What it costs to take a card payment in the app based on your plan, how much of every payment you keep, and where every cent of the fee goes.
Cobros lets you send a payment link and get paid by card, straight to your bank account. Every payment you collect carries a fee. Here is exactly what it is based on your plan, where every cent goes, and why it is what it is.
First things first: you only pay when you get paid
There is no setup fee for your payments account, no monthly minimum, and no separate rent for using Cobros. If you did not collect anything this month, you pay nothing. The fee applies only to payments your customers actually complete.
| Your plan | Fee per payment |
|---|---|
| Monthly · Level 1Active subscription | 3.5% + $0.55 |
| Monthly · Level 2Active subscription | 3.5% + $0.55 |
| LifetimeOne-time payment, no subscription | 5% + $0.55 |
Where your money goes: a $100 job
This is a real $100 payment on a monthly plan. No hidden percentages, this is the whole breakdown:
- Card processing (Stripe)$3.20
- Deposit to your bank (Stripe)$0.50
- Platform$0.35
Out of every $100 you collect, $3.70 goes to Stripe for processing the card and depositing your money. We keep 35 cents, and there is still one charge that does not show up in that breakdown.
What Stripe charges us
Stripe is the company that processes the cards and sends the money to your bank. Here is what Stripe charges us:
- 2.9% + $0.30 on every card payment
- 0.25% + $0.25 every time we deposit money to you
- $2 a month for every active payments account
On a $100 job the first two add up to $3.70. That is why the fee is 3.5% + $0.55: it covers what Stripe takes out of that payment and leaves about 35 cents.
The third one is a different story. It is not attached to any payment, so no fee covers it.
The $2 a month is where we lose money
That $2 arrives every month for every active payments account, whether you collected ten jobs or none at all. We pay it either way and you never see it.
Now put the two numbers together. We keep 35 cents per $100 you collect, and your account costs $2 a month no matter what. For your account to simply pay for itself, you would have to run about $570 a month through the app.
- We keep
- $0.70
- Your account costs
- $2.00
- We keep
- $2.00
- Your account costs
- $2.00
So on most accounts we are the ones putting money in so you can get paid. That is deliberate: the slow months are covered by the good ones, and whoever is just starting out is covered by whoever already has volume. Nobody loses the ability to get paid for being small.
It is also the reason the fee cannot be any lower. If we dropped it to 2.5%, on a $100 job we would collect $3.05 and pay Stripe $3.70. We would lose 65 cents on every single payment, no matter how much you collect. No amount of volume fixes that.
Why the Lifetime plan pays a little more
The Lifetime plan is a single payment. After that nothing else comes in, but Stripe's costs keep arriving every month and on every payment: the $2 active account, the processing on each card, the deposit to your bank.
On the monthly plans, your subscription covers those fixed costs. On the Lifetime plan there is no monthly payment covering them, so they have to come out of the per-payment fee. That is why it is 5% + $0.55 instead of 3.5% + $0.55.
And if you ever start a monthly subscription, your payments move to the 3.5% + $0.55 fee on their own. You do not have to ask us or tell us.
What we do not charge you for
- Nothing to open or keep your payments account
- Nothing if you did not collect this month
- Nothing if a customer never pays the link
- Nothing to send quotes or payment links
- No monthly minimum and no lock-in contract
