everything, or how much you should be setting aside for tax. For a side-by-side comparison of what every platform charges on the same sale, see our best platform for digital products guide.

That's what Owelet does. Connect every platform and see your real net income, fee breakdown per platform, and tax set-aside in one place. Free to start at owelet.app.

See how Stripe's real effective rate compares to all 9 creator platforms →

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