A fee charged as a percentage of a sale, or pay earned for closing one — the cut a platform or salesperson takes from each transaction.
“Commission” gets used two ways. On a marketplace, it’s the percentage the platform skims off each sale you make — the reason a $1,000 job doesn’t put $1,000 in your pocket. In sales, it’s what a salesperson earns for closing a deal. Both share one idea: a cut tied to a transaction.
For sellers, marketplace commissions are a direct tax on your work. Fiverr charges sellers roughly 20% and Upwork’s freelancer service fee is around 10% (as of mid-2026 — check their current fee pages), which means a chunk of every project never reaches you. Over a year, that adds up to real money you earned but didn’t keep.
For buyers, commission structures shape prices you never see: freelancers often pad quotes to absorb the platform’s cut, so high-commission marketplaces can cost you more indirectly.
This is the problem Mindhyv is built around — it’s commission-free, so sellers keep 100% of what they earn. If you want to see what those percentages cost over time, run the numbers with the commission savings calculator, and read why commission-free matters.