You are paying for demand and dispute cover

A commission is a price, and like any price the useful question is what it buys rather than how large it is. It buys four things, and three of them are expensive to replace.

Earners who leave a platform over the cut usually discover that the cut was the cheapest part of their cost base, and that the parts they were getting free were the ones that mattered.

The four things you are buying

Demand. This is most of it. A marketplace has buyers arriving with intent, already past the decision to spend money, needing only to choose someone. Replacing that means paid acquisition, an audience you build over months, or referral, and all three have a cost per booking that is easy to underestimate because it is spread across time rather than deducted per job.

Payment rails. Card acceptance, fraud screening, currency conversion, payout to your bank. A sole trader acquiring these independently pays a processor fee that is itself a few percent plus a fixed charge, and takes on the compliance work that comes with it. The platform's rate is not free money; it is a real service with a real cost underneath it, itemised in the post on what actually gets deducted.

Escrow. The buyer's money is committed before you start and released after you deliver. This is the single most valuable thing on the list for a new earner, because the alternative is trusting a stranger and having no recourse.

A dispute process. Somebody other than you decides who is right, using evidence, on a defined timeline. It is imperfect and sometimes goes against you, and it is dramatically better than a private argument with a buyer who has your work and your bank details. Off-platform, a card dispute is settled by the buyer's bank instead: Stripe's documentation says cardholders can typically dispute within 120 days of payment, the outcome is "at the sole discretion of the account owner's bank", and outside Mexico the fee for receiving a dispute is non-refundable.

What it does not buy

It does not buy quality control, and it does not buy you a position in search. Ranking is earned by behaviour rather than granted by fee - the mechanics are in the post on how marketplace ranking works.

It does not buy account security. Platforms suspend accounts, change rules and occasionally close categories, and the commission includes no promise about any of that. That is the reasoning behind not putting your whole income on one platform.

It does not buy pricing power. A high-commission platform with strong demand can leave you better off than a low-commission one with none, which is why the only honest comparison is take-home rather than headline rate.

The arithmetic of going direct

Direct work looks like a straight saving equal to the commission. It is not, and the gap is the point.

The numbers in the first two columns are an illustration, not a quoted rate. The line that decides it is acquisition cost per booking, and almost nobody who goes direct has measured theirs.

If sourcing a buyer independently costs you an hour of promotion, and your hourly is anywhere near your rate, you have replaced a twenty percent commission with a hundred percent one and gained a payment risk.

When going direct genuinely makes sense

There are real cases, and they share a feature: the platform's demand is no longer the thing you need.

A buyer who is already yours. Repeat work does not need acquiring. Note the significant caveat that taking an existing platform buyer off-platform typically breaches the terms you agreed to and is the fastest route to losing the account - the post on that specific request covers why the saving is usually not worth the exposure.

Work the platform does not host. A format outside the categories, a corporate or bulk arrangement, anything with a contract attached. Nothing is being taken from the marketplace, so nothing is being risked.

Volume that exceeds what the platform sends you. If you are booked out and turning work away, the marginal booking is not coming from the platform anyway, and a direct channel adds capacity rather than diverting it.

A second channel run in parallel. Not instead of, alongside, with the platform continuing to supply the bulk while the direct channel builds. The reasoning is the same as adding a second platform: diversification before optimisation.

The threshold worth calculating once

Work out what one booking costs you to source without the platform. Estimate honestly: time spent, any spend, and the conversion rate from contact to paid job.

If that figure is below the commission on a typical job, direct work is cheaper for you and you should build the channel. If it is above, the commission is a discount and the correct move is to send more volume through the platform rather than less.

Most earners who do this calculation for the first time find the second answer, and are surprised by how far above the line they land. The number moves as your reputation grows, which is why it is worth recalculating annually rather than deciding once.

What is outside the fee entirely

The commission is also not the only cut taken on the way to your account - who actually pays the payment processors accounts for the rest of it.

Two costs sit on your side regardless of where the work comes from. The first is time, which the per-hour take-home view makes visible in a way commission percentages never do. The second is that buyers arriving with no platform context have usually already tried the free automated options, so the conversation starts at a different point - what an automated score already does explains why a direct enquiry is often a buyer who has exhausted the cheap path.

The buyer's own account of why they use a marketplace rather than finding someone independently is short, mostly about risk, and worth reading once: Rate Penis covers how a commission is chosen, and it is a clearer statement of what the platform is selling to the other side than any fee page. The free tools that set the buyer's baseline expectation before they arrive are catalogued here.

For what the current cut actually is and what it covers on the platform itself, Rate Cock's judges page states the terms, and terms are the thing to read rather than infer.