Stripe fees for donations, explained

The standard Stripe fee: 2.9% + 30¢

Stripe's standard pricing for a successful card payment in the United States is 2.9% of the amount plus a flat 30 cents. The percentage scales with the donation; the 30 cents is the same on every transaction. So on a $50 donation, Stripe takes $1.45 (that's 2.9% of $50) plus 30 cents, for a total fee of $1.75 — and you receive $48.25.

The flat 30 cents is why small donations cost proportionally more. On a $5 donation, the 30 cents alone is 6% of the gift before the percentage even applies. On a $500 donation, the same 30 cents barely registers. This is worth knowing if you expect a lot of small gifts: the fee math is gentler on larger amounts.

• $5 donation → Stripe fee about 45¢ → you receive about $4.55.
• $25 donation → Stripe fee about $1.03 → you receive about $23.97.
• $100 donation → Stripe fee about $3.20 → you receive about $96.80.

When the fee comes out, and how payouts work

The fee isn't a separate bill. Stripe takes it out of each donation as it's processed, so the amount that lands in your Stripe balance is already net of the fee. You never get invoiced for it and you never pay it yourself out of pocket — it's deducted before the money reaches you.

From your Stripe balance, the money pays out to your connected bank account on a schedule — daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on your settings, usually after an initial hold of a few days when you're new. A payout typically bundles several donations together, which is part of why the fee can be confusing to reconcile: the deposit in your bank is the sum of several gifts minus several fees, not a single clean number.

What donation platforms add on top

Here's the part that catches people out. The 2.9% + 30¢ is Stripe's fee. Many donation and crowdfunding platforms charge their own fee on top of it — a platform fee, sometimes 5% to 10% of each donation, sometimes a per-transaction add-on, sometimes framed as an optional tip that's switched on by default.

So the question to ask any donation tool is not just "what does Stripe charge" but "what do you charge on top of Stripe." Two tools can both run on Stripe and cost you very different amounts, because one passes you Stripe's fee untouched and the other stacks a percentage on top of it. The total that comes out of a $50 gift could be $1.75 in one case and $4.25 or more in the other.

How to read the fee on your Stripe dashboard

Every transaction in Stripe shows its fee broken out, so you can verify exactly what came out of each donation. In your Stripe dashboard, open the Payments section and click into an individual payment. You'll see the gross amount the donor paid, the Stripe fee, and the net amount that went to your balance, listed separately.

For the whole picture, the Balance and Payouts sections show how individual transactions bundle into the deposits that hit your bank. If a number ever looks off, this is where to check: the dashboard always shows the fee per transaction, so you can match a payout back to the gifts and fees that make it up. Stripe also lets you export this as a report if you'd rather reconcile in a spreadsheet.

Where CrowdCreate fits on fees

CrowdCreate runs on your own Stripe account and adds nothing on top of Stripe's fee. We don't take a percentage of donations and we don't route the money — every gift goes straight to your Stripe account, and Stripe's standard 2.9% + 30¢ comes out exactly as it would if you'd set up Stripe yourself. That fee is paid to Stripe, not to us.

What we charge instead is a flat $20 a month for the tool — the widget, the hosted page, and the dashboard — no matter how much you raise. The trade-off is straightforward: at low volume a percentage-based tool with no monthly fee can cost you less, while the more you raise, the more a flat $20 beats a percentage that keeps growing with every gift. We'd rather you do that math up front than discover it on a payout.

Common questions

How CrowdCreate works

1. 1

   Sign up free and connect Stripe

   Create your account and link your own Stripe account. It takes about ten minutes.

2. 2

   Paste the snippet on your site

   Drop one line of code onto your own page — or share your hosted CrowdCreate page if you don't have a site.

3. 3

   Funders pledge

   Money lands in your own Stripe account. We take no cut of what your funders give.

Your money goes straight to your own Stripe account — CrowdCreate never holds it, and takes no cut of donations.