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Stripe fee calculator

This simple calculator will help you determine how much you should charge your customers so that the end price covers the Stripe transaction fee.

  • Enter a transaction amount and hit ‘Calculate’
  • Check the results to see how much your transaction would cost in Stripe fees, and how much you should ask for to avoid paying out of your pocket

Calculate your STRIPE Fee.

2022 Stripe payment reviews: UK fees & pricing

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As one of the most popular payment services providers (PSP), Stripe gives PayPal something to think about. Amazon UK, British Council, Deliveroo, and Missguided all use their service for card transactions, and many smaller UK companies have also come on board. 

But what makes Stripe such a popular choice? After all, they’re not the only company that processes online credit card payments.


Table of contents


Company background

Seed stage

Two brothers from Ireland — John and Patrick Collison — founded Stripe in Silicon Valley in 2009, and it didn’t take long for things to take off. The company raised $2 million in seed funding by 2011. This initial round of funding included investments from PayPal co-founders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, along with famed venture capital firms like SV Angel and Sequoia Capital.

To present

In the next ten years, the company had ten more rounds of equity funding that put funding at a total of $2.2 billion from 39 different investors through April 2021. The company is valued at over £72 billion and processes hundreds of billions of pounds every year in transactions.

With the Irish background of the Collison brothers, the company has a strong standing in both the US and Europe and has headquarters in San Francisco and Dublin. The company has its credentials in place, but the Stripe transaction fee structure makes them popular.

How does Stripe charge fees?

Stripe fees charge automatically to the bank account you connect to your Stripe account when you set up the service. Once you begin processing payments, you’ll build a balance in your Stripe account. Each transaction shows in your dashboard as a pending balance consisting of the transaction amount minus the fees. The fees are automatically deducted when moving from the card to your account.

From there, the balance changes from pending to available based on your payout schedule. Businesses in the UK typically take two to three days to payout. You may have payouts on your daily available account balance with credit card payment processed two or three days earlier.

An overview of Stripe processing fees

Stripe pricing works on a per-transaction basis and offers a fixed fee for each transaction. The base rate is 1.4% + 20p for European card transactions and 2.9% + 20p for non-European cards — an additional 2% fee applies for currency conversion. There are no monthly or annual fees, and your business will be able to accept a wide range of popular payment methods, including Google Pay and Apple Pay.

With Stripe, you’ll mainly pay transaction fees for processing credit and debit cards as the fee structure is pay-as-you-go. They try not to complicate things like many other payment providers who charge fees based on card type. Plus, Stripe offers custom pricing for companies that process a large payments volume or have what they describe as “unique business models.” 

Stripe’s other costs and fees

Outside of the baseline pay-as-you-go transaction fees, there are charges for a range of additional services. You don’t have to use these services or forms of payment, but they can be helpful for your business.

Settling in additional currencies

Stripe allows you to accept payments in other currencies. Using their alternative currency payouts function on the Stripe dashboard, you can settle in currencies outside of your primary currency at a rate of 1%. 

For example, a UK company can enable a European bank account that deals in Euros on their dashboard and settle their payments in that currency. You still have a currency conversion charge for a foreign payment even if you settle in your primary currency.

Adaptive acceptance

Stripe’s Adaptive Acceptance features directly integrate machine learning into your payment process. With direct connections to card networks, the learning algorithm can help optimise card messaging and synchronise card updates. This works to reduce latency, improve card payment reliability, and lower decline rates.

And should a card be declined, the machine learning capabilities help the system to re-run the payment with the best routing and messaging combinations. Keen business owners know that when you lower card decline rates, you’ll increase revenue as customers won’t get fed up with the payment process.

The program adds an additional 0.08% per successful charge.

Stripe Terminal

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If your business runs outside of just online payments, a Stripe terminal allows you to process credit and debit cards in person. The service also works as a per-transaction service, but you’ll also have a one time cost for the card reader. 

Stripe charges 1.4% + £0.10 for European cards and 2.9% + £0.10 for non-European cards - the terminal still charges the 2% currency conversion fee on international cards.

