Skip to content
Menu

Checkout cost calculator: what each platform costs at your monthly revenue

The plan price on a pricing page is the smallest part of the bill once you sell at volume. Enter your monthly revenue and order count, and the calculator adds the plan, the vendor's cut of each sale and card processing for every platform we review, then sorts them by total.

By Marcus Reyes, Editor. Published 13 October 2026.

Summarize with:

Treat every figure as an estimate. Card processing defaults to the 2.9% + 30¢ that SamCart publishes for SamPay on its pricing page, and you can change it below. Your real rate depends on your gateway, your card mix and your merchant category. Calculate your checkout costs now, or read how the numbers are built first.

Estimate your monthly checkout cost

Only plans priced by page views use it.

Fill in your revenue and orders, then press Calculate my costs. The table orders every platform by estimated total.

How the estimate is built

Each total is three numbers added together: the monthly plan, the vendor's own fee on your sales, and card processing. Where a vendor is a merchant of record or a marketplace, its per-sale fee already includes processing, so the third number is zero. Our explainer on merchant of record vs payment processor covers what else changes when you sell that way.

The plans and fees come from the same catalog rows that feed each vendor's pricing page on this site. Each figure was taken from the vendor's own pricing page, and the table further down shows the date we checked it. When a vendor sells several plans, the calculator takes the cheapest one that fits your inputs: a revenue cap, a page-view limit, or whether the plan includes bumps and upsells. That is how Kartra's Essentials plan, with its 5% transaction fee, loses to Starter once your revenue passes about $1,200 a month.

Some costs are left out on purpose because they depend on how you run the account: ElasticFunnels page-view overages, GoHighLevel's SMS and email usage, SamCart's optional tax collection, Checkout Champ's billable add-ons, Sticky.io's fee on declined cards, affiliate commissions, payout fees and ClickBank's one-time activation fee. If one of those is large for your business, add it to the total by hand. The method behind our rankings explains how the catalog itself is researched.

Worked example: $50,000 a month across 500 orders

Illustration of a calculator beside three stacked bars of different lengths and a small pile of coins, standing for plan, platform fee and card processing costs

Take a seller with a $100 average order who needs order bumps and upsells. At the default rate, processing comes to 2.9% of $50,000, which is $1,450, plus 500 orders at 30¢, which is $150. That $1,600 is the same on every platform where you bring your own processor, so the plan and the platform fee decide the order.

  • ClickFunnels Launch: $97 a month and nothing per sale, as the ClickFunnels plans FAQ confirms, so about $1,697 in all.
  • SamCart Pro: $199, the tier that carries the bump and upsell features, for a monthly total of around $1,799.
  • ElasticFunnels Growth, assuming around 120,000 page views: $197, then 0.5% of revenue through its own gateways ($250), then processing, about $2,047.
  • Checkout Champ Growth: a $300 plan and 1% of gross sales ($500), as Checkout Champ lists them, for a total near $2,400.

Comparing SamCart and ClickFunnels on cost at this volume, ClickFunnels comes out about $100 a month cheaper, and the whole gap is the subscription. If your offer runs without add-on offers, SamCart Core flips that result. The SamCart pricing breakdown and the ClickFunnels pricing breakdown list every tier, and the ElasticFunnels pricing breakdown shows how its page-view limits map to plans.

When the plan price misleads

A low or zero subscription often hides a percentage that grows with you. Kartra Essentials looks cheap until its 5% fee meets real revenue, at which point a $97 flat plan elsewhere costs a fraction as much.

Marketplaces and merchants of record work the other way round. ClickBank charges 7.5% + $1.00 per sale with no monthly plan, as ClickBank explains. Paddle and Lemon Squeezy charge 5% + 50¢, and Gumroad takes 10% + 50¢ before processing. The merchant of record fee calculator prices those four at your order count, including Lemon Squeezy's add-ons and Gumroad's card line. That is cheap at $2,000 a month and the most expensive line on the table at $50,000, though the fee also buys tax handling, dispute handling or an affiliate marketplace that a plain checkout does not include.

PayKickstart sits between the two. The PayKickstart plan page offers $79 a month for up to $3,000 in monthly revenue, or a Launch plan at 6% of revenue with no subscription. Its higher subscription tiers sit on a slider, so past that cap the calculator shows Launch and links you to PayKickstart's pricing page here to compare a tier quote against it.

My take: run the calculator at the revenue you expect six months from now, not today's. Percentage fees are the line that grows fastest as ad spend scales, and switching checkouts later means rebuilding funnels and re-testing. For sellers whose processor is the real constraint, the guide to high-risk merchant account providers covers the rate and reserve side that this calculator holds constant, and the chargeback ratio checker shows how close your dispute rate is to the card networks' monitoring thresholds.

The fee rules behind the calculator

Every vendor the calculator covers, alphabetically, with the plans it can choose from. Monthly figures are in US dollars.

Your next step

Run your own numbers, then open the pricing page for the platform you are leaning toward: each name in the results links straight to it. If two land close together, a head-to-head settles what the totals cannot, such as SamCart vs ThriveCart, ClickFunnels vs GoHighLevel or Checkout Champ vs ClickFunnels. The checkout and funnel software ranking says which of them we would trust with paid traffic, and why.

Frequently asked questions

Does ClickFunnels charge a transaction fee?
ClickFunnels itself takes nothing per sale; its pricing FAQ answers that question with a plain no. You still pay whichever gateway you connect, so a sale through ClickFunnels costs the plan plus your processor's rate.
Is SamCart cheaper than ClickFunnels?
Only if Core covers you. Once you need order bumps or one-click upsells, SamCart moves to Pro and costs more each month than ClickFunnels Launch. Processing is close to identical on both, so the subscription decides it.
What counts as a checkout platform transaction fee?
It is the cut the software vendor takes from each sale, separate from the card processor's cut. Some vendors charge none, some charge a percentage on top of a plan, and merchants of record roll both into one per-sale price.
Why does the calculator not show a price for some vendors?
A few vendors quote each seller after a call, and two publish prices only in euros. Inventing a number for them would make the comparison look more complete than it is, so they sit below the table with the reason.

Written by

Last checked 2026-10-13

Comments

No comments yet. Questions and your own experience are welcome.

Leave a comment

Thank you. Your comment will appear once it has been reviewed.