Headline News:
We are increasing the voluntary transaction fees that people pay when they tip you.
Why the change?
Increased security fees that we’re paying mean we’re now losing money on each tip, especially on small to medium ones. So, we’re increasing the voluntary fees that tippers pay on those smaller tips.
What is the increase?
The difference is small, at least as far as the tipper is concerned. For them, there shouldn’t be much of a psychological difference between tipping an extra £0.37 or an extra £0.50 (or $0.50 / €0.50 etc, depending on your currency).
And yet, the difference for us is whether we can pay our bills.
How will this affect you?
We will pay close attention to how this change affects the tips street performers receive. If there is a significant change (and I have to repeat: we don’t think this is likely), we’ll consider other options.
Country-by-Country Breakdown
Unfortunately, the transaction fees Stripe charges in each currency differ. This means that we can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach.
So, here’s a breakdown of the voluntary fee we add on top of tips in each currency. Click on your country/region flag to view the new fees.
Again, we don’t believe that this will affect the tips you receive. However, we will be monitoring our data, and if there’s a big change we’ll look at other options!
Why is there a voluntary fee?
Stripe charges a fee to process transactions. In other words, every tip made on our platform has a transaction fee deducted by Stripe. We would also like to earn enough from tips to cover our costs. So, we add a voluntary fee on top of the transaction — so that you lose less money from your tips.
Our logic is this: Paying $0.50 extra on a $4.00 tip won’t make a huge difference to the tipper. But if you were losing a significant amount of money on every tip, that would make a big difference to you.
How much you’ll earn
This means that you will lose a lot less money. In fact, currently, tippers pay the fees 93% of the time. So for every £10.00 you are tipped, you should earn an average of £9.95. To read more about it, see our “Pricing on The Busking Project explained” blog post.
But let’s say, for example, that twice as many people chose not to pay that fee. Then, instead of people paying the fee 93% of the time, that dropped to 86% of the time. In that case, you’d still earn an average of £9.90 on every £10 tipped — a change of 0.5% overall.
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