Kickstarter fees vs Indiegogo fees: exact percentages in 2026

A £30,000 campaign on Kickstarter and a £30,000 campaign on Indiegogo don’t leave you with the same money in the bank. They’re close. But the “close” hides at least one place where founders get caught out badly, and it isn’t the 5% platform fee.

I’m an official Kickstarter Expert Partner and I’ve had this exact “which platform costs less” conversation more times than I can count. It usually starts with the founder assuming Indiegogo is cheaper because they read that somewhere in 2019, and ends with me pulling up the current fee pages side by side. So let’s do that now. Kickstarter fees vs Indiegogo fees in 2026, with the exact numbers and the actual pound-figure impact on £10k, £30k and £100k raises. All sourced. No hand-waving.

The headline: fees on a standalone campaign are almost identical

Before we get into the £-per-pound reality, here’s the top-line comparison for a campaign that launches directly on either platform. This is what both platforms publish on their own help pages (Kickstarter’s fees page and Indiegogo’s fees article).

Fee component	Kickstarter	Indiegogo
Platform fee (funded campaigns)	5%	5%
Payment processing (standard pledges)	3% + $0.20 per pledge	3% + $0.20 per transaction
Payment processing (micro pledges under $10)	5% + $0.05 per pledge	Varies by processor
Fee if campaign fails to fund	0% (all-or-nothing)	0% (fixed funding since Oct 2025)
Post-campaign fee (originally launched there)	N/A	5% (Late Pledge)
Post-campaign fee (came from elsewhere)	N/A	8% + up to 15% on IGG-driven pledges
Realistic effective total	~8-10% of gross	~8-12% of gross

That’s the number you write on the back of an envelope. Now the pound figures.

What each platform actually takes from £10k, £30k and £100k

The percentage looks abstract. The pound figure doesn’t. Here’s what you’d actually lose in fees on three realistic UK-founder raise sizes, assuming average pledge of £60 (so 167, 500 and 1,667 backers respectively) and no failed pledges yet (we’ll add those in a moment).

£10,000 raised (167 backers, average pledge £60):

• Kickstarter: 5% platform (£500) + payment processing at ~3% + £0.20 x 167 pledges (£300 + £33 = £333) = £833 gone. You net roughly £9,167.
• Indiegogo: 5% platform (£500) + payment processing at 3% + £0.20 x 167 transactions (£333) = £833 gone. You net roughly £9,167.

£30,000 raised (500 backers, average pledge £60):

• Kickstarter: 5% platform (£1,500) + payment processing (~£900 + £100 = £1,000) = £2,500 gone. You net roughly £27,500.
• Indiegogo: same maths, same result. £27,500 to the bank.

£100,000 raised (1,667 backers, average pledge £60):

• Kickstarter: 5% platform (£5,000) + payment processing (~£3,000 + £333 = £3,333) = £8,333 gone. You net roughly £91,667.
• Indiegogo: same. £91,667.

On a standalone, “launched here first” campaign, the two platforms cost the same to within rounding error. For the full model on your own numbers, my Kickstarter fees calculator does this maths in real time, and I’ve written the full fees breakdown post if you want the Kickstarter-only version in detail.

So where’s the difference? Two places. Failed pledges (both platforms), and the InDemand/Late Pledge fee (Indiegogo only).

The fee neither platform advertises: failed pledges

Kickstarter shows you a big shiny total on your campaign page when it closes. That’s the pledge total, not the collected total. When cards get charged, some decline. Some backers cancel between end-of-campaign and payout. In my experience across 30+ Kickstarter campaigns, 5-10% of pledges fail at collection, which is completely normal and worth building into your model.

Indiegogo has the same problem. Cards decline on both platforms at similar rates because both use similar processors. So on your £30,000 raise, you’re probably looking at £27,000 actually collected, then fees on that £27,000, then a net closer to £24,500-£25,000 in the bank.

That 5-10% failure rate is invisible in the fee tables both platforms publish. It’s not technically a fee, it’s a collection outcome. But it hits your bank account the same way a fee does. Model it in.

Where the platforms actually diverge: Indiegogo InDemand / Late Pledge

Here’s the fee difference nobody talks about until it’s too late.

If you launched your campaign on Kickstarter and then decide to run Indiegogo’s Late Pledge (formerly InDemand) afterwards to extend momentum, Indiegogo charges 8% platform fee rather than the standard 5%. On top of that, if any of your Late Pledge sales come through Indiegogo’s own marketing channels (their homepage, category browse, email newsletter), they take up to 15% total on those specific pledges. This is documented directly on Indiegogo’s fees page.

If you launched on Indiegogo originally and then run Late Pledge on top, the fee stays at 5%. Same as your main campaign.

Practical implication: if you’re a hardware founder in 2026 planning to launch on Kickstarter and then flip to Indiegogo for a Late Pledge tail, budget 8% platform + 3% processing = 11% off the top, not the 8% you’d assume. On £20,000 of Late Pledge revenue, that extra 3% is £600 you didn’t plan for.

I’ve written about whether Late Pledge is even worth running after a Kickstarter (short version: for most founders in 2026, no, because the marketing engine that made the old InDemand valuable is gone since the October 2025 relaunch). But if you’re going to do it, know the fee is 8%, not 5%.

