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Originally published on Substack
The invoice tool fee audit: what the giants actually take from every payment
Let's do some math that the invoice industry hopes you won't do.
You send a $1,000 invoice. The client pays by card. How much do you actually receive?
It depends entirely on whose "Pay" button is on that invoice. And the answer ranges from $966 to the full $1,000. That $34 difference, on every invoice, forever, is the most important number in this article.
The fee table (verified September 2026)
The fee table. Every tool that processes your payment takes a percentage; the ones that don't process payments take nothing.
Square Invoices: 3.3% + 30c per card payment. On $1,000, that's $33.30. You keep $966.70. (They raised this from 2.9% in January 2026.) The free plan includes unlimited invoices, which is genuinely good. But every card payment costs you.
Square's pricing page: 3.3% + 30c per card payment, raised from 2.9% in January 2026.
PayPal Invoicing: 3.49% + 49c for PayPal/Venmo payments, 2.99% + 49c for cards. On $1,000 via PayPal, that's $35.39. You keep $964.61. The highest cut on this list.
Wave: 2.9% + 60c for cards, 1% for bank transfers. On $1,000 by card, that's $29.60. You keep $970.40. The free Starter plan includes unlimited invoices plus free double-entry accounting, which is a real package.
Zoho Invoice: $0, and no cut of your payments. They don't process payments themselves; you connect Stripe or PayPal, and Zoho adds nothing on top. Full features, free forever, no ads, they don't sell your data. On $1,000, you keep whatever your payment processor charges, and Zoho takes zero.
QuickBooks: now has a $0 solopreneur plan (2 invoices/month), but the real product starts around $20+/month, plus payment processing fees on top.
FreshBooks: no free plan. Starts around $21/month. Payment fees on top of that.
When they win
Honesty first. These tools are big for reasons.
Wave's free accounting bundled with invoicing is a genuinely good deal if you want bookkeeping too. Zoho Invoice is the strongest free feature set in the industry: client portal, time tracking, multicurrency, estimates, recurring invoices, all free, and they take nothing from your payments. Square's next-day bank deposits and automatic payment reminders are excellent. PayPal has hundreds of millions of users, so your client probably already has an account.
If you want an all-in-one financial platform, or you take card payments constantly and want them automatic, the giants earn their cut.
When we win
Here's the argument the fee table makes for us.
Every tool above that processes your payment takes a percentage of your money. That's their business model. Square makes $33.30 every time you collect $1,000. PayPal makes $35.39. Across a year of freelancing, at say $60,000 in invoices paid by card, Square's cut is about $2,000. PayPal's is about $2,100.
That’s $2,000 a year for the privilege of a "Pay" button.
MonkeeTools never touches your money. We don't process payments, so we can't take a cut. You add your own payment details to the invoice: your Wise link, your bank details, your PayPal.me, whatever you already use. The client pays you directly. MonkeeTools never processes the payment, so we can't take a percentage of it. Your payment provider's own fees still apply, but we add nothing on top.
The MonkeeTools invoice generator. We never process payments, so we can't take a cut.
Our incentive is pure: we don't make more money when you make more money, because we don't take any of it. For the tools that process your payments, their incentive is a percentage of everything you earn.
The real comparison
The honest version:
If you want automatic card processing with next-day deposits and you're fine paying 3.3% for it, Square is excellent.
If you want free accounting with your invoices, Wave is the answer.
If you want the deepest free feature set and you bring your own payment processor, Zoho Invoice is hard to beat.
If you want the invoice itself to cost you nothing, take two minutes, require no account, and add no payment fees of our own on top of whatever your provider charges, that's what we built: monkeetools.pages.dev.
Nobody else in the no-signup category will write this post. The big platforms write comparisons that carefully avoid their hardest rival. We're aiming upward, at the giants, and the math is the math.
$2,000 a year for a Pay button. Or $0, and the client pays you directly.
MonkeeTools is a free invoice generator for freelancers. No signup, no account. Your invoice data stays in your browser; the only thing stored on our servers is the shortened URL if you use our optional link shortener. We never process your payments or take a percentage. Make an invoice at monkeetools.pages.dev.
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