For the credit card readers, Stripe has two options:

  • £49 (excluding VAT) - BBPOS WisePad 3

  • £179 (excluding VAT) - BBPOS WisePOS E

Both readers support Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Stripe rates for additional tools

Stripe also offers other security, tax, and data-based tools. These tools can be very useful to your business and come with separate fees.

Stripe Billing

Beyond the payments platform, Stripe has a companion tool through Stripe Billing. This allows you to set up recurring billing and your customers to set up subscriptions for a product. It’s a great option to help you increase recurring revenue and comes with additional tools to help reduce churn. There’s also a pre-built customer portal available.

This tool has two plans available: 

  • Their Starter plan has auto-collect, recurring billing, and a customer portal and charges at 0.5%. 

  • The Scale plan has the Starter features and adds the ability to auto-send Stripe data directly to NetSuite — an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for finance and accounting. You can also send customers pricing quotes before they subscribe.

Stripe Invoicing

This tool allows you to customise and send invoices online and get paid quickly. There are no set-up costs or fixed fees, so you only have to pay when a customer completes a payment. 

Their Starter plan gives you access to a unique hosted invoice page along with detailed reports and analytics. And the Plus plan adds additional features like invoice auto-reconciliation, auto-collect, and customer quotes. 

  • Starter - 0.4% per paid invoice with the first 25 invoices free every month.

  • Plus - 0.5% per paid invoice

Stripe Connect

Connect is the baseline payments platform offered by Stripe. It allows you to build your marketplace, accept payments from customers, and pay your salespeople or other freelancers. 

The Standard version comes with your basic account. But if you want to customise or white-label your customer payments experience, Express and Customer versions are available starting at 0.25% of the account volume. A per account fee may also apply.

Stripe Tax

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Stripe Tax allows your payment system to calculate and collect taxes automatically on each transaction. It’s built into Stripe, so there’s no third-party installation involved. And it comes with registration thresholds monitoring, auto-collection in over 30 countries, and tax reporting features. 

Stripe charges 0.5% per transaction to use this feature or 0.4% when you process more than £50,000 in a month.

Revenue Recognition

This tool is especially useful for accounting. It helps you to automate your revenue reporting and simplifies accrual accounting. 

With Revenue Recognition, you can easily prepare for tax audits, as it includes tracing down each transaction. Plus, you’ll have a comprehensive overview of all revenue data — within Stripe or imported — and it allows for customisation to fit your accounting style.

Stripe charges 0.25% of your sales volume, including imported transactions or 0.2%

when your volume is more than £50,000 in a month.

Stripe Sigma

Powered by SQL, Stripe Sigma provides instant advanced business data. Within the dashboard, you can type in queries and get quick answers to help you make better business decisions and fix potential issues. 

Stripe charges for this platform based on the number of authorisations, charges, and application fees processed by your business in the previous month. The pricing tiers are:

  • 0 to 500 charges per month - 1.5p per charge plus £10 infrastructure fee.

  • 501 to 1,000 charges per month - 1.4p per charge plus £20 infrastructure fee.

  • 1,001 to 5,000 charges per month - 1.2p per charge plus £40 infrastructure fee.

  • 5,001 to 50,000 charges per month - 1.1p per charge plus £75 infrastructure fee

If you go beyond 50,000 charges per month, you can contact sales for special pricing.

Stripe Atlas

If you’re taking your company globally and want to set up a business arm within the US, Stripe Atlas is an easy-to-use platform that helps you complete the forms needed to set up an LLC or C corporation and issue stock with a C-corp. You’ll also gain access to a US business bank account. 

This service has a one time $500 fee plus ongoing costs to run your business, like annual corporate tax preparation and processing fees in the US.

3D Secure Authentication

3D Secure adds a step to verify a customer’s identity and authenticate their card at purchase. This feature is included with your Stripe account.

Card Account Updater

Included in Stripe basic plans, this feature helps you to update expired or renewed card information automatically saved to your dashboard.

