Understanding Platform & Processing Fees

Two fees can come out of a payment: Stripe's processing fee for moving the money, and Crafted Call's platform fee for running the transaction. They are charged by different parties and they behave differently on entry fees and on sales. This guide explains what each one is charged against, who bears it, and where to see it on a transaction.

The two fees

The Stripe processing fee is the cost of accepting a card payment. Stripe deducts it before the money reaches your account, and Crafted Call never adds anything on top of it. In the United States the standard rate is 2.9 percent plus US$0.30 per transaction, with a surcharge on cards issued outside your own country. Stripe publishes rates country by country, so Australian and New Zealand organizations pay the rate Stripe lists for their country in their own currency. Check Stripe's pricing page for yours.

The Crafted Call platform fee is what your plan charges for running the payment. There are two forms of it:

On a completed application, a flat amount set by your plan. It runs from US$1.00 on Pay as you go down to US$0.25 on Premier, and it is the same amount whether or not the call charges an entry fee.
On an artwork sale, a percentage of the sale, using your plan's sales rate. It runs from 4 percent on Pay as you go down to 1 percent on Premier.

Both are set by your plan. See Plans and Pricing for the figures on each. Publishing a call itself costs nothing on any plan.

Currency: the sales fee comes out of the transaction, so it is charged in whatever currency the payer used. The per-application charge and your subscription are Crafted Call's own revenue and are always billed in United States dollars, wherever your organization is.

What the per-application charge applies to

The charge is a flat amount per completed application, not a percentage of anything. An application counts once it is complete, so a draft an artist never finishes is never charged, and an application whose fee you waive outright is not charged either.

A discount is not a waiver. A coupon, a member benefit or a sliding-scale choice that brings an entry to nothing leaves an ordinary free entry, which carries the per-application charge like any other free entry: your organization pays it on the monthly invoice, or on an artists-pay call the artist pays it as a small checkout of its own before the application completes. Only the waiver on the submission itself, the one an admin applies, takes the charge away with the fee.

If you refund an entry fee and send the platform fee back with it, the per-application charge goes back too: your reports show it as refunded rather than collected. A refund never adds anything to your monthly invoice.

It does not depend on what the call charges artists. A free-entry call carries the same per-application charge as a paid one: that charge is how a free-entry call pays for itself, and it is what replaced the old per-call activation fee.

If your organization paid an activation fee for a call published under the old pricing, that payment is still on record. Open Payments, find the row marked Call Activation, and use its Receipt button for a receipt you can file with a grant claim or your books.

Include costs in your entry price

In the call's fee settings, use Include costs in the entry price. Enter the amount you want to recover per paid work in the call's currency, preview the resulting prices, then apply and save them. The tool increases ordinary paid prices; it preserves free choices and blank price variants. Price-table totals include recovery only for paid marginal works, preserving free steps and gaps. First-work, additional-work and configured early/late prices appear separately in the preview.

Choose Your organization pays when publishing. On eligible USD calls, also save a billing card and keep paid prices at or above the USD platform charge; otherwise existing rules can still ask artists for a separate platform charge. Your organization remains responsible for Crafted Call's USD platform charge, collected through its existing settlement flow. Organization-paid charges on AUD/NZD calls accrue to the monthly invoice. On supported USD checkouts, a sufficient paid entry can settle the organization's charge by deduction from its proceeds. Existing country and currency rules still apply; ordinary Australian checkout requires AUD. The artist pays the gallery's advertised entry price, including costs you incorporated. Existing gallery tax settings determine tax added or included at checkout; the whole price follows that supply's tax treatment and refund rules. A refunded recovery amount is ordinary entry-price money, not a separate nonrefundable processing fee.

Use your own budget and exchange-rate allowance when choosing an amount in another currency. The tool does not convert the USD charge or promise your net proceeds. Processing costs, GST where applicable, coupons, member discounts, sliding-scale choices and free works can reduce how much you recover. A 100 percent discount remains a free entry, and an explicit waiver continues to waive the platform charge.

This model is available through existing supported entry payments; it does not enable a blocked checkout, change the configured payer or create a separate artist-to-platform supply. Existing edit locks still apply, including the fee configuration lock on pay-on-acceptance calls after submissions begin.

Who pays the per-application charge

You choose this per call, on the Publish this call card, before the call goes public:

Your organization pays. The month's charges are gathered onto a single invoice, itemized by call, and billed at the start of the following month to the card you saved when you published. Nothing is charged at publish time.
Artists pay. The charge is added to what the artist pays at checkout, grossed up so the payment processing comes out of it rather than out of the charge. On Pay as you go that is about US$1.34 on a US card. The artist sees the total before they start.

