Pricing, in public
The honest math on invoicing fees (including when we're not the cheapest)
Fee pages are where invoicing tools go to be vague. "Simple pricing." "No hidden fees." An asterisk. Another asterisk. By the time you find out what a $1,000 invoice actually costs you, you've read three support articles.
So let's do something unusual for a company blog: actual math, including the part where a competitor comes out ahead.
What the popular options really charge
Every platform below also passes through card processing (typically 2.9% + $0.30 in the US — that part is basically unavoidable no matter who you pick). The numbers here are the platform's own cut on top:
| Platform | Platform fee on a $1,000 invoice |
|---|---|
| Gumroad | $100.50 (10% + $0.50) |
| Lemon Squeezy | $50.50 (5% + $0.50) |
| Buy Me a Coffee | $50 (5%) |
| Stripe Invoicing | $4 (0.4% per paid invoice, from invoice #1) |
| RivitPay | $0 until you've collected $5,000 lifetime — then 1.5% |
To be fair to Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy: part of what you're buying there is merchant-of-record tax handling, which matters if you sell digital products globally. If that's you, they're charging for something real. But if you're a freelancer invoicing clients for services, that 5–10% is mostly paying for machinery you don't need.
Where RivitPay wins — and where it honestly doesn't
Here's our pricing in one sentence: $0 platform fees until you've collected $5,000 through RivitPay, then 1.5% per payment, with no monthly fee, ever. Card payments settle directly into your own Stripe account.
For your early freelance income, that's hard to beat. Your first $5,000 collected costs you nothing in platform fees — the same volume on Stripe Invoicing would cost about $20, and on a 5% platform, $250.
But we'd rather you hear the other side from us than discover it in a spreadsheet later: because Stripe charges 0.4% from the first dollar and we charge 1.5% after $5,000, the break-even sits around $6,800 in lifetime volume. Past that point, a high-volume business using Stripe Invoicing directly pays less in platform fees than they would with us. Someone collecting $20,000 would pay Stripe about $80, versus $225 with us.
So why would anyone stay past the break-even? The honest answer is that some shouldn't — if you're a high-volume operation that lives in dashboards, wants recurring billing and tax tools, and squeezes every basis point, Stripe direct is the rational pick, and we'll say so. People who stay do it because of what surrounds the payment: sending an invoice in under a minute, live "your client just opened this" tracking (which Stripe's invoice statuses simply don't have), automatic reminders that chase in your own words, and a tool that doesn't require a developer's patience to operate.
Why this matters more than a percentage point
The pattern behind the stats we've shared in this series is that freelancers lose money in three places: fees they didn't see coming, hours spent on admin, and invoices that get paid late or never — with unpaid freelancers owed an average of $6,000 and 1 in 4 business bankruptcies linked to late payments (Allianz Trade). Fees are just the most visible leak. The right question isn't only "what's the percentage?" but "what does this tool do to the other two leaks?"
Our answer: make starting free, make tracking live, and put the fee where it only kicks in once the tool has demonstrably paid for itself — after your first $5,000 collected.
The bottom line
If you're starting out or invoicing on the side, RivitPay is genuinely the cheap option — free until $5k, about a minute to your first invoice, no signup required to try it. If you outgrow us into Stripe-direct territory someday, honestly? That's a good problem, and we hope the viewed-tracking keeps us worth the difference.
Free until you've collected $5,000 — about a minute to your first invoice, no signup required to try it.
Make an invoice — free, no signup