Stripe Issuing

With Stripe Issuing, you can create, distribute and manage physical and virtual credit cards. This allows you to create branded credit cards for anyone within your business who need it — contractors, employees, or even clients. 

Creating cards

You can instantly create a virtual card or have physical cards shipped within two days through Stripe Connect. Physical cards can come with your brand printed on the card, and they offer push provisioning to digital wallets.

Stripe charges £3 per physical card.

Card transactions

You can set up custom controls for each transaction with spending limits or limit them to use with certain merchants for each card. And you can update the controls through the Stripe dashboard at any time. 

There are no transaction fees for the first £500,000 spent, and it’s 0.2% + £0.15 per transaction after that. If you dispute a transaction on the card, it’s £15 per lost dispute.

International cards

You can use the card for international payments, but there are additional processing fees at 1% + £0.30 for non-European transactions.

Stripe Support

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Stripe is known for having a solid customer and technical support system mainly because they offer 24/7 phone, email, and chat support. It’s a service you won’t find with many other payment processing companies. They also have email support in nine additional languages on business days.

Premium Support

If your company requires a customised support plan, Stripe offers premium support starting at £1,400 per month. This gives you access to prioritised support responses, a dedicated support manager, emergency response support, and a quarterly support review personalised to your business.

Stripe Custom Pricing plans

If your company does a large volume of transactions or has a unique business model, Stripe offers custom pricing. This plan gives businesses access to volume discounts, country-specific rates, interchange pricing, and multi-product discounts. 

We can’t tell you the special rates they charge exactly as they’re customised to each business. But they charge additional fees to customers with custom accounts for 3D Secure authentication and for the card account update feature at a rate of:

  • 3p per 3D Secure attempt

  • 25p per card account update

Stripe safety and security

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When a company processes payments totalling in the hundreds of billions, there’s certainly a keen eye on safety. But if you have any doubts, here’s an overview of Stripe’s safety credentials and additional fees associated with the supplemental security features Stripe offers.

PCI level 1 and encryption

A certified auditor from the Payment Card Industry (PCI) certified Stripe as a Level 1 PCI Service Provider. This means that Stripe processes over six million Visa or Mastercard transactions every year, and it’s the highest level of certification for a payments platform. 

In processing these millions of transactions, Stripe uses both HTTPS and HSTS for secure connections. They also encrypt all sensitive data sent to their servers, which do not share credentials with their primary services like their API and website. 

Stripe Radar

Stripe radar is Stripe’s fraud protection service powered by machine learning. It helps detect and block fraud by using data from millions of companies across the globe. The platform is built into Stripe and adapts to your unique business model. 

To use Stripe Radar, they charge 4p per screened transaction but waive the fee for accounts with standard online payments processing at 1.4% + 20p.

Radar for Fraud Teams

If your company has its own fraud team, you can integrate Radar for Fraud Teams into your current fraud protection protocols. This grants you access to Radar’s machine learning and advanced fraud protection tools along with additional features to further support your fraud team, including:

  • Allow and blocklists

  • Customised protection with a rules engine

  • Optimised manual review flows

The platform costs 6p per screened transaction and 2p for accounts with standard 1.4% + 20p pricing.

Chargeback Protection

Disputes can be unpredictable for any business. Stripe Chargeback Protection covers dispute fees and the disputed amount with no evidence required. This feature costs 0.4% per transaction.

Stripe Identity

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ID document and selfie verification

At £1.25 per verification, you can capture and authenticate global ID documents and then match ID photos with selfies of the document holder using biometric verification. The platform supports ID verification from over thirty countries.

ID number lookup

Using government and third-party databases, Stripe will validate a government ID number if you also provide a name and date of birth. Unfortunately, this is only available for US social security numbers at the moment.

Conclusion

If you own an online sales business in the UK, it’s important to know your PSP’s fee system won’t cut into your profits. We hope this article helped lay out everything you need to know about Stripe's fees and how they charge them to your account. 

If you’re looking for any further advice, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’ll be more than happy to help get the ball rolling.

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