Pay
The rate you charge is not the rate you earn
Four separate deductions sit between a buyer's payment and your bank account, and only one of them is usually advertised.
Your headline price is a marketing number. The number that decides whether this work is worth doing is what remains after the platform, the processor, the currency market and the withdrawal rules have each taken a turn, and that number is rarely printed anywhere.
Working it out takes about ten minutes and changes how you price permanently.
The four deductions
Commission is the platform's cut of the job, and it is the one everybody knows about. It is also usually the smallest surprise, because it is advertised.
Processing is what the card network and the payment processor take. On some platforms this is inside the commission; on others it is a separate line, and on a few it is charged to you rather than to the buyer. Read which, because the difference is a few percent of everything you will ever earn.
Currency spread applies whenever the buyer pays in one currency, the platform holds another, and you withdraw into a third. Each hop takes a margin over the mid-market rate, and the margin is not a fee in the sense of being itemised. Two conversions of two percent each is four percent of your income, invisibly.
Withdrawal cost has two parts: a flat fee per payout, and a minimum balance before a payout is possible at all. The flat fee makes frequent small withdrawals expensive. The threshold is worse, because it holds a permanent float of your money that you can never actually spend.
Do the arithmetic once
Take a real job at your real price and follow it through.
| Stage | Example | Running total |
|---|---|---|
| Buyer pays | 50.00 | 50.00 |
| Platform commission at 15% | -7.50 | 42.50 |
| Processing at 2.9% + 0.30 | -1.75 | 40.75 |
| Currency conversion at 2% | -0.82 | 39.93 |
| Withdrawal fee, spread over 5 jobs | -0.40 | 39.53 |
Those percentages are an illustration and yours will differ, but the shape holds: a headline of 50 becomes something closer to 40, and the advertised commission accounts for less than half of the gap.
Now divide by the time the job took, including the unbilled parts, and you have your effective hourly rate. That is the number to compare against anything else you could be doing with the hour.
What this means for pricing
Three consequences follow, and none of them are about charging more.
Small jobs are hit hardest, because flat fees do not scale down. A 0.30 processing charge is 0.6% of a 50 job and 3% of a 10 one. If your rate card has a very cheap entry option, check that it is not working at a loss once you count the unbilled minutes around it.
Withdrawal frequency is a lever you control completely. Withdrawing monthly rather than weekly can save several percent a year for the price of slightly worse cash flow, and for most people that is a straightforward trade.
Currency is worth choosing rather than accepting. If the platform can pay you in the currency you actually spend, take that, even at a slightly worse headline rate, because you are removing a conversion rather than shopping for a better one.
Choosing a platform on the right criteria
New earners compare commissions. Commission is the least important of the four for someone starting out, because the other three interact badly with low volume.
The questions that matter more in month one are: what is the minimum withdrawal, how long is the hold before earnings become withdrawable, does the platform pay in your currency, and who eats the processing fee. A generous commission attached to a 200 minimum and a 30-day hold pays a beginner nothing at all for two months.
This is also where the demand side matters more than the fee schedule. A platform with a worse cut and real traffic beats a better cut with none, and no amount of arithmetic fixes an empty queue. What buyers are actually looking for is a better predictor of your income than any fee comparison.
Holds, reversals and the money that is not yours yet
Most platforms hold funds for a period after a job completes, to cover disputes and chargebacks. This is reasonable and it is also a real cost: money held for thirty days is money you cannot use for thirty days.
A chargeback goes further and takes the payment back, sometimes months later, occasionally with a fee attached. You are unlikely to see many, but the first one is a shock if you have already spent the money. Treat recent earnings as provisional until the hold period is behind them, and keep the records that let you contest one - the brief, the delivery, the timestamps. The records post covers what to keep and for how long.
The comparison worth making
Once you have your effective rate, compare it against the version of your own work you have not tried yet rather than against someone else's headline.
Recorded work usually carries a higher price for the same subject, and the fee stack takes the same percentage of a larger number. Rubric-led scored work is easier to produce consistently once you have a template, and the mechanics of building one are covered well on Penis Rater's material about how scores are assembled. The measurement conventions that a rubric leans on - what is being compared, and how - belong to Measure My Cock, and being precise about them is part of what separates a professional assessment from an opinion. Buyers commissioning this work have their own view of what they are paying for, which Rate Penis documents from their side.
If you are working through the platform this site is published by, the current fee and payout details live on Rate Cock's rewards and payouts page rather than here, because a number in an article goes stale and a number on a product page does not.