Payment Gateway Fee Calculator

Enter what you charge per sale and how many sales you close in a month. The calculator prices that volume across Stripe, PayPal, Paddle, and Lemon Squeezy at their published rates, then shows the fee per sale, total monthly fees, what lands in your account, and the effective rate for each. The highlighted row is the cheapest on raw fees. Read the merchant-of-record section before treating it as the winner, because the cheapest processor and the least total work are usually different companies.

How gateway fees are worked out

Every mainstream gateway prices the same way: a percentage of the transaction plus a fixed amount per transaction.

fee per sale = price × percent ÷ 100 + fixed

Monthly fees are that figure multiplied by sales volume, and the effective rate is total fees divided by gross revenue. The percentage tracks the value at risk, the network and issuing-bank costs that scale with the amount of money moved, while the fixed fee covers the roughly constant cost of authorizing and settling a single transaction, which is the same whether the sale is nine dollars or nine hundred. The fixed part is why the effective rate always sits above the headline percentage, and why it climbs as prices fall. Stripe's $0.30 is 0.3% of a $100 sale and 3.3% of a $9 one.

Where the percentage-plus-fixed model comes from

The shape of a processing fee is older than e-commerce. When Diners Club issued the first general-purpose charge card in 1950, it charged merchants a percentage of each bill: a restaurant that accepted the card gave up a slice of the sale in exchange for guaranteed payment and new customers. That merchant discount is the direct ancestor of the percentage you still pay.

Bank of America turned the charge card into a bank credit product in 1958, mailing unsolicited BankAmericards to residents of Fresno, California. In 1970 the banks that licensed the card spun it into an independent cooperative, National BankAmericard Inc., renamed Visa in 1976. The cooperative replaced a tangle of bilateral deals with a single standardized interchange reimbursement fee. Interchange is the wholesale fee the merchant's bank pays the cardholder's bank on every sale, and it typically carries two parts: a percentage of the amount and a small flat charge for authorizing one transaction. That dual structure is why modern quotes still read as a percentage plus a fixed fee.

Moving the model onto the web took another generation of plumbing. CyberCash, founded in August 1994, ran one of the first internet payment services. In 1996 Jeff Knowles founded Authorize.Net in American Fork, Utah, building one of the earliest examples of what the industry now calls a payment gateway: software that relayed card details securely from a web page to the banking networks over SSL. Consumer trust followed. Confinity, founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek, launched the PayPal transfer service in 1999, merged with Elon Musk's X.com in March 2000, took the PayPal name in June 2001, listed on NASDAQ in February 2002, and was bought by eBay that October.

The flat convention this calculator assumes was set by Stripe. Patrick and John Collison founded it in Palo Alto in 2010 and opened it to the public in September 2011 after a long private beta, replacing the underwriting paperwork of a traditional merchant account with a few lines of code and one published rate: 2.9 percent plus 30 cents for nearly everyone. A blended flat rate like that folds the fluctuating interchange, network fees, and the processor's own margin into a single predictable number. It costs Stripe more on a premium rewards card and less on a debit card, but the seller sees one figure. Square and PayPal price the same way. Traditional acquirers still sell interchange-plus, which passes the real wholesale cost through with a fixed markup and tends to win at high volume, but flat pricing took the internet because it is legible on a pricing page.

Current published rates

The rates below come from each provider's published pricing pages — Stripe's standard US card rate, PayPal's rate for standard credit and debit card payments, and the flat merchant-of-record rates from Paddle and Lemon Squeezy — verified July 2026. The comparison above reads from the same data file.

All figures are USD, which is how these providers publish their pricing whatever currency you sell in.

Three shops, three answers

A $9 utility selling 40 copies a month grosses $360. Stripe charges 9 × 0.029 + 0.30 = $0.56 per sale, $22.44 for the month, a 6.23% effective rate. PayPal's larger fixed fee takes $0.76 per sale and $30.36 for the month, 8.43%. The merchant-of-record platforms take $0.95 per sale, $38.00 in total, 10.56%. The absolute premium over Stripe is $15.56 a month — if those 40 buyers span ten countries, that is the cheapest tax compliance available anywhere.

The default inputs model a $29 product at 350 sales, $10,150 gross. Stripe: $1.14 per sale, $399.35 monthly, 3.93%. PayPal: $1.36, $474.99, 4.68%. Paddle or Lemon Squeezy: $1.95, $682.50, 6.72%. The merchant-of-record premium over Stripe is $283.15 a month, about $3,400 a year. At this size that premium is usually cheaper than registering for EU VAT OSS and a few US states and filing every quarter yourself.

