Pay
A cheap tier can lose money quietly
Flat processing charges do not scale down, so the smallest job on your card is the one most likely to be underwater.
Guides on Pay: Pricing, from first principles to the annual review, The ceiling is hours, and it arrives sooner than people expect, What rating work actually pays
A percentage commission is neutral about the size of a job. A flat fee is not, and every payment route in this trade has at least one of them somewhere in it.
That single asymmetry decides whether your entry tier is a loss leader or just a loss.
The arithmetic, once
Take a job priced at 5 units of whatever currency you work in. Commission at 20 percent removes 1. A flat processing charge of 0.30 plus 3 percent removes another 0.45. If you withdraw in small amounts and the payout carries a flat 2 charge, that lands too.
You have 1.55 left from 5, and the withdrawal fee alone was 40 percent of the price. Run the same deductions against a job priced at 40: commission 8, processing 1.50, payout 2, leaving 28.50. The percentage lines took the same share of both. The flat lines took 45 percent of the small job and 9 percent of the large one.
| Price | Percentage deductions | Flat deductions | Take-home | Effective loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | 1.15 | 2.30 | 1.55 | 69% |
| 15 | 3.45 | 2.30 | 9.25 | 38% |
| 40 | 9.20 | 2.30 | 28.50 | 29% |
Those numbers are an illustration with the assumptions stated, not a survey of what platforms charge. Substitute your own; the shape does not change. For a published schedule, PayPal's US merchant fees are 3.49% plus a fixed $0.49 per standard checkout transaction, so on a $5 sale the fixed part alone is 9.8% of the price. The full anatomy of the four deductions is in the breakdown of what sits between a buyer's payment and your bank.
Where the floor actually sits
Your floor is the price at which take-home covers your minutes at a rate you would accept.
Work it in that order rather than backwards from a competitor's listing. Time one complete job honestly, including the brief and the admin. Decide what an hour of your attention is worth. Then add the flat charges on top before you publish anything, because they are the part that does not shrink when you cut the price.
A useful test: if halving your price more than halves your take-home, the flat fees are already the dominant term and the tier is not viable.
Whether to keep an entry tier at all
The argument for one is that it gets people through the door and produces the early reviews that make everything else possible. That argument is real in month one and weak by month three.
The argument against is stronger than most earners expect. Cheap tiers select for the buyers who ask for the most, and the reasons the bottom of a card attracts the hardest work are structural rather than bad luck. Batching withdrawals is the cheap fix for the payout line, and raising the smallest tier until the flat charges stop dominating is the fix for the rest.
If you want an entry point without an underwater price, shrink the work rather than the fee: a shorter deliverable at a defensible price rather than the same deliverable discounted. That keeps your card intact, which is the whole point of having a card you can defend.
The comparisons worth making outside your own numbers
Buyers do not see any of this and reasonably assume your price is your income - the account of how a commission normally opens from their side is a short corrective on how differently the two ends of a job read. The floor under generic assessment has already been set by automation rather than by other people's pricing, and what an automated score reliably produces explains why competing downward is a race with a machine in it. If precision is the thing your price is defending, the measurement conventions worth being exact about are documented elsewhere and worth borrowing from.
For how a specific platform's payout minimums and methods work in practice rather than in the abstract, Rate Cock's rewards page carries the current numbers.