Squarespace fee calculator

Rates verified 2026-10-25 against the official pages: Squarespace Help: Transaction fees and payment processing rates (Basic 2%, Core, Plus and Advanced 0%; Squarespace Payments card rates by plan) · Squarespace Help: Selling on the Basic, Core, Plus, and Advanced plans. If a rate changes upstream, we update the constant and this date together. Estimates, not tax or accounting advice.

Squarespace's help splits the cost of a sale in two. Payment processing is charged on every purchase, by whichever provider takes the card: Squarespace Payments, or a third-party processor such as Stripe or PayPal at its own rates. The transaction fee is Squarespace's own, and it depends on your billing plan and on what you sell. For physical products, downloads, services and donations, Squarespace says it collects a percentage of the total sale amount for each completed transaction.

Which percentage depends on which generation of plans your site is on. Squarespace is rolling out its Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced plans in waves, and its help still lists the plans many sites pay for today: Business, Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced. The calculator carries both lines, so pick the plan named in your billing settings rather than the one on today's pricing page.

• Basic: a 2% transaction fee, and Squarespace Payments at 2.9% + $0.30 for a US standard card.
• Core: no transaction fee, and Squarespace Payments at 2.9% + $0.30.
• Plus: no transaction fee, and Squarespace Payments at 2.7% + $0.30.
• Advanced: no transaction fee, and Squarespace Payments at 2.5% + $0.30.
• Older plans: Business 3%, Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced 0%, each with Squarespace Payments at 2.9% + $0.30 in the US.
• Legacy plans, for sites that signed up between November 2015 and November 2017 and never moved: Legacy Personal 3%, Legacy Business 2%. A site that signed up before 3 November 2015 and never moved pays no commerce transaction fee.

Moving from Basic to Core takes the transaction fee from 2% to nothing and leaves the Squarespace Payments rate where it was, so the whole saving is the transaction fee. Squarespace's pricing page shows plan prices in the visitor's own currency, so this page doesn't print them, and the arithmetic works with whatever yours says. Take the difference between the two monthly prices and divide it by 2%: that is the monthly sales at which Core pays for itself.

Each $10 of monthly price difference breaks even at $500 of sales a month, and each $20 at $1,000. Below that line Basic is cheaper even with its fee. Above it, every month on Basic pays Squarespace more than the upgrade would have cost. The calculator counts the shipping you charge as part of the sale, reading Squarespace's total sale amount as the whole charge, since its help doesn't break that phrase down.

Squarespace Payments is Squarespace's own processor, and on the new plans its rate falls as the plan rises: 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic and Core, 2.7% + $0.30 on Plus, 2.5% + $0.30 on Advanced, for a US standard card. Premium cards, which in the US means American Express and select business and corporate cards, pay 3.2% + $0.30 on every plan, and an international card adds 1.5%. Squarespace Payments is not available in every country yet; Squarespace's help keeps an availability guide.

Connect Stripe or PayPal instead and the processor charges its own rate, while Squarespace's transaction fee still applies on a plan that has one. Squarespace's help says Stripe shows it on the order as a Squarespace application fee, and PayPal as a payment to Squarespace. The calculator starts from Squarespace Payments on a US standard card. If you use another processor, type its percentage and fixed fee into the rate fields.

If you refund an order on a plan with a transaction fee, Squarespace's help says the transaction fee is refunded to you and the Squarespace Payments rate isn't. So a refunded Basic order still costs you the processing on the original charge, 2.9% + $0.30 for a US standard card, and none of the 2%.

Refunds come out of the day's Payments balance. Squarespace says a refund larger than that balance leaves it negative until new payments cover it, and without new payments it debits your connected bank account. For a store with many returns, the processing on refunded orders is a real cost; the calculator shows the cost of a sale that stays sold.

The subscription is the fixed cost. Squarespace's pricing page shows the plans in the visitor's currency, so divide your own monthly plan price by the orders you take in a month to see what it adds to each one. Sales tax is out of the sums too, and Squarespace says that when you use automated tax rates a fee is applied to each transaction, combined with the processing fee rather than shown on its own line.

Digital products, meaning courses, video pages and member sites, have a transaction fee scale of their own, from 7% on Basic and 5% on Core down to none on Advanced, and the calculator leaves them out. Invoices and standard pay links carry no transaction fee, Squarespace's help says, so neither belongs in a per-sale calculation.

The waterfall above runs the reference sale used across all 19 calculators: a $40 product, $6 of shipping charged and $12 of materials, on the Basic plan with Squarespace Payments and a US standard card. The sale amount is $46.00. The transaction fee of 2% is $0.92, the processing at 2.9% + $0.30 is $1.63, Squarespace's two lines come to $2.55, and the seller keeps $31.45 after materials.

Move the same sale to Core and the transaction fee line goes, leaving $1.63 of processing. On Advanced the processing falls to $1.45. Put the sale through the Shopify calculator next to it and you are comparing two store builders whose buyers both come from search, which is the comparison that matters when you choose where to build.

The fee is the part you can calculate. Whether anyone finds the product is decided on Google and the other search engines, and Squarespace's help says what they read: the SEO title, up to 100 characters with 70 or fewer advised, and the SEO description, up to 400 with 50 to 300 advised and a cut around 160. Leave either empty and the product name or the product description stands in.

Watch the title format as well. By default a product reaches search as its SEO title, a hyphen and your site title, so a long site name eats into the 70. Then price against what the same product sells for elsewhere, with this page's fee already taken out.

The fee is the marketplace's decision and it does not move. What the listing says is yours, and that is the part this site was built to write.