Stripe processing fees explained: Guide & fee calculator

Stripe is a major player in the payment processing industry, handling more than 500 million API requests every day. While still not as well-known as PayPal, it's become a popular choice for many online stores and is continually gaining popularity as a payment provider.

Stripe's fees are fair and clear, but there are a lot of things that can make it hard to figure out how much they are.

In this article, we'll give you a Stripe fee calculator to help you quickly and accurately figure out the numbers!

We'll also talk about how Stripe's processing fees work for different payment methods, locations, and features, and how Checkout Page can help you use Stripe to sell digital goods, event tickets, and subscriptions.

Overview of Stripe

Stripe was started in 2010 and has quickly become one of the best-known payment service providers (PSPs). Its platform lets businesses take payments online and offers a number of ways to pay, such as credit cards and digital wallets. Some ways to pay include Apple Pay and Google Pay, bank transfers, and buy now, pay later options like Klarna.

Stripe's flat-rate fee pricing model is usually easier to understand than the more complicated interchange-plus pricing structure, which can change depending on the card type.

What are the benefits of using Stripe?

As a leading payment processor solution, Stripe gives businesses a lot of benefits, such as easy setup, fast payouts, support for multiple currencies, and strong security features.

Let’s Let's look at some of the main benefits:

1. Quick setup: Setting up an account with Stripe is quick and easy for businesses. This is because traditional merchant account providers often have long approval processes.
2. Immediate payouts: Stripe makes sure that your account is funded right away after each sale. The timing of your payouts will depend on how you set up your account, which will help you manage your cash flow better.
3. Multi-currency support: You can accept payments in more than 135 currencies, which makes your products available to more people around the world.
4. Accept various payment methods, to give your customers more ways to pay, accept different types of payments, like debit and credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Klarna.
5. Fee handling flexibility: You can charge service and credit card fees to ticket buyers, which means you can keep the full value of ticket sales or donations.
6. Trusted security features: Stripe puts security first with features like PCI compliance, encryption, and advanced fraud detection tools. These kinds of features keep private customer information safe, which builds trust with your customers.

How do Stripe processing fees work?

Most of the time, your business will be charged the same amount for each transaction, no matter how much it is, what type of card is used, or which network issues it. Any online seller needs to know about the different fees that come with Stripe.

Stripe works in more than 30 countries around the world, so the rate may be different depending on where you live.

Stripe takes fees out of your payouts, which lowers the total amount you get based on the fees you pay.

Let's look at the different things that affect Stripe's fees:

Stripe standard payment fees (US)

• Online transactions: Stripe charges 2.9% plus $0.30 for each online transaction when sellers accept payments through credit/debit cards or digital wallets.
• In-person payments: The fee is a little lower for transactions made through Stripe Terminal (for in-person sales), at 2.7% + $0.05 per transaction.
• Bank transactions:
  • ACH credit payments: $1 per transaction.
  • ACH direct debit payments: 0.8% per transaction (capped at $5).
  • Wire transfers: $8 for ACH credit payments and $15 for wire transfers.

International and currency conversion fees

Stripe makes it easy to do business with people in other countries, but it does come with extra fees:

• International cards: An additional 1.5% is added for international card transactions.
• Currency conversion: If a currency conversion is required then there is an extra 1% fee applied.

Stripe supports international payment methods with country-specific fee structures, including SEPA Direct Debits and local options like iDEAL, Multibanco, and Giropay.

Stripe refund, chargeback, and disputed transaction fees

Stripe doesn't charge extra fees for giving refunds, but the merchant doesn't get back the original credit card processing fees. This means that you won't have to pay the Stripe online payment fees or the in-person terminal fees that were part of the original transaction.

Stripe charges a $15 dispute fee for each chargeback, whether it's for an ACH direct debit or a card dispute. This is true no matter what the outcome is. This fee pays for the costs of handling the dispute.

Additionally, if you use an international card to make the payment, the Stripe international transaction fees will still apply.

Additional Stripe plans and fees

Stripe has a number of tools and services that cost additional fees:

Stripe billing
Stripe Billing is a powerful tool that helps businesses keep track of subscriptions and payments that happen on a regular basis. It makes it easy to set up and automate billing, which is great for businesses that offer subscription services, membership fees, or recurring invoices.

Charges range from 0.5% to 0.8%, depending on location.

Stripe Connect
Stripe Connect lets platforms like marketplaces and on-demand services handle payments between more than one person.

With Stripe Connect, you can make onboarding new users easier, handle payouts more quickly, and make sure legal stipulations are adhered to, all in one space. Its flexibility lets businesses split transactions and make payments to more than one person.

The fee is 0.25% per transaction.

Stripe Radar
Stripe Radar is a tool for businesses to use to stop fraud from happening during transactions. It uses machine learning and analysis of transaction data to find and stop transactions that look suspicious before they are finished.

