If you use Stripe to process your marketplace payments, you’ll need to bear in mind their fees.
Summary
The basic Stripe fee is a percentage of the transaction, plus a fixed fee. There are also currency conversion fees. All fees will vary based on the locations of your marketplace, the Customer and the Freelancer. Fees are charged to both Customers paying in, and Freelancers receiving funds. Whitelance automatically adds the exact fee as an ‘Admin Fee’ to ensure that 1) the full value of the relevant Milestone is present after all fees have been deducted, and 2) your marketplace can withdraw your commission earnings net of these fees.
Type of Stripe Fees
There are 2 types of payment that Stripe charges fees on:
1. Customers make a payment. Here are Stripe’s fees. These fees are charged based on the country of the Freelancer in that particular transaction. To see the country-relevant fees, scroll down to the footer, click on the current country name and select your freelancer’s country.
2. Freelancers receive funds. Here are Stripe’s fees. Whitelance uses a ‘Custom Connect’ integration, so review the relevant fees in that section. Scroll down the page to see the fees relevant to your Freelancer’s country:
General Principles
=> When you use Stripe, you’ll set up your own Stripe account, and Stripe will charge their fees directly your Stripe account.
=> To cover the fees Stripe will charge you to receive payments from customers, Whitelance will enable you to charge an ‘admin fee’ to the customer, listed in the invoice. This differs for every country, and every combination of customer and freelancer countries. The result is that after Stripe has levied it’s fees for that transaction, the remaining funds correspond to the value of the related milestone.
=> To cover Stripe fees for sending payments to freelancers, Whitelance automatically charges an ‘admin fee’ to the freelancer, listed in the invoice. Again, these fees will differ based on the Freelancer’s country.
=> Stripe charges a ‘Connect’ fee. This is usually around $2 per month (see above for international fees), for every active freelancer on your marketplace. Active freelancers are any freelancer that has received any payment during that month. For example, if you have 5 freelancers who’ve receive any payment each that month, you’ll be charged around $10 that month. That is a fixed fee irrespective of how much those freelancers earned. This fee will be charged to your Stripe account. If you don’t have any funds in your Stripe account, if will be charged to your associated bank account.
=> Aside from the above $2/month Connect fee, all the funds that remain in your Stripe balance are net of all Stripe’s fees.
=> All payments will be charged in the default currency of your Stripe account.
Some Specifics
Bear in mind that our goal is to ensure that all Stripe fees are covered such that the remaining funds left in your account, are exactly the same as the associated milestone value. This means that the ‘admin fee’ charged to customers is slightly higher than the exact Stripe fee, in order to take into account Stripe’s fee on that ‘admin fee’. For example, a $30 milestone charged in the US will have Stripe default fees of $1.17 (2.9% + 30c). However, this will only leave $29.97 in the Freelancer’s account. In order to ensure the full value ($30) is available in the Freelancer’s account, your marketplace will charge a fee of $1.20. You can test this example in action here for US payments.
When the Freelancer’s currency is different to the marketplace currency, Stripe charges a standard 2% fee (except USA where it’ 1%). This fee is charged to the customer, and included within their Admin Fee when they pay for the milestone. Stripe doesn’t provide a real-time API displaying their current currency conversion rates, so we check and update Stripe’s rates every 10 minutes to calculate their rates as closely as possible. If Stripe has changed it’s currency rate in the 10 minutes prior to a particular transaction, there may be a very slight difference between the invoiced amount and what Stripe charges.
Accuracy
The Customer Invoice: 100% accurate. The Customer will be charged exactly what is listed on their invoice.
The Freelancer Invoice: 100% accurate. The Freelancer will be charged exactly what is listed on their invoice.
The platform’s fee: 99.999% accurate. Whatever currency fluctuations occur for that transaction will be applied to the platform’s commission. However, these are very small – up to 5 cents on a $1,000 payment.
Calculations
Customer Admin Fee
( (MilestoneValue + PayIn FixedFee) / (1 – PayIn PercentFee / 100) ) – MilestoneValue
Freelancer Admin Fee
PayOut FixedFee + ( (PayOut PercentFee / 100) * MilestoneValue ) + ( ( MilestoneValue * MarketplaceCommission ) / 100 )
Key Terms
MilestoneValue = The value of the related milestone being paid for.
MarketplaceCommission = This is the commission you are charging your Freelancers, as set in your admin dashboard.
PayIn FixedFee & PercentFee = Stripe charges a percentage of the transaction value, plus a fixed amount. For example, in the UK for domestic payments, Stripe charges 1.4% (PercentFee) + £0.20 (FixedFee). The exact charge depends on your Freelancer’s country and the country of your Customer’s card registration, for example the fee for a Freelancer based in the UK will be different for customers paying with cards registered in the UK and those registered in the US. Stripe charges a domestic fee for payments in the same country, and an international fee for all other payments. The exception is the the Eurozone is considered one country, so payments within the region are all considered domestic by Stripe. For the full list of exact fees, please follow the links listed above and select the country of your Freelancer(s).
PayOut FixedFee & PercentFee = Similar to the above, but in relation to funds being paid out to Freelancers. These fees will differ based on the location of your Freelancer’s bank account.
Transparency
To help your freelancers see what everyone will be paying and adjust their rates accordingly, you can enable the ‘Calculations’ feature, which will add an information icon next to the milestone value field. When freelancers click on this, a popup will display all the relevant calculations.