How much does Kickstarter take? Fees plus a free calculator

A £30,000 Kickstarter raise does not land £30,000 in your bank account. It lands closer to £27,000, and that’s before you’ve bought a single unit of stock or paid for shipping. Most founders find that out the wrong way, usually the week after they thought they’d hit their budget.

I’m an official Kickstarter Expert Partner and I’ve watched this exact conversation play out more times than I can count. Someone runs a lovely campaign, hits their goal, cracks open a bottle of something, then logs into their Kickstarter dashboard on payout day and stares at a number that’s noticeably smaller than the one on their campaign page. So let’s do the maths properly, so how much does Kickstarter take stops being a surprise.

The two fees Kickstarter charges

There are two, not one. This is where most people trip up.

Platform fee: 5%. This is Kickstarter’s cut for hosting the campaign, running the payments, sending emails, providing the trust badge, and generally being the reason a stranger felt comfortable enough to give you £45 for a product that doesn’t exist yet. Fair enough.

Payment processing: roughly 3% + £0.20 per pledge. This goes to Stripe, which handles the actual card charges. For pledges under £10 it flips to 5% + £0.05, which mostly affects tip-jar style campaigns rather than product launches. Kickstarter’s own fees documentation lays this out for UK creators.

Add those together and you’re looking at 8 to 10% of your total raise going out the door before you touch it. Not the end of the world, but not nothing either.

Kickstarter fees at a glance (2026)

Fee type	Rate	Who takes it	Applies to
Platform fee	5%	Kickstarter	Every funded campaign
Payment processing (pledges over £10)	3% + £0.20 per pledge	Stripe	Standard pledges
Payment processing (pledges under £10)	5% + £0.05 per pledge	Stripe	Micro-pledges
Failed pledges	Not fees, but lose ~5–10%	N/A (backer cards decline)	All campaigns
Combined effective loss	~8–10% of gross raise	Fees + processing	Realistic mid-size campaign

For the source of truth on rates, see Kickstarter’s own fees page — worth a bookmark if you’re going to run more than one campaign.

The bit nobody mentions: failed pledges

Kickstarter shows you a big shiny number at the end of your campaign. That’s not the number that gets collected.

When the campaign closes, Kickstarter attempts to charge every backer’s card. Some cards decline. Some backers pledged with a card that expired between clicking “back this project” and the campaign end date. Some just changed their mind and cancelled. In my experience, 5 to 10% of pledges fail at collection, which is worth building into your model.

You don’t pay Kickstarter fees on failed pledges, which is a small mercy. But you also don’t get the money, which is the bigger point.

A worked example: £30,000 raised, 500 backers

Let’s run the numbers on a realistic mid-size campaign so you can see what actually lands. Say you hit £30,000 with 500 backers, average pledge £60.

• Gross raise: £30,000
• Failed pledges at 7%: -£2,100
• Actual collected: £27,900
• Kickstarter platform fee (5% of collected): -£1,395
• Payment processing (~3% of collected + £0.20 x ~465 successful pledges): -£930
• Net to your bank: roughly £25,575

That’s about 85% of the headline figure. Not 100%. Not even 92%. And that’s before you’ve paid a designer, bought a mould, booked a container, or thought about VAT.

I built a free Kickstarter fees calculator that runs this maths on your own numbers in about ten seconds. Pop in your target, your backer count, your average pledge, and it’ll spit out what you’ll actually receive. No email wall, no sign-up.

The lesson: raise more than you need

If your bill of materials, moulding, shipping, and margin need £30,000 to land safely in your bank, your Kickstarter target should be £34,000 or so. Not £30,000.

This is genuinely the single most common budgeting mistake I see. Founder builds a beautiful spreadsheet, works out they need exactly £30k, sets the goal at £30k, funds at £30k, then realises in month three of fulfilment that they’re £4k short and now they’re funding the shortfall out of their own pocket.

The fix is embarrassingly simple. Take your true cost. Add 15%. That’s your target.