It keeps changing and adapting to fit new data patterns, so businesses can make their fraud protection plans fit their needs.

Radar: Costs $0.05 for every transaction screened for fraud protection. This fee is waived for standard account holders.
Radar for fraud teams: Costs $0.07 for every transaction screened or $0.02 for accounts with standard pricing.

Stripe Invoicing
Stripe Invoicing is easy to use and helps businesses make custom invoices, which makes the billing process easier.

The Plus option gives you access to more features, like sending quotes to customers, collecting payments automatically, and reconciling invoices automatically.

Starter: 0.4% per invoice paid
Plus: 0.5% per invoice paid

Stripe Sigma
Stripe Sigma is a great analytics tool that helps businesses make sense of their payment data. Users can make custom reports using SQL or natural language prompts and look at different parts of their transactions to learn more about sales, refunds, customer behavior, and more.

The number of charges, authorizations, and application fees your business processes each month will determine how much this service costs.

Stripe processing fees at a glance

Standard transaction fees internationally

Stripe transaction fees for businesses within the US

Advanced Stripe features and pricing models

In addition to its standard pricing, Stripe attempts to offer flexibility to those businesses operating at a higher turnover:

• Volume discounts: Businesses processing high transaction volumes may qualify for special negotiated rates.
• Multi-product discounts: Businesses that offer multiple products may also qualify for negotiated rates.
• Nonprofit discounts: Nonprofit organizations submit an application for discounted processing rates, so there is a potential to save on fees.

Stripe fees for nonprofits

Stripe gives special prices to certain nonprofit groups that help lower the cost of processing donations.

These are the main things to think about:

Discounted processing rates on donations

Eligible nonprofits can benefit from reduced donation processing fees, typically $2.2% + $0.30 for standard credit and debit card transactions. American Express transactions usually incur a higher cost, usually around 3.5%.

• Eligibility criteria:
  • Organizations must be classified as 501(c)(3) in the United States to qualify for nonprofit rates.
  • To maintain access to these reduced rates, nonprofits must process at least 80% of their payments as donations through Stripe.
  • Organizations primarily involved in ticket sales, membership fees, or other non-donation-related activities may not qualify for the discounted rates.

Additional considerations for non-profits

• Refunds: When a nonprofit gives money back, they usually don't give back the processing fees. Nonprofits should keep this in mind when making plans for their donation processing budgets.
• Chargebacks: Nonprofits, like any other Stripe user, may have to pay fees for transactions that are disputed. This usually means a $15 fee for chargebacks.

💡 Learn more about how Checkout Page can help you accept donations with Stripe

Stripe processing fees calculator

📲 Businesses can get a better idea of their possible costs by using a fee calculator. We've created a Stripe processing fees calculator that includes options for the US, UK, EU, and Australia.

Start by entering your transaction amount and selecting your country from the dropdown box:

The results will show you your total Stripe fees, net amount after fees, and effective rate:

Tips for minimizing fees

Here are some useful tips for online sellers to cut down on the costs of processing payments:

1. Opt for lower-cost payment methods: Encourage customers to use debit cards or digital wallets with lower fees.
2. Fraud prevention: To stop fraud, put in place security measures like address verification to lower the number of fake transactions and the costs that go with them.
3. Regular review: As your transaction volume goes up, you should regularly check and negotiate your fees with Stripe.

Benefits of using Stripe with Checkout Page

Checkout Page is a simple, no-code tool that lets you quickly create and customize one-page checkouts. You can add these checkouts to your website or host them as stand alone pages in just a matter of minutes.

Connecting your Stripe account to Checkout Page gives you and your customers all the benefits of Stripe and even more that you can't get with just Stripe. Here are a few of those benefits:

• Sell digital downloads: You can sell digital downloads and have the files sent to the buyer automatically.
• Craft customizable checkout forms: add text fields, drop-downs, text areas, checkboxes, and more.
• Sell event tickets: Use all the ticketing features to let people buy different types of tickets.
• Product variants & upsells: Add one-click upsells, order bumps, and product variants.
• Offer ‘Pay what you want’: Let your customers decide how much to pay for a product.
• Create lead capture forms: Create registration forms, surveys, lead magnets & more.
• Responsive website embed: Embed checkouts on your site with our user-friendly copy-paste setup.

In a nutshell, you can customize the payment process with Stripe and Checkout Page so that you can focus on what matters most: getting more people to buy and giving them a great experience along the way.

Checkout Page plans are subscription-based and involve a budget-friendly monthly fee, with zero processing fees or any other hidden fees to worry about.

We also offer discounts for non-profits and charities.

Why not see how easy we've made it to make checkout pages that convert well and and are seamless to use? Try out our 7-day free trial—no card needed!

There are many benefits that you won't get with Stripe alone, which you can read more about in our article:

Why choose Checkout Page if you already use Stripe?