The choice is fixed once the call is published, so make it before you publish. The separate artists-pay platform charge is currently available on calls priced in US dollars outside Australia and New Zealand. The consumer-supply tax and payment implementation for those countries still requires review. This restriction does not prevent a gallery from including costs in its advertised entry price where entry payments are supported. Organization-paid platform charges are quoted before any applicable GST.

On USD calls, two prices take the choice out of your hands. An entry priced above zero but below the per-application charge cannot cover it, so the artist pays the charge on that entry however the call is set. If every price on the call is below the charge, the publish card fixes the setting to artists pay and tells you the entry price that would give the choice back. If the call's prices straddle the charge, it keeps your setting and the artist pays the charge on entries under it; the call page and the entry form name that threshold. Where artists cannot be asked at all, a call priced that way is refused rather than part-collected. Prices in other currencies are checked against their checkout minimum, without comparing them with USD platform cents.

If a monthly invoice cannot be collected

You have seven days from the first failed collection. Nothing changes during them, and a retry does not restart the clock. After seven days, publishing a new call, creating an exhibition, duplicating an exhibition and exporting submissions in bulk stop until the balance is settled. Live calls keep accepting artists, and signing in, reading your calls and submissions, jury review, your billing pages and updating your card are never restricted. Settling the invoice restores the four on its own.

Charging per entry rather than a single fee

A call does not have to charge the same price for every entry (Same price per entry). Two other shapes are available when you set the call up:

First entry + each additional. Set a First Entry Fee and an Each Additional Entry amount. The first entry the artist submits pays the first-entry price, and every entry after that pays the additional price. "$35 for up to 3 works" is $35 first and $0 each additional.
Price table. Price by how many entries the artist has submitted, using a table you define, with separate member and non-member columns where you use memberships.

All three count entries, not photographs: each work entered is one entry. Extra images of one piece are documentation of that piece, so uploading five views of a sculpture is still one entry and one fee. The platform charge is separate from all of this: it applies to each entry, whatever entry fee you set.

Who bears the fees

Your organization pays Stripe processing costs from its proceeds. The Gallery Absorbs Processing Costs preference does not create an automatic processing-fee addition or card surcharge. Allow Artists to Add a Contribution offers a separate, unticked contribution toward gallery costs. Artists can decline it and pay the same entry price. A contribution is part of the gallery payment and follows that supply's tax treatment; its label does not make it a GST-free donation.

There is no wrong answer, but decide before the call opens. Changing it after artists have paid means two groups paid different amounts for the same call.

You can see the result of that choice later: Covered by Artist in Payout Reports is the share of fees artists paid rather than your organization, reported per currency.

Your own commission with an artist is a separate matter and comes out of the sale before their payout. See Setting Commission Rates.

An artwork sale, in layers

A $100 sale on a plan with a 2 percent platform sales rate and a 30 percent gallery commission:

Slice	Amount
Stripe fee	about $3.20
Crafted Call fee	$2.00
Gallery commission (30 percent)	$30.00
Artist payout (70 percent)	$70.00

Fees come out of your side of the split, not the artist's. The commission percentage the artist agreed to is the percentage they receive.

Seeing fees on a transaction

Open a transaction and the Fee Breakdown shows the Gross, the Stripe Fee, the Crafted Call Fee, any conversion fee, and Net to Gallery. If the payment has been refunded, a Net After Refund line is added.

Across a period, your financial reports total the same figures, and Payout Reports breaks a bank deposit into Crafted Call Fees, Stripe Fees, Conversion Fees, Covered by Artist, Refunds and Net to Gallery, each per currency.

If a fee ever looks wrong, start with the individual transaction, not the report. The transaction shows the arithmetic.

Practical notes

Small charges cost proportionally more. Stripe's fixed component is a bigger share of a $5 charge than of a $50 one.
International cards cost more. If your fee ratio for a period is higher than expected, Payout Reports flags it, and international cards are the usual reason.
Reconcile against Stripe. Stripe is the authority on processing fees; Crafted Call mirrors them into your records.

Common questions

Does Crafted Call add Stripe's fee to its own? No. Stripe charges its fee directly, and the platform fee is separate.

Do free-entry calls cost anything per application? Yes, the same flat per-application charge as any other call. You can pay it on your monthly invoice or have artists pay it at checkout.

Can artists help cover the costs? Yes. Include costs in the advertised gallery entry price or allow an optional contribution. The separate platform-charge payer option remains subject to currency and country eligibility.