Paddle Fee Calculator

Paddle Fees at a Glance

Paddle charges its fees on the order total.

Fee	Percentage	Flat	Notes
Merchant-of-record fee	5%	$0.50	—

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	$0.75	$4.25	15.00%
$20.00	$1.50	$18.50	7.50%
$50.00	$3.00	$47.00	6.00%
$100.00	$5.50	$94.50	5.50%
$500.00	$25.50	$474.50	5.10%

One Rate, No Separate Processor

Paddle acts as the seller of record for your software or SaaS. Its rate bundles card processing, sales-tax and VAT handling, invoicing and fraud tooling into one number; there is no Stripe fee underneath it.

What you would otherwise pay	Included
Card processing	Yes
VAT / GST / sales tax remittance	Yes
Tax-compliant invoicing	Yes
Chargeback handling	Yes
Subscription billing logic	Yes

Built for Subscriptions

Where Paddle differs from a plain processor is recurring billing: proration, plan changes, dunning for failed cards and involuntary-churn recovery are part of the product rather than something you build.

Involuntary churn — subscriptions lost to expired cards rather than to a decision — runs at several percent a year for most SaaS. Recovering even half of it is often worth more than the rate difference against a bare processor.

The Trade-Off Is Control

As merchant of record, Paddle owns the customer payment relationship and sets what payment methods are available. Migrating away means re-collecting card details, exactly as with any merchant of record. That lock-in is the real cost, and it is not on any pricing page.

When a Bare Processor Wins

Companies with an existing finance team, established tax registrations and a billing system they already maintain are paying twice for a merchant of record. The break-even is usually somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands of annual revenue.

Charging to Hit a Target Payout

Adding 5.00% 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	$105.79
$1,000.00	$1,053.16

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.

Paddle is the seller of record and handles VAT and sales tax inside this rate.