Pay
The processing fee is charged to somebody, and sometimes it is you
Two platforms with identical commissions can differ by three percent on this line alone.
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
The platform, the buyer or you pays the card processing fee, and which one is often written nowhere near the headline commission. Every card payment costs somebody a percentage plus a fixed amount, and that cost does not disappear because a platform sits in the middle.
This is the single most reliable place where two platforms with the same headline number pay differently.
The anatomy of a card fee
A consumer card payment is not one fee. It is an interchange fee that goes to the buyer's bank, a scheme fee that goes to the card network, and an acquirer margin that goes to the processor - bundled, for small merchants, into a single quoted rate.
Published rates for standard online card acquiring in most developed markets sit in the low single digits of a percent plus a fixed amount of pence or cents, with cross-border cards costing more. Stripe's published UK pricing is a fair reference: 1.5% + 20p for standard UK cards, 3.15% + 20p for international cards, and a further 2% if currency conversion is required. Anyone quoting you a specific figure for your situation without knowing your card mix and your country is guessing. What matters more than the exact number is the structure, because the fixed component is what mangles small transactions - the arithmetic is worked through in minimum viable price when fees are flat.
Adult-adjacent categories are routinely priced above standard rates by acquirers who serve them at all, which is a structural fact of the sector rather than a comment on any platform. It is also why the fee on this kind of work is frequently higher than the numbers you will find in a general small-business guide.
Three ways platforms handle it
Absorbed. The platform quotes one commission and pays processing out of it. Cleanest for you, and usually reflected in a higher headline commission.
Passed to the buyer. The buyer sees a service fee on top of the price. Your take is unaffected in arithmetic, and affected in practice, because a visible surcharge suppresses conversion at the margin and makes your published price look higher than it is.
Deducted from you. Your fee is reduced by commission and then again by processing. This is the one that produces the three-percent gap between platforms that look identical.
There is a fourth case that is not really a fee: the payout charge at the far end, when the money leaves the platform for your bank. That is a separate deduction with its own rules, and it interacts badly with small balances - see withdrawal thresholds and trapped float.
| Layer | Typical basis | Who usually bears it |
|---|---|---|
| Platform commission | Percentage of fee | You |
| Card processing | Percentage plus fixed | Varies - this is the question |
| Currency conversion | Spread on the rate | You |
| Payout transfer | Fixed, sometimes waived above a threshold | You |
| Chargeback fee | Fixed, per event | You, usually |
Reading a fee schedule
The commission number is on the marketing page. Everything else is in the terms, and the terms are where the answer is.
Search the document for these words: processing, transaction fee, payout, transfer, conversion, foreign exchange, reversal, chargeback, dormant. Each one that appears with a number attached is a deduction, and the sum of them is your actual cost of trading.
Then check what the schedule says about changes. A clause allowing fee changes on notice is normal; the question is how much notice and whether it reaches you as an email you will actually read - fee changes and reading the terms email is about the moment that notice arrives.
The questions worth asking before you sign up
Is processing deducted from my payout, added to the buyer's total, or included in the commission?
What is the fee on a refund - is the original processing cost returned, or kept?
What does a chargeback cost me beyond the disputed amount?
Is there a fixed component per transaction, and at what job size does it stop being trivial?
What does a payout cost, and does that change by method or by amount?
If the buyer pays in another currency, whose rate is used and what is the spread?
Support channels answer these more readily than people expect, and an answer in writing is worth having, because a screenshot of a support reply is evidence and a memory of a fee page is not.
Why the comparison matters more than the rate
The number that decides which platform is better for you is take-home per completed job, not commission. A platform charging a lower commission and deducting processing, conversion and a payout fee can land you less than a higher-commission one that absorbs all three - the full method for that comparison is in comparing platforms on take-home, not commission.
Run it on your actual job size. Fee structures with a fixed component change ranking depending on the size of the transaction, so the better platform for someone selling long recorded work may be the worse one for you.
The buyer side has its own version of this arithmetic, and it shapes what they will pay: a visible surcharge changes how a commission price reads at the point of decision, which the commissioning-side account of how buyers compare describes better than any fee table does. It is also worth knowing that free automated alternatives carry no transaction cost at all, so the fixed component is precisely what makes very cheap human work uncompetitive - what an automated score covers is the floor that fixed fees push you away from. Where a platform charges for verification or measurement steps as separate line items, the conventions those steps follow tell you whether the charge buys anything.
For the platform-specific version of how a judge's money moves and what is deducted where, Rate Cock's payouts and rewards page is the current source, and it is worth reading beside the terms rather than instead of them.