Fees

The standard retail protocol fee is 0.5% of the invoice amount, capped at 50 USDC per payment. The cap is reached at 10,000 USDC. The fee is deducted from the invoice amount at settlement and rounds down to the nearest USDC base unit.

Retail examples#

These examples use retail pricing. The payer authorizes the full invoice amount; the protocol fee is not added on top. Any network gas paid by the payer is separate.

Enterprise pricing#

Negotiated enterprise pricing can use a merchant-specific percentage of at most 0.5% (50 basis points) with no per-invoice cap. A lower percentage does not necessarily mean a lower fee than capped retail pricing on a large invoice. Confirm your agreed terms rather than assuming the retail cap applies.

For illustration only, a 0.20% uncapped rate on 1,000 USDC produces a 2 USDC fee, less than the 5 USDC retail fee. On 100,000 USDC the same rate produces a 200 USDC fee, while retail pricing on that amount produces a 50 USDC fee. This example is not a quote or an entitlement to an enterprise rate.

Estimates and actual settlement fees#

The current merchant rate is read at settlement. A rate change can affect invoices that were issued earlier but remain unpaid. Fee previews for unpaid invoices are estimates based on the current configuration, not a locked quote.

Once an invoice is paid, use its recorded settlement fee for accounting. Later rate changes do not rewrite the fee already charged. Payment History and exports distinguish the gross amount, protocol fee, and net amount. If a fee estimate is unavailable, do not interpret the missing value as zero.

Network costs#

External-wallet payments require ETH on the invoice's network to submit the transaction. A permit signature authorizes USDC spending; it does not itself pay for the settlement transaction's gas.

Supported smart-account or embedded-wallet operations can use sponsored gas when the deployment and sponsorship service allow it. Sponsorship is not a blanket guarantee for every wallet or operation. See Pay an invoice.

The protocol fee described here is an invoice settlement fee. Withdrawing funds is a separate USDC transfer, not a conversion to a bank balance.