Pricing pages are written to be read quickly. Ten percent. Five percent. Zero percent. The number is large, it is centred, and it is almost never the whole story.
Almost every platform charges you in two separate places. There is the platform's own cut, which is the number on the page. Then there is the payment processor's fee — typically 2.9% of the sale plus a flat 30c — which the platform passes through to you and which usually appears, if it appears at all, in a footnote or a help article.
So a $20 sale is never $20. What it actually becomes depends on the price, on how much you sell, and on a piece of arithmetic almost nobody does before they choose. This is that arithmetic, run across eighteen platforms at three prices.
The 30c is the part that decides everything
Percentages scale. A flat fee does not, and that single asymmetry explains most of what follows.
Thirty cents on a $49 sale is six-tenths of one percent — noise. Thirty cents on a $9 sale is 3.3% before anything else is taken, and on a $5 sale it is six percent. The fee has not changed. The price has.
This is why the same platform can look generous and punishing depending on what you sell. A course seller at $199 and a sticker-pack seller at $4 are using the same product and having completely different experiences of it, and neither of them is wrong about what they are seeing.
The same sale, three prices
Take twenty sales a month — a modest, believable number — and change only the price. Here is the best a seller can do on each, choosing the cheapest plan on each platform for that volume.
- $9 a sale: the best result keeps 94%, or $8.46 of every nine dollars. The worst leaves you at minus 5.7%.
- $20 a sale: the best keeps 95.8%. The worst has climbed to 50.8% — it is now merely bad rather than ruinous.
- $49 a sale: the best keeps 96.7%, the worst 78.2%. The whole field has bunched up.
The month that ends with you behind
That minus 5.7% is not a rounding artefact. It is what happens when a platform priced at $179 a month meets $180 of sales.
Twenty sales at $9 is $180 gross. Card processing takes about $11 of it. The monthly plan takes $179. You finish the month roughly ten dollars down, having done all the work and made all the sales. Every sale you made that month cost you 51c.
Nothing dishonest has happened here. The platform in question charges no percentage at all — its pricing page truthfully says it takes no cut of your revenue — and for a business doing $20,000 a month that is an excellent deal. At $180 a month it is a bill.
That is the trap worth naming: a subscription-priced platform is not expensive or cheap in itself. It is expensive or cheap relative to what you sell, and the pricing page cannot tell you which, because it does not know your numbers.
When a percentage beats a plan, and when it stops
The crossover is easy to find and worth finding before you commit.
A free plan with a 9% cut costs you nine cents in every dollar, forever, at any volume. A $30 plan with no cut costs you $30, once, at any volume. They meet where 9% of your monthly sales equals $30 — about $333 a month. Below that the free plan wins. Above it, the paid one does, and the gap widens every month you grow.
Do that calculation with your own two numbers rather than adopting someone else's conclusion. Most advice on this subject is written by people selling one of the two shapes.
What this does not measure
One honest caveat, because a comparison that flatters itself is worth nothing.
Cost is not value. A platform that only processes payments will always look cheaper here than one that also hosts your page, builds your forms, sells your tickets and takes your bookings — because it is doing less. Some of the platforms doing worst on these numbers are doing so because they include an email tool, a course player and a CRM that you might otherwise pay for separately.
Read the figure as what it is: the cost of moving money. Then decide separately whether what you get for it is worth having.
Run it on your own numbers
Three prices and one volume is an illustration, not an answer. Your price and your volume are the only two inputs that matter, and they are the two an article cannot know.
The full table — eighteen platforms, every rate read from the platform's own pricing page, dated, with the sentence it came from quoted — is on our free fee calculator. Put your own price and monthly sales in and it will show you what each one leaves you, including where OneSol does not come first.