If you are building a platform that disburses funds — marketplace sellers, contractors, creators, claims, rebates — the fee that decides your margin is usually not the payout fee. It is the per-active-account charge that grows every time you onboard a recipient, whether or not they ever get paid.
Both models are computed live from published rates. Note what happens to the gap when you raise the recipient count without raising the average payout — that is the per-account fee doing the work.
Illustrative model. Stripe rates from Stripe Connect pricing and Stripe payments pricing, August 2026; Paystack rates from our own rate card. Assumes one active connected account per recipient per month under Stripe’s platform-priced model. The $250 Paystack platform fee is fixed and always applies. Your blended cost depends on payout size, frequency, and funding mix.
| Cost driver | Stripe (Connect) | Paystack |
|---|---|---|
| Fund in — card | 2.9% + $0.30 | Interchange + 2.00% + $0.30 |
| Fund in — ACH pull | 0.8% (cap $5.00) | $0.75 flat |
| Standard payout (1–3 day ACH) | 0.25% + $0.25 / payout | $0.75 flat |
| Same-day payout (same-day ACH) | — | $1.50 flat |
| Instant payout (to card) | 1% of volume | 0.95% (cap $10.00) |
| Active recipient fee | $2.00 / account / mo | None |
| Platform fee | — | $250 / mo fixed |
Stripe rates from Stripe Connect pricing and Stripe payments pricing, August 2026. Card interchange is a pass-through on both platforms.
A $2 per-active-account fee grows with every payee you add. At 10,000 recipients that is $20,000 a month before a single dollar moves. Paystack charges none — you are billed for movement, not for the size of your address book.
Paystack caps push-to-card at $10. An uncapped 1% keeps climbing with payout size: a $5,000 instant payout costs $50 there versus $10 here. The bigger your payouts, the wider the gap.
Fixed per-payout and per-pull fees let you price your own product with confidence. No blended-rate surprises at scale, and no renegotiation every time your mix shifts.
The comparison above is money movement only. A mature Connect integration also buys you onboarding UI, identity verification, tax forms, and dispute tooling — some of which you would build or buy separately here. If your recipients are few and your payouts are small, a percentage can genuinely be the cheaper answer.
The model turns in your favor when recipient count is high, payout size is large, or both — which is exactly when a payouts platform starts working.
Twenty minutes, and we will run your actual distribution — not an average — against both models, including the cases where the answer is that you should stay where you are.