Big Cartel Fee Calculator

What a Big Cartel shop costs each month

Big Cartel advertises a monthly price, not a cut of each sale. The company states on its own help pages that it does not charge transaction fees on your orders. So the money that leaves your shop each month has two parts: the plan fee you pay Big Cartel, and the processing fee that Stripe or PayPal keeps before the rest of the money reaches your bank.

That second part is the one people forget. Stripe's standard U.S. rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful card charge, and PayPal charges 3.49% plus 49 cents on PayPal and Venmo checkouts in the U.S. On a $45 order, Stripe keeps $1.61 and PayPal keeps $2.06. Neither fee shows up in your Big Cartel admin, which is why a shop owner can look at the dashboard, see a healthy sales number, and still feel short at the end of the month.

The calculator on this page puts both parts in one place. Enter your plan, your order count, your average order value and your processor, and it returns the total monthly cost, the net payout, and the all-in rate you are paying as a share of sales. Big Cartel's own pricing page, checked on October 17, 2026, lists Platinum at $15 a month and Diamond at $30 a month, with a limited free Gold plan.

Two habits make the number useful. First, compare plans at the same sales volume, because a $15 fee is 0.83% of $1,800 in sales but only 0.13% of $12,000. Second, treat the fee as a fixed cost that your first few orders of the month exist to cover, not as a percentage you can shave by raising prices.

Worked example: 40 orders at $45 on each plan

A small shop selling prints does 40 orders a month at an average of $45. That is $1,800.00 in sales. The percentage part of the processor fee is 1,800 x 0.029 = 52.20, and the fixed part is 40 x 0.30 = 12.00, so card processing takes $64.20 in total.

• Gold (free): processing $64.20, plan $0.00, you keep $1,735.80
• Platinum ($15): processing $64.20, plan $15.00, total $79.20, you keep $1,720.80
• Diamond ($30): processing $64.20, plan $30.00, total $94.20, you keep $1,705.80

As a share of sales, the all-in cost runs 3.57% on Gold, 4.40% on Platinum and 5.23% on Diamond. The jump from Gold to Diamond is $30.00 a month, or $0.75 per order at this volume. That sounds small until you notice it is 1.67% of sales for features a five product shop may never use.

Now the same shop at 200 orders a month with a $60 average, or $12,000.00 in sales. Processing is $348.00 plus $60.00, so $408.00 in total. Platinum adds $15.00 for $423.00, which is 3.52% of sales, and Diamond adds $30.00 for $438.00, which is 3.65%. The plan fee barely moves the percentage, because the fixed fee per order is now spread across far more revenue. This is the whole argument for growing before you upgrade: the same $15 is a heavy weight at 40 orders and a rounding error at 200.

The per-order view is the one that decides things. At 40 orders, the Platinum fee is $0.38 per order and the Diamond fee is $0.75. At 200 orders those fall to $0.08 and $0.15. If your margin on a single print is $12, a $0.75 plan cost is 6% of that margin, which is worth a second look before you pay it.

Big Cartel plans side by side

Prices below come from Big Cartel's pricing page and plan help article, both read on October 17, 2026. Annual billing is 20% off, which works out to $144 a year for Platinum and $288 a year for Diamond. Confirm the current numbers on the official page before you budget, because plan prices and product caps change.

What separates Platinum from Diamond is not selling capacity in the checkout sense, it is tooling: abandoned cart recovery, scheduled product drops, password protected products, Zapier access to more than 7,000 apps, and priority support. Both paid plans sell physical and digital products, print shipping labels, and take cards, PayPal and Afterpay. The free Gold plan sells up to five products and one customizable template, which is enough to test a product idea and not much else.

Because the transaction fee is 0% on every tier, the upgrade question is never "will I pay less per sale". It is "do I need more product slots or these specific tools, and is that worth $15 or $30 a month". Answer that with a number, not a feeling: divide the plan fee by your average order profit and see how many extra orders the plan has to produce to pay for itself.

Why the monthly fee hurts small shops more

A fixed fee does not scale with you. At 10 orders a month, the $15 Platinum fee is $1.50 per order. At 100 orders it is $0.15. Same plan, ten times the difference in what it costs you per sale. That is why two shop owners can pay the same $15 and have completely different experiences of whether Big Cartel is cheap.

Here is the monthly cost of the plan fee alone, spread across order volume:

The plan fee itself stays at $15 whatever the volume, so the per-order column is the one that moves, and it is the one that tells you whether a paid plan is eating your margin. A shop doing 10 orders a month at $45 is paying $1.50 per order for the privilege of listing 50 products instead of 5. That can be a fair trade if the extra slots let you sell a product line, and a bad one if you are paying for slots you never fill.

The same logic explains why the free plan is not a trap for everyone. If you sell five prints and take 15 orders a month, Gold costs you nothing and the 0% transaction fee means Big Cartel takes nothing on top of processing. You are giving up custom domains, discount codes, inventory tracking and label printing, which is a features trade rather than a money trade.