The bits neither fee table shows

The fees Kickstarter and Indiegogo charge are the smallest cost of running a campaign. This is where most first-time founders get the maths wrong. Here’s what actually comes out of your raise before you ever see the money.

Failed pledges: 5-10% of gross. As above. Both platforms.

VAT: 20% on UK backer pledges, plus IOSS for EU shipments. If you’re a UK creator and your reward is a physical product, VAT applies. This can be 15-20% of gross depending on where your backers are and how you’ve structured the rewards. Neither platform collects this for you (though Kickstarter has started collecting sales tax in some US states). VAT sits entirely outside the fee tables.

Pledge manager fees. BackerKit and CrowdOx take 2-3% on top of platform fees for the pledge management stage. Add-on revenue collected through the pledge manager gets hit by pledge-manager fees again, so your effective take on add-ons can be lower than on main pledges.

Currency conversion. If your campaign is denominated in USD and you’re paid in GBP, expect a 1-2% FX hit at Stripe’s conversion rate. Not huge, but real.

Fulfilment platform fees. Easyship, ShipBob and similar take a per-shipment margin on top of the actual carrier cost. Budget this separately.

Add the lot together and the “10% in fees” you thought you were paying can easily become 20-25% by the time the last box ships. If you want to model ad spend inside the same picture, the Kickstarter ROAS calculator handles the marketing side of the equation, and the pricing calculator covers reward tier maths.

If you’re trying to work out whether your fee assumptions are realistic before you commit to a goal figure publicly, my £60 strategy call is the fastest sanity check going. One hour, spreadsheet on screen, honest answer. Cheaper than getting the goal wrong.

Which platform actually costs more, honestly

Right, so which one is more expensive? Here’s my straight answer.

For a standalone campaign that launches directly on the platform: they cost the same. To within £50 on a £30,000 raise. The 5% platform fee is identical and the payment processing is functionally identical. Choose based on which platform will raise you more, not which shaves 0.3% off your fee.

For a Kickstarter campaign followed by Indiegogo Late Pledge: Indiegogo is measurably more expensive on the Late Pledge portion (8% vs 5%). That extra 3% might still be worth paying if it drives incremental revenue you wouldn’t otherwise get, but it’s a real cost and you should include it in the decision.

For a campaign that raises 2x more on Kickstarter than it would on Indiegogo: Kickstarter is dramatically cheaper in absolute pound terms even at identical percentage fees, because 5% of a bigger number is still a bigger number in your net. On the traffic and audience side, Kickstarter’s ~27 million monthly visits versus Indiegogo’s ~2.6 million (per SimilarWeb’s April 2026 data) is the actual number that decides platform choice for consumer-product founders. I covered this in full in Kickstarter vs Indiegogo by the numbers and the plain-English version in Kickstarter vs Indiegogo in 2026.

Fees aren’t the tie-breaker. They never were.

What the Gamefound acquisition didn’t change

Quick note for anyone who’s read that Indiegogo got acquired and wonders whether the fees moved. They didn’t, materially.

Gamefound acquired Indiegogo on 22 July 2025 and relaunched the platform on 16 October 2025. The main structural change was killing flexible funding and moving all campaigns to fixed funding (same as Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing rule). The fee structure stayed the same: 5% platform, 3% + $0.20 processing, 8% for Late Pledge campaigns that didn’t originally launch on Indiegogo. Gamefound is still tuning the wider product, so it’s worth checking Indiegogo’s fees page directly before you commit, but as of mid-2026 the numbers above are current.

The one thing to watch, and this is opinion not fact, is whether Gamefound eventually harmonises Indiegogo fees with Gamefound’s own fee structure (Gamefound has historically charged around 5% platform + processing, plus its own tabletop-focused Late Pledge product). If they do, expect Indiegogo’s rates to move somewhat. Nothing announced yet.

The turn

Here’s what I want you to take away, if you take one thing away.

The fee difference between Kickstarter and Indiegogo in 2026 is the least interesting question in your platform decision. Founders spend hours agonising over 0.3% differences in payment processing and then blow six figures worth of raise potential by launching on the platform with less traffic in their category. It’s like arguing about the fuel efficiency of a car you’re about to drive into the wrong city.

Pick the platform whose audience actually contains your backers. Model your fees at 10% (Kickstarter or Indiegogo standalone) or 11% (Kickstarter then Indiegogo Late Pledge) plus a 5-10% failed pledge allowance plus VAT. Build your goal to survive the total, not to survive the platform fee.

The maths above should save you a spreadsheet weekend. Now go raise well.

Want a hand with yours?

If you’re staring at your goal figure and trying to work out whether you’ve built in enough headroom for fees, failed pledges, VAT and the rest, that’s exactly what my £60 strategy call is designed for. Bring the spreadsheet. I’ll tell you honestly if the number stacks up.

If you already know your platform and you want the campaign video sorted before launch, my £3,000 Kickstarter video service covers that. If you’d rather have the whole campaign run for you by someone with £3M+ raised across 30+ Kickstarter campaigns and a 100% funding rate on personally-launched projects, the £5,000 done-for-you package is where most founders end up.

Cheapest starting point is still the strategy call. It usually pays for itself before the call is over.