Artist/Getting paid

Fees and pricing

Maelo takes 5% of your deposit. Here is exactly what reaches your bank.

On this page

What Maelo charges

Maelo takes 5% of your deposit. That is the whole pricing model. There is no monthly subscription, no setup cost, and no per booking charge.

It is charged on the deposit only. Final payments, Tap to Pay, quick sales through Quick Pay and no-show fees carry no Maelo fee at all. So on a booking with a $200 USD deposit and an $800 USD balance to settle on the day, Maelo earns on the deposit and nothing on the rest.

Payments you take outside Stripe cost nothing either, because Maelo never sees them. See Payments outside Stripe.

What Stripe charges

Stripe is separate, and Stripe bills you directly. It comes out of your Stripe balance before your payout, not out of Maelo's cut, and it applies to every card payment including the ones Maelo takes no fee on.

Stripe's price depends on where you are and what card your client uses. These are the domestic card rates Maelo uses when it estimates what you will receive:

•United States: 2.9% plus $0.30 USD
•Canada: 2.9% plus $0.30 CAD
•United Kingdom: 1.5% plus 20p
•Eurozone: 1.5% plus €0.25
•Australia: 1.7% plus $0.30 AUD
•Czechia: 1.5% plus 6.50 Kč

Warning

An overseas card or a business card costs more than the rate above, everywhere. Maelo cannot know which card your client will use until they type it in, so the figure you see before payment is an estimate. Your own currency and a normal domestic card is the case where it lands exactly. Stripe publishes the full table on Stripe's own pricing page.

A worked example

All the figures below are in Canadian dollars, and assume a Canadian client paying with a normal Canadian card. Say you set a deposit of $200 CAD.

Example

Your listed deposit: 200.00

Your client pays: 216.59

Maelo fee (5%): 10.00

Stripe processing (estimate): 6.59

You receive: 200.00

You set a price and you get that price. Both fees are built into the total your client sees, as one clean all-in number with nothing added at the end.

The uplift is $16.59 CAD rather than a flat $16.00 CAD because Stripe charges its percentage on the whole amount that goes through the card, including the part covering the fees themselves. That is why it does not simply add up.

Who covers the fee

By default your client covers all of it, which is the example above. You can change that with the Who covers the fee slider in Settings, Payments, Platform Fees. It runs from 0% to 100% in steps of 5, and it saves the moment you let go.

Slide it all the way to You absorb 100% and the same $200 CAD deposit is charged at exactly $200 CAD. Your client sees a round number, and $183.90 CAD reaches you once Maelo and Stripe have taken theirs. Anywhere in between splits the difference.

Note

The slider changes your payout, never Maelo's fee. Maelo collects the same 5% of your base price at every position. What moves is whether it comes out of the price your client sees or out of what lands in your account.

Checking your own numbers

The Platform Fees panel does this maths live, in your own currency, on a listed price of 100. Move the slider and the four lines underneath update: Your client pays, Maelo fee, Stripe processing (est.) and You receive. It is the fastest way to see what a change actually does before you commit to it.

The Platform Fees settings panel showing the who covers the fee slider and a live worked example

For real bookings rather than examples, open Financial and tap any payment. The breakdown there lists every fee that came off that specific charge, taken from Stripe rather than estimated. See The Financial hub.

If your account is on an at-cost plan, the panel says so and the Maelo fee shows as nothing. The slider still works, and it decides whether you or your client covers Stripe's processing cost.