Platform Fee vs Processor Fee: The Two Numbers on Every Creator Payout

Every creator payout has two fees baked in, and they come from two different companies with two different rulebooks. The processor fee (Stripe, PayPal) is unavoidable and roughly 2.9% + $0.30 per US card sale. The platform fee is a business decision by the software you sell through, ranging from 0% to 30%. Understanding this split is the difference between $70 and $96 landing in your bank on a $100 sale.

Two fees, two different companies, two different rules

When a customer clicks “buy” on your course, membership, or digital download, the money moves through two separate pipes before it reaches you. Each pipe charges its own toll, and the tolls have nothing to do with each other.

The first toll is the processor fee. This is what Stripe, PayPal, or another payment company charges to move the money from your customer’s card into a bank account. It exists because someone has to talk to Visa, handle fraud checks, manage chargebacks, and stay compliant with card network rules. This fee is unavoidable. Anyone selling online pays it, whether they use Shopify, Kajabi, Gumroad, or their own custom checkout.

The second toll is the platform fee. This is what the software you sell through takes as its cut. Unlike the processor fee, this one is entirely a business decision. Some platforms charge 0%. Some charge 10%. Some marketplaces charge 30%. There is no technical reason for any specific number, only pricing strategy.

Every “fee” complaint you have ever seen from a creator online conflates these two. The number that actually varies between platforms, and the one you can shop for, is the platform fee.

The processor fee you cannot avoid (and what it really is in the US)

In the US market as of July 2026, standard processor pricing looks like this:

• Stripe: 2.9% + $0.30 per successful card charge for domestic cards. International cards add 1.5%, currency conversion adds another 1%. Source: Stripe’s US pricing page .
• PayPal: 3.49% + $0.49 for standard commercial transactions on digital goods. Micropayment pricing exists for sub-$10 sales. Source: PayPal’s merchant fees page .
• Apple Pay and Google Pay: billed at the underlying card rate, no wallet surcharge.

These rates are the floor. No serious platform can undercut them because they are not the platform’s fees to discount, they are pass-through costs from Visa, Mastercard, and the banking rails.

When a platform advertises “we don’t take a cut” or “0% transaction fees,” they are talking about their own margin. You still pay Stripe. Anyone who claims otherwise is either subsidizing the processor cost (which they will stop doing) or hiding the fee inside a higher subscription price.

The platform fee that is a business decision, not a cost

Here is where the numbers get interesting, because this is where platforms actually differ. As of July 2026:

Two things jump out. First, the platform fee is a strategic choice, not a technical one. A platform charging 0% has decided to make money from subscriptions instead. A platform charging 10% has decided the opposite. Neither is more expensive by default. The break-even depends on your sales volume.

Second, the “free to start” platforms are almost never the cheapest at scale. Gumroad costs you nothing until you make a sale, then takes 10.5% forever. At $5,000/month in sales that is $525 gone. At $20,000/month it is $2,100 gone. A $31/month SaaS with 0% platform fee costs you $31 either way.

Zanfia sits in the 0% platform fee column as of July 2026, from $39/month, or $31/month billed annually on Starter, with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required. Under the hood, Zanfia is less a checkout with a course tacked on and more an AI team that runs a creator business: you can dictate actions to the assistant by chat or voice instead of clicking through settings, connect your own agents through the MCP endpoint on higher plans, and sell 12 product types (courses, communities, newsletters, digital downloads, consultations, bundles and more) through one checkout built to move money, with order bumps, installments, upsells, and a test mode that lets you buy your own product before launch to confirm the funnel works end to end. Availability of specific AI capabilities depends on the plan, so check the current Zanfia pricing before signing anything, ours included, because SaaS pricing moves.

Reading a $100 sale down to what lands in your bank account

The clearest way to see how these two fees interact is to run a single $100 sale through each model. Assume a US customer paying with a domestic card via Stripe at 2.9% + $0.30.

Now stretch it to a real month. Say you do $10,000 in course sales, split across 100 sales of $100 each. The processor fee is the same across all four models: $320. The platform fee is where the models diverge.

• 0% platform: $9,680 in your bank, minus your SaaS subscription (say $39 for Zanfia monthly, or $31 billed annually on Starter). Net: ~$9,641 to $9,649.
• 5% platform: $9,180 in your bank, minus $39 subscription. Net: $9,141.
• 10% + $0.50: $8,630 in your bank, no subscription. Net: $8,630.
• 30% marketplace: $6,680 in your bank, no subscription. Net: $6,680.