When upgrading pays for itself

Run the upgrade as a purchase decision with a payback number. The step from Platinum to Diamond costs $15 more a month. At a $45 average order, after Stripe's 2.9% and 30 cents you keep $43.40 per order. Divide $15 by that and you need 0.35 extra orders a month to break even, which is roughly one extra order every three months.

Put that way, the Diamond plan is easy to justify for a shop with steady traffic and no abandoned cart emails, because recovering one cart a quarter covers the difference. It is hard to justify for a shop with 8 orders a month, where the $15 is 12.5% of revenue before any processing fee is counted.

• Stay on Gold if you sell five products or fewer and do not need a custom domain.
• Move to Platinum the moment a sixth product would earn more than $15 a month in profit, or when you need discounts, inventory tracking or your own domain.
• Move to Diamond when the extra $15 is covered by one recovered cart or one scheduled drop a quarter, and when you have more than 50 products to list.

There is a second break-even worth knowing: annual billing. Platinum at $144 a year instead of $180 saves $36, and Diamond at $288 instead of $360 saves $72. That is a guaranteed return for paying up front, and it only makes sense if you are confident you will still be selling in twelve months. If you might close the shop, monthly billing is the cheaper exit.

A third number to check before upgrading: the effective rate on your real sales. At 40 orders and $1,800, Gold costs 3.57% all in and Diamond costs 5.23%. If your product margin is 40%, the Diamond plan takes 13.08% of your gross margin at that volume, and about 9.13% at $12,000 a month.

Payment processing is not a Big Cartel fee

The fee that surprises new sellers is the processing fee, because it is charged by the processor and never appears in the Big Cartel dashboard. Big Cartel hands the payment to Stripe or PayPal, the processor deducts its cut, and the remainder lands in your processor balance before payout to your bank. Big Cartel does not hold the funds and does not deduct the fee.

On 40 orders at $45, the difference between the two processors is $18.22 a month, which is more than the Platinum plan fee. That is not an argument for dropping PayPal, since some buyers only use it, but it is an argument for knowing the split. If a fifth of your orders arrive through PayPal, you can estimate the blended cost rather than assuming one rate applies to everything.

Two details change the arithmetic. International cards and currency conversion add a surcharge on top of the standard rate, so a shop selling abroad pays more than the table shows. Buy now, pay later methods such as Afterpay and Klarna carry higher processing costs than a plain card, and Big Cartel lists Afterpay as an accepted method on paid plans. Neither surcharge is visible in the order list, so the only reliable way to know your real rate is to open a few transactions in the Stripe or PayPal dashboard and divide the fee by the order total.

A useful sanity check: if your effective all-in rate is above 5% at a few hundred orders a month, the cause is almost always the fixed 30 or 49 cents on small orders, not the Big Cartel plan. Ten dollar orders carry a 3% fixed cost before the percentage even starts.

The product cap trap: 5, 50 and 500

Big Cartel prices by product count, not by sales. That single design choice creates the most common upgrade mistake: paying for capacity you already have, or hitting a wall in the middle of a launch.

The caps are 5 products on Gold, 50 on Platinum and 500 on Diamond. Variants count within a product, so a shirt in four sizes and three colors is one product with twelve variants, not twelve products. Big Cartel allows up to 150 variants per product across a maximum of three variant groups, which means a single listing can carry a lot of options before you need another slot.

Where the cap bites is a catalog, not a product. A ceramicist with 8 glaze options and 3 forms has 24 products and needs Platinum. A print shop with 60 designs needs Diamond. A maker testing one product in five colorways can sit on Gold for a year and pay nothing.

Before you upgrade for slots, count what you would list this month, not what you might list someday. If the honest number is 12, Platinum is the right tier and Diamond is $15 a month for tools you are not using. If the number is 55, Diamond is the only option and the extra $15 is not a choice.

How to read the numbers before you switch

Three figures decide the plan question, and the calculator returns all three.

1. All-in cost as a share of sales. Total fees divided by revenue. Below 4% is normal for card sales with a paid plan at volume; above 5% usually means small orders or a high fixed fee.
2. Plan fee per order. The plan price divided by monthly orders. This is the number that tells you whether a fixed fee is heavy or light at your volume.
3. Extra orders to break even. The upgrade price divided by your net per order. If the answer is under one order a month, the upgrade is cheap; if it is five, you are buying features, not profit.

Run the numbers twice, once at your current volume and once at double it. A plan that looks expensive at 40 orders often looks free at 120, and the point of the exercise is to know which side of that line you are on before the busy season, not after.

Keep the source dates in mind. Big Cartel's plan prices and product caps were read on October 17, 2026, and the processor rates come from Stripe's and PayPal's own pricing pages on the same date. Fees in this business change without much notice, so treat every figure here as a starting point and confirm it with the official page before you commit to an annual plan.

One last habit: keep a spreadsheet row for each month with sales, orders, processing fees and plan fee. After three months you will know your real effective rate, and that number beats any estimate on any calculator page, including this one.