Transaction Fees

Overview

Transaction fees are usage-based charges considered part of your Subscriby subscription cost. These fees are charged as a percentage of your processed volume and vary depending on your subscription plan.

Fee Structure

Subscriby applies different transaction fee rates based on your active plan tier.

During your free trial

Every paid plan opens with a 7-day free trial, on both the monthly and the annual cycle. You get the plan's full feature set from the moment you start.

Your card is collected when you start the trial but nothing is charged until it ends, so the subscription converts on its own and you keep your plan without doing anything. Cancel before the trial ends and you are never charged.

If the first payment fails, the Free-tier rate stays in force until it succeeds — your commission does not drop to the plan rate on an unpaid subscription. See What happens if you don't pay.

Ending the trial early

If you are selling during the trial, the 10% rate may cost you more than the plan does. A banner on your dashboard shows the trial status while it runs, with End Trial & Start Plan: it charges your first payment immediately — the exact figure comes from your upcoming invoice, including tax and any usage already metered — and your plan's rate applies as soon as that payment clears.

Sales already made during the trial stay at 10%. Nothing is recalculated backwards, and the trial cannot be resumed once ended.

Billing Methods

How you are charged depends on the payment method used for the transaction.

Stripe Direct Charge

If you are using Stripe exclusively with the Direct Charge configuration, transaction fees are deducted automatically from the incoming payment in real-time. You receive the net amount (payment minus fee) directly in your Stripe balance. No separate invoice is generated for these fees.

Supported Regions: This method works for Stripe accounts in all countries except:

Accumulated Billing (Other Methods)

For all other payment methods (PayPal, Crypto, etc.) and Stripe accounts in the excluded regions listed above, transaction fees are accumulated as a pending balance on your account.

These accumulated fees are charged to your payment method on file:

1. At the end of your billing cycle: Added to your monthly/yearly subscription renewal invoice.
2. When a threshold is reached: To prevent large unexpected bills, we charge fees immediately when they reach a certain threshold (e.g., $50).

Processing fees on accumulated billing

Invoices carrying accumulated fees also carry a Processing fees line.

Fees taken by direct charge cost Subscriby nothing to collect — they are deducted from the payment as it passes through. Fees billed to you by invoice are different: our payment processor charges us to collect that invoice, and that cost scales with the amount being collected. The Processing fees line is that cost, and nothing more.

It applies only to the accumulated-billing route. If your fees are taken by direct charge, you never see this line and your rate is exactly the headline percentage.

Currency Conversion

Subscriby always calculates and charges transaction fees in USD. If your project accepts payments in other currencies, the transaction fee is calculated by converting the transaction amount to USD based on the daily exchange rate.

Fiat currencies

Cryptocurrencies

Telegram Stars

Refunds & Disputes

Subscriby does not refund transaction fees for refunded or disputed payments. The transaction fee covers the cost of processing the original transaction and is non-recoverable.

Plan Changes

If you upgrade or downgrade your plan, the new transaction fee rate applies immediately to all new payments.

Switching plans during a trial is the one exception: your sales stay on the Free tier's 10% rate until your first payment is received, whichever plan you switch to.

What happens if you don't pay

Transaction fees that accumulate get added to your invoices — either immediately (when the usage threshold is hit) or at renewal. If an invoice goes unpaid, Subscriby follows a defined sequence of milestones so there's a predictable path back to good standing.

Your dashboard pauses immediately

Your projects keep running throughout — subscribers keep their access, and existing subscriptions continue to bill and renew. What pauses is your ability to manage things, not your members' access. Subscriby also keeps retrying the failed charge automatically over the following days, and a fresh payment method triggers a retry straight away.

Transaction fees continue to accrue while an invoice is overdue. They're added to your balance and collected once payment succeeds, so an unpaid invoice defers the bill rather than waiving it.

The overdue clock

How long you have depends on what you have actually committed. Creators on the Free plan have no subscription revenue behind them, so their clock is much shorter — and so does anyone whose free trial never converted, because no payment has landed yet.

Every day below is counted from your first failed payment.

Lockdown lands at day 30 on paid plans because the automatic payment retries are exhausted by roughly then — waiting longer doesn't recover the charge. Deletion stays a long way behind it at day 90, because lockdown is reversible and deletion is not.

The unconverted trial column applies when your free trial ends and the first payment does not go through. Lockdown comes early, on the Free plan's schedule, because nothing has been paid for the plan's higher limits you have been using. Deletion stays on the paid schedule, because it cancels your subscribers as well as your account, and a card that simply needs replacing should not cost you your audience. Which column you are on is fixed when the first payment fails — it does not change as the days pass.

Internally the last two milestones are measured from the lockdown date rather than from the failed payment — 3 and 7 days after lockdown on the Free plan, 53 and 60 days on paid plans and after an unconverted trial. The day numbers above assume lockdown lands on schedule; if it happens later, the deletion milestones move back with it.

Every milestone is preceded by an email, on every plan — the debt is the same regardless of which plan you're on, only the timings differ.

Fees on access-code redemptions

Access codes have their own fee model, layered on top of the general transaction-fee rules:

• Your plan's free access-code allotment resets at the start of each billing cycle (not rolled over).
• An access code is counted as "used" when it's redeemed by a subscriber — not when you generate it.
• Codes redeemed beyond your plan's free allotment are subject to the same standard transaction fee rate (10 % / 3 % / 1 %).
• Unused free allotment does not carry over — it resets at the start of each new cycle.
• While a free trial runs the allotment stays at the Free plan's 5 per cycle, whichever plan you are trying. A code inside the allotment is a sale the platform waives its commission on, so it is priced with the plan rather than lent with the features — exactly like the transaction rate above. Your plan's full allotment opens up as soon as the first payment lands.

See Access codes for the full mechanics.