Lemon Squeezy Fee Calculator

Guide

About the Lemon Squeezy Fee calculator

Our Lemon Squeezy fee calculator is a free tool that shows exactly what Lemon Squeezy takes on a sale and what you keep. Lemon Squeezy is a merchant of record (MoR) for digital products and software, popular with indie makers and small SaaS teams who want to sell globally without handling tax compliance themselves. Its fee bundles several things together and adds surcharges in some cases, so the real cost is easy to misjudge — this calculator makes it clear.

What "merchant of record" means for the fee

Like Paddle, Lemon Squeezy is the legal seller of your product, not just a payment processor. That means its 5% + 50¢ base fee already includes card processing, fraud handling, and the calculation, collection and remittance of sales tax and VAT worldwide. You don't pay a separate Stripe fee on top, and you don't have to register for tax in dozens of jurisdictions. So comparing Lemon Squeezy's 5% against a plain processor's 2.9% isn't apples-to-apples — the processor's rate doesn't include the global tax compliance that an MoR handles for you.

International cards and other surcharges

The headline 5% + 50¢ applies to standard US-card sales. When a customer pays with an international (non-US) card, Lemon Squeezy adds 1.5%, taking the effective rate to about 6.5% + 50¢ — toggle the international option above to see this. Lemon Squeezy also applies surcharges on some features: subscription payments and PayPal can add a small percentage, abandoned-cart recovery adds more, and affiliate-referred orders carry an additional cut. The base calculator here models the standard and international-card cases; the surcharge features are worth checking in your dashboard if you use them.

How the fee is calculated

The math is: fee = sale price × 5% (plus 1.5% on international cards) + $0.50, and your payout = price − fee. Because of the fixed 50¢, low-priced products pay a much higher effective rate: a $5 sale costs $0.75 (15%), a $20 sale costs $1.50 (7.5%), and a $100 sale costs $5.50 (5.5%). The calculator shows the effective rate so you can see what each price point really costs. To net a specific amount, switch to reverse mode and it grosses the price up so your payout hits the target.

Who this tool is for, and the Stripe acquisition

Indie developers, course creators and small SaaS teams use this to price products and model net revenue after Lemon Squeezy's cut. A common question is how Lemon Squeezy compares with Paddle: both are merchants of record at 5% + 50¢, so on a domestic sale they're identical — the difference is the international surcharge and add-ons, which our Paddle vs Lemon Squeezy calculator breaks down. Note that Stripe acquired Lemon Squeezy and has since introduced its own "Stripe Managed Payments" merchant-of-record product (also 5% + $0.50); Lemon Squeezy continues to operate, but if you're choosing for the long term it's worth weighing that direction too.

Accuracy and important notes

Lemon Squeezy's base rate is 5% + 50¢ with a 1.5% international-card surcharge, and other feature surcharges can apply, so we store the rates in a dated file and stamp the page with a "fees last verified" date. The fee is genuinely all-in for an MoR — don't add a separate processing fee — but payout currency conversion and specific features can carry their own costs. Always confirm the final figure in your Lemon Squeezy dashboard before relying on it, but for fast, dependable estimates of what you'll keep on a sale, this calculator gives you a clear answer in seconds.