Most platforms advertise one number, and a sale pays several. Here is the whole stack, in the order it comes out of a sale.
The card fee
Someone has to move the money. Card networks and payment processors take a percentage plus a fixed amount per transaction — Stripe publishes its own rates, and in the United States the standard online rate for domestic cards has been 2.9% plus 30 cents for years. On a $27 sale that is about $1.08, so roughly $25.92 reaches you.
Nobody escapes this one. When a service says it takes nothing, it means nothing on top of this. The card fee is still paid, whether by you to your own payment processor, out of the subscription you pay the service, or before you see the number.
The platform fee
This is the cut the store takes on top of the card fee. It is the one number worth reading carefully, because a percentage grows with you and a fixed price does not.
- A 5% platform fee on a $27 file is $1.35 — more than a dollar on every sale, forever.
- At 100 sales a month, that is $135 a month. At 500, it is $675 a month.
- A fixed monthly price does the opposite: it hurts at 3 sales and disappears at 300.
The subscription
Most creator stores charge a monthly fee. Compare it against your real volume, not your hoped-for volume: a $29 monthly plan on 3 sales of $27 is eating more than a third of the money; on 100 sales it is barely 1%.
The payout
Then there is getting the money out. Two questions decide how much this costs you: how long the money sits before it is released, and whether it is converted into another currency on the way. Currency conversion is where the quiet fee lives — a percentage on top of the exchange rate, charged on every payout, often invisible on the dashboard.
If the money lands directly in your own payment account, in your own currency, on your own schedule, that cost is zero and the timing is yours.
One sale, added up
- Sale price: $27.00
- Card fee at 2.9% + $0.30: about $1.08
- Platform fee at 5%: $1.35 — or $0 if the store does not take a cut
- Left before the monthly plan: $24.57 with a 5% cut, $25.92 without
The gap looks small on one sale. It is $135 a month at a hundred sales, and it is the difference between a hobby paying for itself and a hobby paying you.