At $49 and 2,000 sales a month, gross is $98,000. Stripe takes $3,442 (3.51% effective) and the merchant-of-record platforms take $5,900 (6.02%). The premium is now $2,458 a month, roughly $29,500 a year, and the arithmetic flips: Stripe Tax at about half a point costs near $490 a month on this volume, leaving room under the premium for filing help. This is the revenue band where companies typically migrate off a merchant of record and bring tax in-house.

The merchant of record trade

Stripe and PayPal move money; the tax obligations stay yours. Sell a download to a customer in Germany and EU VAT rules apply from the first euro for digital goods. Sell into Texas past the economic nexus threshold and Texas expects registration and returns. A merchant of record resells your product instead: Paddle or Lemon Squeezy is the legal seller on the invoice, collects the correct VAT or GST at checkout, remits it in every jurisdiction, and absorbs the registration burden along with much of the payment-method sprawl. That is what the roughly two-point premium buys.

The model spread in the early 2010s and became close to mandatory for small digital sellers on 1 January 2015, when the European Union began taxing digital services where the buyer lives rather than where the seller sits, with no minimum threshold. The Mini One Stop Shop, put in place the same day, let a seller file that VAT through a single return instead of registering in each member state, and was extended into the wider One Stop Shop on 1 July 2021. An annual EUR 10,000 turnover threshold has sheltered the smallest EU-established sellers since 1 January 2019, but a seller based outside the EU still owes from the first euro. A merchant of record removes the registration step entirely by taking it onto its own books.

Stripe Tax is the middle path. For an extra fee of about half a percent per transaction it calculates and collects the right tax on your Stripe charges, but collection is not remittance — registering and filing in each jurisdiction remains your job or your accountant's. It suits businesses concentrated in a handful of tax jurisdictions that want Stripe's lower base rate.

Stripe acquired Lemon Squeezy in July 2024, so the two ends of this trade-off increasingly belong to one company, leaving Paddle as the major independent merchant of record.

What the comparison leaves out

The table models base rates on domestic cards. Real statements carry line items this calculator excludes. International cards add 1.5 percentage points on Stripe and Lemon Squeezy, and Stripe charges about 1% more when currency conversion is involved. PayPal's branded checkout button is priced above the standard card rate used here, at 3.49% plus $0.49. A chargeback costs $15 per dispute on Stripe regardless of outcome. Recurring billing tooling carries its own surcharge on some processors. Payout timing differs too, with merchant-of-record platforms settling on a slower cycle than card processors. If your customer base is heavily international, your real Stripe effective rate will sit noticeably above the number shown here, which narrows the gap to the merchant-of-record platforms.

Prices change without notice and figures here are estimates, not quotes; this site is not affiliated with any provider named above. See the site disclaimer.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Stripe take from a $29 sale?

2.9% plus $0.30, so $0.84 in percentage fee and $0.30 fixed, $1.14 in total, which is an effective rate of 3.93%. Add 1.5 percentage points if the card was issued outside your country, and about 1% more if currency conversion is involved.

Why do Paddle and Lemon Squeezy charge 5% plus 50 cents when Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents?

Because they sell as merchant of record. They become the legal seller on the invoice, so they calculate, collect, and remit VAT, GST, and US sales tax in every jurisdiction where your customers live. The roughly two-point premium is the price of never registering for EU VAT or tracking US economic nexus yourself.

Is PayPal cheaper than Stripe?

Not on standard checkout rates. PayPal's 2.99% plus $0.49 loses to Stripe's 2.9% plus $0.30 at every price point, and the gap widens on cheap products: on a $9 sale PayPal takes 8.43% against Stripe's 6.23%. PayPal can still win on conversion, since many buyers have a PayPal balance and no card at hand.

Who owns Lemon Squeezy?

Stripe acquired Lemon Squeezy in July 2024. It still runs as a separate merchant-of-record product with its own 5% plus $0.50 pricing, so the closest competitor to Stripe in this comparison is a company Stripe owns.

What is an effective payment processing rate?

Total fees divided by gross revenue. The headline percentage understates what you pay because of the fixed fee: at $29 per sale Stripe's 2.9% plus $0.30 works out to 3.93%, and at $9 per sale it reaches 6.23%. Comparing effective rates at your actual price point is the only fair comparison.

Do these numbers include chargebacks and payout fees?

No. A disputed charge costs $15 on Stripe whether you win or not, currency conversion adds about 1%, and some providers charge for payouts to certain countries or currencies. The table covers the base processing fee on a domestic card, which is the number every provider publishes.