The order of operations
- Start from the sticker price - what the buyer sees.
- Subtract the platform's cut, whether it is a flat fee, a percentage, or both. Gumroad, app stores and marketplaces all take theirs off the top.
- Subtract the payment fee, the one the card processor takes, usually a percentage plus a small fixed amount per transaction.
- Subtract the tax you will owe on the sale - not from panic, but from the rate you actually expect to pay, set aside at the moment of the sale.
- What is left is the real number. That is the only number worth pricing from.
Run one sale through it
- Take your most common product price and write it at the top of a page.
- Apply your platform's exact fee schedule - look it up once, write it down, stop guessing.
- Apply the payment fee, remembering the fixed per-transaction part hurts small prices the most.
- Apply your tax rate as a set-aside line, moved to a separate account if you can.
- Look at the remainder. Now divide it by the hours that product took to make, and you have its true hourly value.
Where this goes wrong
- Pricing from the sticker and living from the remainder - the most common way freelancers work harder every year for the same money.
- Forgetting the fixed fee on small transactions, where a few percent plus a fixed fee can quietly become a large fraction of the price.
- Treating tax as a surprise instead of a line item. A set-aside at sale time is boring; a scramble at filing time is not.
- Never re-running the numbers after a platform changes its fees. Fee schedules change; feelings about them do not pay rent.
What the real number is for
- It prices the next product: if a file takes twenty hours, the price has to clear twenty hours of your floor rate after fees, or it is a hobby with a storefront.
- It compares channels honestly: the same sticker price can leave very different remainders on different platforms, and that difference is a business fact.
- It tells you when to raise prices: not from greed, but from the remainder shrinking under your costs.
The free tool for this
What a store actually leaves you - What a store actually leaves you. It runs in the page, asks for your own numbers, and sends nothing anywhere.
If you would rather not build it yourself
The Calculator Pack runs this as the payout check: price, fees and tax in, the real number out, saved as a file you keep. Calculator Pack is $12. See it on the shop, and there is a plain page about it here: what it holds.
Questions people actually ask
How much should I set aside for tax?
The rate you actually expect to pay, which depends on where you live and what you earn - a local accountant answers this in one meeting and it is a meeting worth paying for. The habit that matters is setting it aside at the moment of the sale, not the amount of the guess.
Do fees mean I should just raise prices?
They mean you should know the remainder before deciding. Sometimes the honest answer is a higher price; sometimes it is a different platform; sometimes it is a bundle that makes the fixed fees hurt once instead of five times.
Read next
How to work out your freelance hourly rate, honestly, How to find your break-even as a one-person business.