If you’re staring at a spreadsheet trying to work out what to aim for, my £60 strategy call is the fastest way to sanity-check the number before you commit to it publicly. One call, honest answer, done.

Some founders push back on this: “But if I set the goal higher, won’t backers think I’m greedy?” Honestly, no. Backers look at the product, the video, and the reward tier. They don’t do forensic accounting on your funding goal. And the goal you show is the minimum, not the ceiling, most funded campaigns raise well above it anyway.

What about Indiegogo, VAT, currency conversion?

A few honest quick answers on the questions I get every week.

Indiegogo fees. Roughly the same. 5% platform fee on funds raised, plus payment processing. The bigger difference between the two platforms isn’t the fee, it’s the audience, the discovery mechanics, and the all-or-nothing rule. I’ve written a full Kickstarter vs Indiegogo comparison if you want to go deeper, and a side-by-side Kickstarter fees vs Indiegogo fees breakdown with the exact pound-figure impact on £10k, £30k and £100k raises.

VAT. Not included in Kickstarter fees. If you’re a UK creator selling physical products to backers in the EU or UK, VAT can be a substantial additional cost, and it doesn’t come out of Kickstarter’s cut, it comes out of yours. Post-Brexit IOSS rules apply for EU shipments. This is one of the biggest gotchas for UK founders and it deserves its own conversation with an accountant, not a paragraph on a blog.

Currency conversion. Real, but usually small. If your campaign is denominated in GBP and Kickstarter pays you in GBP, there’s no conversion. If you’re a UK creator running a campaign in USD (some do, to tap the US market more effectively), you’ll take a small hit on the FX rate when the payout converts. Rarely more than 1 to 2%, but worth modelling if you’re on a tight margin.

How to calculate Kickstarter fees before you launch

The formula is simple enough to do on the back of an envelope:

Net raise = Gross raise – (5% × Gross raise) – (3% × Gross raise + £0.20 × number of backers) – failed-pledge allowance

For a rough sanity-check, take your gross target, multiply by 0.85, and treat that as your realistic bank-account number. It’s not exact but it’s honest and it’s within a few hundred pounds of the truth on most standard campaigns.

For anything more serious than a rough estimate, use the Kickstarter fees calculator. It handles the per-pledge component, the currency you’re raising in, and (optionally) any agency retainer or marketing spend you’re planning to lay on top. If you’re weighing up whether to hire an agency at all, that break-even side of the calculator is the fastest way to see whether their fee eats your net.

The mental model that keeps you sane

Stop thinking of your Kickstarter total as “the money I raised.” Start thinking of it as “the top of the funnel.”

Off the top comes 8 to 10% in platform and processing fees. Then maybe 5 to 10% in failed pledges. Then whatever you owe in VAT depending on your setup. Then your cost of goods, packaging, freight, warehousing, fulfilment platform fees (Easyship, ShipBob, whoever), and the ads you ran during the campaign that you’re going to pay off from the proceeds.

By the time you’ve stripped all of that out, a lot of “successful” campaigns actually land the founder somewhere between break-even and modest profit. Which is fine, most first campaigns aren’t about the profit, they’re about proof, cash flow for tooling, and the launchpad for campaign two. But you should know that going in, not discover it three months after.

If you want the full breakdown for your specific numbers, the Kickstarter fees calculator is genuinely the fastest way there. Or if you want a human to sanity-check the whole plan, I do strategy calls that cover exactly this.

Want a hand with yours?

Fees are only ever half the story. The other half is what happens between clicking “launch” and receiving that payout, and that’s where most of the money is actually made or lost.

If you’d like an experienced set of eyes on your budget before you commit to a goal, a £60 strategy call is the cheapest sanity check you’ll ever buy. Bring your spreadsheet. I’ll tell you honestly whether the number stacks up, or whether you’re about to fund half a campaign and finish the rest with your own overdraft.

Or, if you’d rather do the sums yourself first, the free calculator is right there. No sign-up, no catch, just the actual number.