Between the best case and the worst case, at $10k/month, there is nearly $3,000 in monthly delta. Over a year, that is $36,000. That is a salary. It is not a rounding error, and it is entirely driven by which platform fee model you picked.

Why “0% transaction fees” means four different things across pricing pages

The phrase “0% transaction fees” appears on almost every course platform’s pricing page, and it almost never means the same thing twice. Read carefully.

Meaning 1: “We don’t take a platform cut.” You still pay Stripe or PayPal. This is the honest version. Zanfia, Kajabi (all tiers), and Podia (Mover and up) use it this way. What it actually means: 0% from the platform, roughly 3% + $0.30 from the processor.

Meaning 2: “0% on our higher tiers only.” Teachable famously charges 5% on its Basic plan and 0% on Pro. When you see “0% transaction fees” in a Teachable comparison, check which tier. The Basic plan still takes 5%. Source: Teachable’s pricing page.

Meaning 3: “0% platform fee, but we bake it into a higher subscription.” Some platforms have moved from a percentage model to a flat SaaS model, and the SaaS price accounts for what they used to earn from sales cuts. Not dishonest, just worth naming. You are still paying for the platform, just as a predictable line item instead of a variable one.

Meaning 4: “0% until you sell via our marketplace.” Gumroad’s headline pricing looks aggressive (10% + $0.50 on direct sales), but sales made through Gumroad Discover, its internal marketplace, are charged up to 30%. The “10%” number only applies to buyers you drove to the page yourself.

The lesson: the phrase “0% transaction fees” is a marketing claim, not a definition. It only means something once you have asked which fee, on which plan, from which traffic source.

The question to ask a platform before you sign up

If you get one thing out of this article, get this: before you commit to a platform, force the pricing conversation onto a single sentence. Write out the answer, in plain numbers, for a hypothetical $100 sale.

“On a $100 sale to a US customer paying with a Visa card, what do I keep after every fee, on the plan I would sign up for?”

Any platform that cannot give you a specific number for that scenario is hiding something. Any platform that answers with “0% transaction fees” without saying what the processor cost will be is dodging. The honest answer, for every platform, looks like: “You pay your Stripe rate (about $3.20), we take $X, you keep the rest.”

Then run the same math for your actual expected volume, not $100. If you plan to hit $5,000/month, the fee model matters. If you plan to hit $50,000/month, it is the single biggest cost decision in your business.

The two numbers on your payout are not going away. What you can control is how much of each one is negotiable. The processor fee is a fact of card payments. The platform fee is a choice you make when you pick where to sell. Pick knowing what you are picking.

FAQ

Why can't any platform charge less than about 2.9% + $0.30 per US card sale?

That rate is the processor fee charged by Stripe, PayPal, and similar companies to actually move money from a customer's card into a bank account. It covers card network compliance, fraud checks, and chargeback handling, and it's a pass-through cost from Visa, Mastercard, and the banking rails. No platform can undercut it because it isn't the platform's fee to discount.

At what monthly sales volume does a subscription platform with 0% platform fee beat a pay-per-sale platform like Gumroad?

Gumroad charges 10% + $0.50 per direct sale, so at $5,000/month in sales that's $525 gone, and at $20,000/month it's $2,100. A SaaS platform at around $31-$39/month with 0% platform fee costs the same either way. The break-even is quite low: past a few hundred dollars in monthly sales, the flat subscription pulls ahead and the gap widens fast.

If a platform says "0% transaction fees," what should I actually ask them?

Ask which fee they mean, on which plan, and from which traffic source. "0%" can mean no platform cut (you still pay Stripe), 0% only on higher tiers, 0% but baked into a higher subscription, or 0% only for buyers you drive yourself while their marketplace still takes up to 30%. Then force a single-sentence answer: on a $100 US card sale on the plan you'd pick, what do you keep after every fee?

How much does the platform fee model actually cost me over a year at $10,000/month in sales?

On $10,000/month split into 100 sales, the processor fee is the same $320 across models, but the platform fee ranges from $0 (0% SaaS) to $3,000+ (30% marketplace). The gap between the best and worst case is nearly $3,000 per month, or about $36,000 per year. Over a full year that difference is a salary, and it comes entirely from which platform fee model you picked.

Why is the processor fee higher on international cards and PayPal?

Stripe adds 1.5% for international cards and another 1% for currency conversion, on top of the 2.9% + $0.30 base. PayPal charges 3.49% + $0.49 for standard commercial digital-goods transactions, higher than Stripe's card rate. These reflect added risk, FX handling, and PayPal's own pricing choices rather than anything the selling platform controls.