What You're Actually Paying For 🐷 Fees, Protection & Why We're Worth It

Every creator platform takes a cut. Most of them don't tell you what it's for.

We're going to. 🧾

Before anything else, the bit that never changes.

Every fee is worked backwards from your listed price and added on top. List something at £100 and you receive £100. Not £81. Not "£100 minus our percentage." £100.

The supporter covers the fees, sees the full total before they pay, and nothing comes out of your side. 🐷

And when currency conversion lands in your favour and a payment arrives worth more than expected? We take less. You still get your full listed price. The maths resolves in your direction, never the other way.

So when we talk about fees below, understand what we're describing: what the supporter pays on top — not a cut of your money.

Here's the honest answer, and it's not "a website."

This is the big one, and it's the one creators only appreciate after it's gone wrong somewhere else.

Creator platforms lose payment processing constantly. Accounts frozen, payouts held, whole businesses gone overnight because a processor decided the risk wasn't worth it. Creators wake up to nothing, with no warning and no recourse.

That doesn't happen here, and it costs money to make sure it doesn't.

We operate under enhanced security and content requirements imposed by Stripe — because of the kind of platform we are, we're held to a higher standard than most. Content review. Identity verification. Continuous fraud monitoring. Transaction screening. Audit and reporting obligations.

That's what the 2% compliance fee funds. Every penny of it. Boring, invisible, and the single most valuable thing on this list. ✨

Tax authorities are cracking down hard on creator income that never went through proper channels. HMRC in the UK, and equivalents across Europe, the US and beyond, are actively pursuing earnings taken as informal payments, app transfers, or "gifts" — anything received outside a documented business transaction.

The days of creator income quietly existing off-ledger are over. ⚠️

On Spenny Piggy, every payment you receive is:

📄 Processed as a genuine business transaction — a documented sale of content
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🧾 Fully receipted — timestamps, amounts, what was sold, what was delivered

🔍 Continuously monitored — screening, fraud checks, content review

🏛️ Routed through regulated payment infrastructure, with a registered UK company behind the platform

📊 Exportable — your complete earnings history, dashboard to accountant in two clicks

And that changes what your money can do:

🏡 Mortgages — lenders want verifiable income history. A dashboard export and a tax return does that. Screenshots of a payment app does not.

🏦 Business accounts — banks need to see where money comes from and why

🚫 Keeping the bank account you already have — banks close personal accounts over unexplained incoming payments from strangers, often without explaining why. Regular, documented, receipted platform income doesn't trigger that. Twelve random transfers a week absolutely does.

💳 Credit, loans, renting — all of it runs on provable income

Creators lose bank accounts over this constantly. Not because they did anything wrong — because their income looked like it came from nowhere. Here, it doesn't come from nowhere. 🐷

This matters, so read it properly.

On Spenny Piggy you are the merchant of record. You're the one selling content to your supporters. We provide the platform, the processing, the monitoring and the paperwork — but the sale is yours, the income is yours, and the tax obligations that come with it are yours too.

That's not us dodging anything. It's precisely what makes the income genuinely yours, and why it stands up when someone asks where your money comes from.

What that means for you:

⚠️ Get proper tax advice — from an accountant who knows your country's rules. Best few hundred quid you'll spend.

⚠️ You can start as an individual. Most creators do. Perfectly legitimate.

⚠️ Register as a business when you approach your country's threshold. Every country has one. Know yours and register before you cross it.

⚠️ Set money aside for tax as you earn. Nobody enjoys the January conversation with themselves.

We can't file for you and we can't advise you. What we can do is make sure everything you need already exists and is already correct when you sit down to sort it. ✅

Out of the platform fee also comes:

🎁 Creator bonus payments — the schemes that pay creators extra on top of earnings

🖥️ Servers and infrastructure — hosting, storage, content delivery, backups
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👨‍💻 Developers — the people building and maintaining all of this
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🔐 Security and monitoring — the systems behind everything above
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💬 Support — actual humans answering actual questions

Margins are genuinely tight. We're not quietly taking a third and calling it a service fee. The number you're about to see is close to what it costs to run this properly — and we'd rather show you that than pretend otherwise.

