Kickstarter Fee Calculator

Kickstarter Fees at a Glance

Kickstarter charges its fees on total funds raised.

Fee	Percentage	Flat	Notes
Platform fee	5%	—	Charged only if the project funds
Payment processing	3%	$0.20	—

Fees That Apply in Some Cases

Fee	Percentage	Flat	When
Micro-pledge processing	5%	$0.05	Pledges under $10

What You Keep

The flat component is what makes small sales expensive. The same fee schedule costs a very different effective rate depending on the order size:

Sale	Fees	You receive	Effective rate
$5.00	$0.60	$4.40	12.00%
$20.00	$1.80	$18.20	9.00%
$50.00	$4.20	$45.80	8.40%
$100.00	$8.20	$91.80	8.20%
$500.00	$40.20	$459.80	8.04%

Nothing Is Charged Unless You Fund

Kickstarter is all-or-nothing. A campaign that misses its goal collects nothing and is charged nothing — no platform fee, no processing, no cards touched. That makes the goal figure a strategic decision rather than an aspiration: set it at the minimum you can deliver on, not the amount you hope for, because a campaign at 98% pays out zero.

The Fee Stack on a Funded Campaign

Component	Rate
Kickstarter platform fee	5% of funds raised
Payment processing	3% + $0.20 per pledge
Micro-pledge processing (under $10)	5% + $0.05

The micro-pledge rate exists because the standard flat fee would eat a $3 pledge. It is still proportionally expensive, which is why $1 reward tiers cost more to service than they raise.

Fees Are the Small Problem

For most campaigns the roughly 8–10% taken here is dwarfed by what comes after: manufacturing overruns, shipping that was quoted before the design finalised, customs, and replacements for units damaged in transit. A campaign budgeted so that the fees are the difference between profit and loss is a campaign that will lose money.

Build the fee into the goal from the start: if you need $50,000 in hand, the goal is roughly $55,000, not $50,000.

Failed Campaigns Still Cost

Nothing is charged by Kickstarter, but the video, prototypes, photography and advertising were paid for in advance. That is the real downside risk of the all-or-nothing model.

Charging to Hit a Target Payout

Adding 8.00% to your price under-recovers, because the percentage then applies to the larger amount as well. The correct gross-up divides:

`` charge = (target + flat fees) ÷ (1 − percentage rate) ``

To receive	Charge
$100.00	$108.91
$1,000.00	$1,087.17

Reducing What You Pay

• Raise average order value. The flat fee is fixed, so bundling two $20.00 orders

into one $40.00 order saves the second flat charge outright.

• Watch the optional surcharges. International and currency-conversion fees stack on top

of the base rate and are easy to miss when you price for a domestic market.

• Negotiate at volume. Most processors will discuss custom rates once you are processing

meaningful monthly volume; the published rate is a starting point, not a law.

• Do not migrate for 0.2%. The engineering and support cost of changing platforms

usually exceeds a small rate difference for years.

All-or-nothing: nothing is charged unless the campaign hits its goal.