On a small tip, the 5% isn't the fee that hurts
I added a buy me a coffee button to Verso, my little book-scanning side project. Before wiring it up I wanted to know the obvious thing: of a €3 coffee, how much actually lands in my account? I assumed the answer was “minus 5%”. It isn’t — and the reason is worth a note.
The fee that hides behind the headline
Buy Me a Coffee’s marketing is a clean 5% platform fee. What their own help docs spell out is that the fees stack: 5% platform + Stripe’s 2.9% + $0.30 + a 0.5% payout fee, plus surcharges (+1% international, +0.5% on subscriptions).
Run a $5 coffee through that:
platform 5% $0.25
stripe 2.9% + $0.30 $0.445 // the $0.30 is fixed, per transaction
payout 0.5% $0.025
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keep ~$4.28 (≈86%)Now the same stack on a $3 coffee → you keep ~$2.45, about 82%. On a $50 membership → ~91%. Same fee structure, wildly different efficiency. The 5% is constant; the thing moving the number is Stripe’s fixed $0.30, which is a 10% tax on a $3 tip and a rounding error on $50.
So skip the platform and go direct?
That was my next thought. Direct Stripe from Austria is 1.5% + €0.25 on a standard EEA card (BMC bills in dollars, my Stripe settles in euros — mind the currency, but the shape is the same), so a €3 coffee nets ~€2.70 (≈90%) — you drop the 5% platform cut, the 0.5% payout fee, the surcharges and the card rate falls from 2.9% to 1.5%. Real money over time. But you still pay the fixed €0.25, because that fee isn’t the platform’s, it’s the card network’s, and nobody makes it disappear.
Which is the actual lesson: on small one-off tips, the fixed per-transaction fee dominates, whoever you route through. The percentage cuts are the part you can shop around; the fixed fee is just the cost of moving small money.
So: if you already have a site and want to keep the extra ~8 points a small coffee loses to the stack (the platform’s own cut plus the lower card rate), a Stripe Payment Link is a button you can host yourself. If you want a hosted page, discovery, and zero setup, BMC’s stack is a fair price for not building any of that. Either way, don’t lose sleep over the 5% — and gently nudge people toward one bigger coffee instead of three small ones.