What Lemon Squeezy Actually Charges: The 5% + Card Fee Breakdown
The advertised rate is one number. The bill has up to five line items.
Just want the number? Run your numbers on the Lemon Squeezy calculator — every add-on listed below is priced in.
Lemon Squeezy is a merchant of record — it sells on your behalf, handles sales tax collection, chargebacks and PCI compliance, and takes a cut for doing so. The headline rate is straightforward: 5% + $0.50 per transaction, and unlike a plain payment processor, that 5% already has card processing and currency conversion folded into it. What catches people off guard is that the 5% base is only the floor — several common situations add a surcharge on top of it, and none of them show up in the "5%" headline most comparison posts repeat.
The base rate, and what it's calculated on
The 5% + $0.50 applies to the tax-inclusive order total, not the pre-tax price. A $15 product sold with $3 of UK VAT has an $18 order total, and the fee is calculated on the full $18 — $1.67, not $1.25. If your mental model is "5% of what I priced the product at," you'll consistently underestimate the fee on any order where sales tax or VAT applies, which for a merchant-of-record platform is most international orders.
Add-ons that aren't in the base rate
| Situation | Surcharge |
|---|---|
| International card | +1.5% |
| PayPal checkout | +1.5% |
| Subscription billing | +0.5% |
| Abandoned-cart recovery email converts a sale | +5% |
| Affiliate-referred sale (merchant side) | +3% |
The last two are easy to miss because they're marketing features, not payment features — you opt into recovery emails and an affiliate program because they make you money, and then the fee on those specific recovered or referred sales is higher than your baseline rate. It's a fair trade (a 3% cut on a sale that wouldn't have happened without the affiliate is still a net gain), but it means your effective average fee rate is higher than 5% the moment either feature is doing real work, and a calculator that only knows the base rate will understate what you actually paid.
Withdrawal fees are separate again
Getting your balance out is billed on top of all of the above: Stripe payout is free for US accounts (1% internationally), and PayPal payout is a flat $0.50 for US accounts or 3% capped at $30 internationally, charged per payout — and Lemon Squeezy pays out twice a month, so the number of payouts in your period multiplies this line item.
Creator Payout Calculator's dedicated Lemon Squeezy page models exactly these add-ons — recovered-cart and affiliate surcharges, the tax-inclusive base, subscription and international rates, and the per-payout withdrawal fee at your actual payout frequency — none of which the platform's own 5-way comparison table can compute, because they only apply to Lemon Squeezy.
For the opposite arrangement, where the platform rate does not absorb the card fee and your own Stripe or PayPal bills you separately, see Gumroad versus Payhip.