The 5% fee: why we kept Seedr's pricing honest
Last month, a church worship leader asked me a direct question over email: 'What do I actually keep when someone tips me £5?' It took me thirty seconds to answer because the maths are that clean. That simplicity didn't happen by accident. It came from a very specific decision we made when building Seedr.
The question that changed how we price
Most tipping platforms hide their fee structure behind percentage breakdowns, Stripe fees, and payment method surcharges. A creator tips their head back and squints at their dashboard, trying to work out if they made £100 or £87 that week. It's exhausting.
When we started Seedr, I watched creators on Streamr and Foundr do this maths in their heads mid-stream. 'If I get tipped £50, that's... minus fees... so really...' They'd lose focus. The moment would break. That bothered me enough to push back on every fee complication we considered adding.
So here's what we settled on: a single 5% platform fee. That's it. A viewer sends a creator £5 (or 5 Seeds, as we call them). The creator keeps £4.75. No hidden payment processor fees on top. No tiered complexity. No surprise deductions.
When you're building on Foundr, the math shifts
The one exception to that rule is intentional, not an oversight. If a creator is already using Foundr as their maker platform, we drop the fee to 1.5%. If they're on Foundr Pro, it falls to 1%. That's not a marketing play. It's a reflection of reality: creators who've invested in Foundr Pro are building their entire presence on MRVL, and we wanted the economics to reward that commitment.
I'm not going to pretend this was a generous impulse. It was pragmatic. We're building an ecosystem where Streamr, Giggl, Foundr, and Seedr work better together. The fee structure should reflect that. A Foundr Pro member tipping themselves from one surface to another shouldn't feel like they're bleeding margin.
The minimum tip is £20 before a creator gets paid out (that's our weekly Monday payout threshold). The minimum single tip is £5. It's tight enough to capture genuine micro-moments of support but structured so creators aren't chasing pennies.
Why we don't hide the fee in Stripe
Here's something that surprised me: most platforms can't answer 'What's your fee?' cleanly because it's split across different systems. Part of it lives in their code. Part of it's baked into Stripe Connect. Part of it only appears on a creator's bank statement three weeks later.
We built Seedr with a single source of truth for fees. Everything flows through the same logic. When we calculate a payout, a creator sees the breakdown in their dashboard. No guessing. No 'it should be this but maybe Stripe took more.'
That honesty also matters for something less obvious: compliance. We're building Phase 1 of MRVL Pay with every FCA requirement in mind, even though we're running on Stripe Connect for now. That means integer pence throughout the system. That means an audit trail so clean you could hand it to a regulator without flinching. The fee structure is part of that story.
What the 5% actually covers
I'm not naive enough to think everyone cares about the philosophy behind a fee. But if you're wondering what 5% actually buys, here's the honest answer: it buys the infrastructure that keeps Seedr running at all.
It covers the API costs for the SDK (three lines of Swift or Kotlin, embedded directly into any MRVL app). It covers the creator web profile at seedr.app/@handle, so you can share your tipping link without owning a domain. It covers the dashboard where creators see exactly who tipped them, when, and how much. It covers the weekly Monday payouts. It covers the Stripe Connect integration that makes no-account tipping possible for fans. And it covers the groundwork we're doing right now to ensure MRVL Pay will be FCA-authorised by 2028.
The fee also covers something harder to quantify: the decision not to nickel-and-dime creators with hidden charges. That costs money to maintain. Every time we're tempted to add a feature that requires a new fee tier, we have to justify why that fee belongs in the 5% or why it doesn't. That friction is intentional.
The creator who made me rethink everything
Back to that church worship leader. She asked about the fee because she wanted to know if Seedr was worth embedding in her community's app. The answer mattered to her as much for principle as profit. She didn't want to be in a situation where she was funneling tithes and offerings through a system that charged differently depending on the phase of the moon.
When I told her the fee was 5%, flat, and explained why, she went quiet for a moment. Then: 'Can you embed the button in our app right now, or do we have to wait?' We did it that week. She tipped herself to test it. Then she asked her community to do the same. In the first month, they'd sent over £300 through Seedr. Not because the fee was cheap (plenty of platforms are cheaper on paper). Because the maths were honest and stayed honest.
That's become the test I use for any decision we make with Seedr. Does it keep the economics simple? Does it stay true to the creator? Does it hold up when someone asks the direct question?
When you're moving money between creators and their audiences, there's no such thing as a simple fee. But there is such a thing as a honest one. Does your platform of choice pass that test?