There's a flat £1 on every transaction. Same on a £4.99 listing as on a £500 one.

On a £5 purchase that £1 is most of the markup, so the percentage looks eye-watering. On a £100 purchase you barely notice it.

The rate isn't higher on small sales — the fixed £1 just weighs more against a small number. It stops mattering above roughly £50. 📉

Three ways to pay. Creator payout is identical on all three.

Plus payment processing, passed through at cost — 2.9% + 30p on cards, 0.8% + 30p on bank. That's the processor's charge, not ours.

💳 By card:

Processing (2.9% + 30p) — £4.06
Platform fee (17%) — £22.05
Compliance fee (2%) — £2.59
Admin fee — £1.00
​Creator receives — £100.00 ✅
​Supporter pays — £129.71

🏦 By bank:

Processing (0.8% + 30p) — £1.26
Platform fee (13%) — £15.64
Compliance fee (2%) — £2.41
Admin fee — £1.00
​Creator receives — £100.00 ✅
​Supporter pays — £120.31

Pay by Bank saves the supporter £9.40 on £100. Most of that is processing — a bank transfer costs a flat 30p to move instead of 2.9% of the value — and we drop our own fee by 4 points on top. 🏦

Read that markup column top to bottom — that's the £1 admin fee doing all the work. By £100 it's settled. By £500 it's noise. Creator receives their listed price on every single row. ✅

What to do with that: 💡

✅ Bundle small items into one bigger listing
✅ Keep a premium option for supporters who want to spend properly
✅ Point supporters at Pay by Bank — a real saving, costs you nothing to mention

More on pricing: Setting Your Prices & How Fees Work 💰🐷.

🇬🇧 Pay by Bank — UK, Finland, France, Germany
🇪🇺 SEPA Direct Debit — Eurozone
🇺🇸 ACH — United States
💳 Card & wallets — everywhere

⚠️ Recurring purchases are card-only. Memberships and Recurring Content bill by card regardless of what a supporter used first time.

Separate from all of the above:

🎁 3-day free trial
💷 Then £8.99 + VAT per month for full access

Flat. Doesn't scale with your earnings. Sell £50 or £5,000 — same £8.99. Cancel any time from your dashboard. 📈

Payments run through Stripe Connect — you're paid into your own Stripe account, on Stripe's payout schedule, straight to your bank. Details: Your Stripe Connect Account Explained 🏦🐷.

Refunds — the listed price returns to the supporter. Processing costs already spent moving the payment aren't recoverable.

Chargebacks — when a supporter disputes with their bank, the amount plus a dispute fee is deducted from your Stripe balance while it's investigated.

Best protection there is: deliver exactly what you listed, promptly, with an accurate description. Clear listings win disputes. Vague ones lose them. 🛡️

"Why am I paying more than the listed price?"
The creator receives their listed price in full. The extra covers processing, platform and compliance costs — all shown before you pay.

"Why does a small purchase cost more proportionally?"
There's a flat £1 admin fee on every transaction. On a £5 item that's a big slice; on £100 it's barely there.

"How do I pay less?"
Choose Pay by Bank at checkout where available — around £9 saved on a £100 purchase. 🏦

"What am I actually buying?"
Content — always. Every payment on Spenny Piggy unlocks something. Nothing here is a donation or a tip.

"Is this a legitimate business?"
Yes. The platform is operated by Social Vortex Limited, registered in England and Wales, and every payment is a documented content purchase with a receipt, processed through regulated payment infrastructure. 🏛️

No hidden cuts. Never have been. 🧾🐷

None of this is tax or legal advice. Rules differ by country and change often — speak to a qualified accountant about your own situation.