The number a platform puts on its pricing page is the start of the bill, not the end of it. When a creator tells me they are "only paying 8%," I usually ask what their last payout actually was against what the buyer paid. The gap surprises people.
I work on Crownerr, so fees are something I think about a lot. This is not a pitch. It is the breakdown I wish someone had handed me the first time I tried to price something.
The three layers that eat a sale
Every transaction passes through up to three separate cuts before it reaches you. They compound, so you cannot just add the percentages in your head and call it done.
1. The platform fee
This is the cut the platform takes for hosting you. It ranges a lot. Membership platforms often sit between 8% and 12%. Marketplaces can be higher once you count listing and promotion charges. Some tools charge a flat monthly subscription instead and take 0% per sale, which flips the math entirely if your volume is low.
2. Payment processing
This one is easy to forget because it feels like plumbing. Card processors like Stripe charge roughly 2.9% plus a fixed fee per transaction in many regions. The fixed fee matters more than people expect on small sales. On a £3 tip, a 20p fixed fee is nearly 7% on its own, before any percentage.
3. The app store cut
If a buyer pays through your iOS app, Apple can take up to 30% of that transaction through in-app purchase. This is the layer that quietly wrecks membership math, and most creators never see it coming because their web checkout looks fine. I wrote a whole separate piece on the Apple tax because it deserves its own page.
How to actually calculate your take-home
Here is the order of operations that trips people up. The cuts are not all taken from the same base.
- Start with what the buyer pays. Say £20.
- Subtract processing first if your platform passes it through. £20 minus 2.9% minus 20p is about £19.22.
- Then subtract the platform fee on the gross. A 10% fee on £20 is £2.
- If it went through iOS in-app purchase, the 30% comes off the top before almost anything else, so a £20 sale could leave the platform with £14 to work from in the first place.
The honest summary: a web sale on a low-fee platform might leave you with £17 to £18 of that £20. The same sale through an iOS app could leave you closer to £12. Same product, same price, wildly different outcome based on where the tap happened.
A useful habit: write your prices for the worst-case channel, then treat the better channels as a bonus. It is less satisfying than optimism, but it keeps you from underpricing.
Why the fee ladder matters more as you grow
At £200 a month in sales, a 10% fee costs you £20. Annoying, not fatal. At £5,000 a month it is £500, every single month, forever. That is a part-time hire you are not making. Fees are one of the few costs in a creator business that scale linearly with your success, which is exactly when you can least afford them. It is one reason a fragmented stack of separate tools gets expensive faster than people plan for.
This is why some platforms move the fee to a flat subscription instead of a percentage. Crownerr, for example, runs a tiered structure: 6% on the free plan, 3% on Creator, and 0% on Studio, so the per-sale cut shrinks as you commit. You can see the full breakdown on the pricing page, and there is an earnings calculator that does the layered math for you instead of making you do it on a napkin. The point is not which model wins. It is that the model changes your whole spreadsheet, and you should pick deliberately. If you are still weighing options, our guide to choosing a creator platform works through it by business model.
Run the numbers before you commit
Pull your last three months of payouts and divide by what your buyers actually paid. That single ratio tells you more than any pricing page. If you are keeping less than 80% of gross on web sales, something in the stack is worth questioning. If you want to compare how different platforms treat that math, the comparison pages lay it out honestly, including where each competitor wins.
None of this means cheap is always right. A platform that takes a bigger cut but brings you buyers you would never have found can be worth every point. Just make the trade on purpose, with real numbers, not on vibes.