Know exactly what you keep.
Stripe vs PayPal vs Wise

Every dollar you earn through an online payment passes through at least one intermediary, and each one takes a cut. The trick is knowing who takes how much, and when a different provider can save you enough to matter. In 2026, the three household names for freelancers and SMBs remain Stripe, PayPal, and Wise — each with a distinct fee profile that rewards a specific kind of transaction.

Stripe and PayPal follow the classic "interchange plus" blended pricing model that card networks invented: a percentage on every dollar plus a fixed per-transaction fee. For US domestic cards, both hover around 2.9% plus roughly $0.30–$0.49 per charge. Where they diverge is international volume. Stripe adds a flat 1.5% surcharge for cards issued outside the US, landing you at 4.40% + $0.30. PayPal takes the cross-border markup even further, adding 1.5% on top of its domestic schedule to reach 4.49% + $0.49 — a spread that sounds small until you multiply it across five- or six-figure annual invoicing.

Wise, by contrast, does not route through card networks at all for its standard payout flow. It charges a transparent margin close to 0.45% plus a $0.50 transfer fee, which makes it dramatically cheaper for large invoices, especially cross-border ones. The trade-off, of course, is that Wise is a push-to-bank product, not a card-acquiring product. Your client has to initiate a Wise transfer, whereas Stripe and PayPal let you charge a card on file with one click.

The right choice is almost never a single provider. Most operators keep Stripe or PayPal for card-ready clients and offer Wise as a discounted wire alternative for invoices above $1,000. FeeCut shows you both options side by side in real time so you can quote the cheapest path to your client without doing arithmetic by hand.

Freelancers and digital agencies that serve international clients lose an average of 3–7% of every invoice to invisible currency markup — a cost that almost never shows up on the line-item invoice from their payment provider. The fee is buried in the "spot rate" that PayPal, Stripe, and Wise present as the "conversion rate" on the day of the transfer.

Stripe and PayPal typically embed a 1.5–3.9% spread into the mid-market rate before the transfer even clears. Wise was built explicitly to undercut this behavior and charges a fraction of a percent above the true Reuters mid-market rate, which is why it consistently shows the highest net payout in FeeCut comparisons for cross-border work above a couple thousand dollars.

But raw conversion spread is not the whole story. Receiving in a foreign currency into a USD-denominated Stripe or PayPal balance, then converting manually on your own schedule, will usually beat automatic point-of-sale conversion because you can pick a better market day and because you can sometimes batch multiple small invoices into one larger conversion, minimizing the fixed-fee impact. FeeCut defaults to showing the per-transaction cost as billed so you can see the worst-case scenario before you decide to batch.

The single highest-leverage move you can make this quarter is to open a Wise multi-currency account, enable local account details in USD, GBP, EUR, and AUD, and then quote every overseas client a choice between paying your Stripe checkout (for the convenience of a card) or sending a local transfer to your Wise details (for a 0.45% fee). The net revenue difference will pay for the 15 minutes of admin work within your first invoice.

Here is the most expensive arithmetic mistake in freelance billing: "My rate is $100 an hour and the project is 40 hours, so I will invoice $4,000 and assume I will see about $3,850 after fees." That assumption is wrong, and it costs most solo operators somewhere between $500 and $5,000 a year in missed revenue. The correct question is not "what will 3% of $4,000 cost me?" It is "what number do I need to put on the invoice so that after Stripe takes 2.9% plus 30 cents, exactly $4,000 lands in my bank account?"

That formula is the reverse calculation in FeeCut, and it is derived from a simple rearrangement of the standard fee equation. If fee = (amount × rate) + fixed, then net = amount − fee. To solve for the invoice amount that delivers exactly your target net, you need amount = (net + fixed) ÷ (1 − rate). Because of the fixed-fee term, the percentage you "lose" is never exactly the headline rate — it is always slightly higher for small invoices and asymptotically approaches the headline rate as the invoice grows large.

The reverse mode in FeeCut runs that formula for all three providers simultaneously and tells you exactly what to write on the invoice for each. If you bill 10 clients a month and forget to pad for fees on each one, the shortfall compounds. At an average invoice of $2,500 with a blended 3% fee, that is roughly $900 a year left on the table — money you earned, quoted, and then quietly donated to the payment rails because you did not want to ask a client for an extra $75.

Run FeeCut in reverse before you send every invoice. Round the result up to a clean round number ($3,100 instead of $3,092.18) and tell the client that the invoice is structured so your final deposit matches the quote. Clients respect the transparency, and your P&L will thank you for the discipline.