See your true marketplace economics after Stripe Connect, cross-border surcharges, FX, and disputes. Compares Express, Custom, and Standard side-by-side. Built by a team that's shipped Stripe Connect on real production marketplaces — not a theoretical calculator.
We'll walk through your specific account type, country mix, KYC plan, and webhook coverage — and tell you the production gotchas that will bite you 6 months in. No pitch. Free.
Most "fee calculators" only show Stripe's published rates. They miss what eats your margin: cross-border surcharges, FX conversion, dispute costs, and the Connect platform fee. Here's the full picture, drawn from our production gotchas shipping Stripe Connect on a vacation rental marketplace and a custom Rails commerce platform.
Custom looks cheaper because there's no Connect platform fee. But Custom requires you to: collect KYC documents in your UI, handle account.updated webhook for compliance updates, manage disputes (including the $15 fee per case), and build payout schedules. Our decision framework covers this in depth — for marketplaces under $1M/month GMV, the operational cost of Custom typically exceeds the Connect fee savings.
From our Tutti Vacation marketplace deployment: at 25% cross-border volume, FX + cross-border ate 50 basis points of GMV. Switching from per-listing to currency-localized pricing dropped that to 15 bps. Sometimes the win isn't account type — it's pricing strategy.
If you want this kind of analysis on your own marketplace, talk to our marketplace engineering team — we've shipped Stripe Connect across vacation rentals, services, and physical-goods marketplaces.
Most marketplaces charge a 10-20% platform fee, but the effective take after Stripe Connect processing (2.9% + $0.30), cross-border surcharges (+1-2%), FX conversion (~1%), and dispute costs typically lands at 6-15%. The calculator above shows the actual number for your scenario.
Express has a small platform fee (~0.25%) but Stripe handles KYC, disputes, and tax reporting. Custom has no Connect platform fee but you absorb KYC costs, dispute fees ($15 each), and compliance overhead. For most sub-$1M/month marketplaces, Express ends up cheaper once you factor operational cost.
Three levers: price in the seller's currency to avoid the +1% FX surcharge, batch weekly payouts instead of daily, and at scale evaluate Stripe's Cross-Border Payouts product or alternatives like Wise Platform.
Stripe Express enforces a 7-14 day rolling reserve for new accounts. On a $100k/month GMV marketplace, that's $25-50k always sitting in Stripe. Plan working capital accordingly.
For US-only marketplaces under $1M/month, Stripe Connect is hard to beat on developer time. Adyen MarketPay is competitive at scale ($5M+/month). PayPal Marketplaces is cheaper for international. Mangopay is solid for EU. Switching costs make the choice load-bearing.
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