Card fee plus the Billing add-on — your true effective rate on a subscription charge.
Stripe Billing adds ~0.7% on top of card processing, and Tax, fraud and disputes push the real rate higher still. See the base math on the payment fee calculator and the annual-billing saving on the annual vs monthly fee calculator.
The Stripe Billing Fee Calculator estimates what you actually keep on a recurring charge after all fees are deducted. You enter the charge amount, the card processing percentage, the fixed per-transaction fee, and the billing add-on percentage that applies to subscription invoices. The tool multiplies the two percentage rates against the charge, adds the flat fee, subtracts the total from your gross amount, and returns your net payout along with the true effective percentage — the combined cost expressed as a single rate. The main drivers are the charge size and the two stacked percentages, since the recurring add-on sits on top of standard card processing.
The key trade-off is that the fixed fee weighs far more heavily on small charges than large ones, so a $5 subscription can lose a much higher effective percentage than a $500 one, even at identical rates. Before setting a price, check the effective rate at your actual ticket size rather than the headline card rate alone, because the billing add-on and flat fee together can quietly raise your real cost by a meaningful margin on low-value recurring plans.
Standard card processing (about 2.9% + 30¢) plus a recurring add-on of roughly 0.7% for subscriptions managed through Stripe Billing. So the effective rate on a subscription is closer to 3.6% + 30¢ before any other add-ons.
Because 2.9% + 30¢ is just base card processing. SaaS companies stack the Billing add-on, Stripe Tax, Radar fraud tooling and dispute fees on top, which for many recurring-revenue businesses pushes the true all-in cost to 4.5–6.5% of revenue.