The cut a marketplace charges on your transactions, or the subscription it charges for hosting your business, listings, and payments.
A platform fee is the price of doing business on someone else’s marketplace. It comes in two flavors: a percentage of each sale (commission), or a flat subscription to keep your listings and tools running. Either way, it’s money that leaves your pocket for the privilege of being where the buyers are.
For sellers, platform fees are easy to underestimate because they’re taken automatically, invisibly, every transaction. Fiverr charges sellers roughly 20% and Upwork’s freelancer service fee runs around 10% (as of mid-2026 — check their current fee pages). On a full-time income, a 20% cut can mean tens of thousands of dollars a year that you earned but never kept. That’s the fee’s true weight, not the small percentage it looks like per job.
For buyers, platform fees shape prices indirectly — sellers often raise quotes to absorb the cut, so high-fee marketplaces can quietly cost you more.
This is exactly why Mindhyv is commission-free: sellers keep 100% of what they earn. Compare what different platforms actually take in freelance platform fees compared, run your own numbers with the commission savings calculator, and read why commission-free matters.