Stripe vs. PayPal Fees: Why the Gap Depends on Your Price Tag
A 19 cent difference in the fixed fee outweighs the percentage on anything cheap, and stops mattering on anything expensive.
Selling through Ko-fi, Payhip or itch.io? The payout calculator takes this processor rate as an input, because on those platforms it is billed to you separately.
The published US rates are 2.9% + 30 cents for Stripe and 3.49% + $0.49 for PayPal Checkout. Almost every comparison reports the 0.59 point difference in the percentage and moves on. That is the smaller half of the story. The fixed fee differs by 19 cents, and on a cheap product the fixed fee is most of the bill, so the two rates diverge far more at $5 than they do at $200. Whether the gap is worth acting on depends on a number the comparison articles never ask for: your average order value.
The published rates, side by side
Checked 2026-09-17 on each company's own pricing page.
| Line | Stripe | PayPal (US) |
|---|---|---|
| Domestic card | 2.9% + 30 cents per successful transaction | 3.49% + $0.49 on PayPal Checkout |
| International card | +1.5% | +1.50% cross-border surcharge |
| Currency conversion | +1% when conversion is required | 4.00% on payment conversions, 3.00% on others |
| Bank debit | 0.8% ACH Direct Debit, capped at $5.00 | Not published as a separate line |
| Standard payout | Free | Free to a linked bank account |
| Fast payout | Instant Payouts 1.5%, minimum 50 cents | Instant Transfer 1.75%, minimum $0.25, maximum $25.00 |
| Monthly or setup fee | "no setup fees, monthly fees, or any other hidden fees" | None published for standard accounts |
The single largest difference in that table is not on the first row. It is the conversion row: 1% against 4.00%, a four-fold gap that only fires if you take money in a currency you do not settle in.
The same sale at three prices
One domestic US card transaction, no conversion, no international surcharge.
| Sale price | Stripe fee | PayPal fee | Difference | PayPal costs more by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $5 | $0.45 (8.9%) | $0.66 (13.3%) | $0.22 | 49% |
| $25 | $1.03 (4.1%) | $1.36 (5.4%) | $0.34 | 33% |
| $200 | $6.10 (3.1%) | $7.47 (3.7%) | $1.37 | 22% |
The absolute difference grows with price, which is what people expect. The proportional difference shrinks, which is what they do not. At $5, PayPal costs roughly half again as much as Stripe for the identical transaction, and 19 cents of the 22 cent gap is the fixed fee, not the percentage. At $200 the fixed fee is a rounding error and the 0.59 point percentage does nearly all the work. If your catalogue is cheap add-ons, the processor choice is a real margin decision. If you sell one expensive thing, it is close to noise.
A month of small sales
Suppose you sell 200 copies of a $19 template in a month, $3,800 gross, all domestic US cards.
- Stripe:
0.029 × 3800= $110.20, plus0.30 × 200= $60.00, for $170.20. Effective rate 4.48%. - PayPal:
0.0349 × 3800= $132.62, plus0.49 × 200= $98.00, for $230.62. Effective rate 6.07%.
That is $60.42 a month, and $38 of it is nothing but the fixed fee difference multiplied by transaction count. The lever is the number of transactions, not the revenue. Doubling the price to $38 and halving the count to 100 leaves the same $3,800 of revenue but cuts the fixed-fee gap in half.
The cross-border case, where it reverses partially
Now sell the same $19 item to a buyer paying with a non-US card in another currency. Stripe adds 1.5% for the international card and 1% for the conversion, reaching 5.4% + 30 cents, or $1.33. PayPal adds its 1.50% cross-border surcharge to reach 4.99% + $0.49, or $1.44, and then charges 4.00% at the moment you convert the balance rather than at the moment of the sale. On $19 that later conversion is another 70 cents of the remaining balance, so the all-in cost is closer to $2.14.
The important structural point is not the size of the gap but where PayPal's conversion charge sits. It is levied on the balance, after the sale, so it never appears in a per-transaction fee report and is easy to leave out of a comparison built from transaction receipts alone.
What this does and does not decide
Fees are one input. Stripe requires you to build or host a checkout, PayPal brings a wallet some buyers already trust and will not check out without, and refund and chargeback handling differ between them in ways no rate table captures. Many sellers run both and pay the higher rate on the PayPal share because the alternative is losing those buyers entirely. What the numbers above do settle is the sizing question: know whether the processor gap is $60 a month or $6, then decide whether it is worth any engineering time at all.
Creator Payout Calculator treats the processor rate as a separate input from the platform cut, which matters on Ko-fi, Payhip and itch.io, where payments land in your own Stripe or PayPal account and both fees are charged. Switch the preset between the two rates above and the net figure moves by exactly the amounts worked out here.
Related pages here: Gumroad versus Payhip is the platform layer that sits above this one, and shows why an all-in rate and a stacked rate cannot be compared directly. Payoneer versus PayPal covers the payout layer below it. What Lemon Squeezy actually charges is the case where the processor fee is folded into the platform rate instead, and 해외 후원·판매 플랫폼 수수료, 한국 거주자 기준 explains why the Stripe column is not available to everyone.