Slidebit charges per sale. Here's the math.
Slidebit has one price: 7% plus 50 cents per sale. That covers payment processing, file hosting, and delivery. There’s no monthly fee, and no charges for storage or bandwidth. If you don’t sell anything this month, you pay nothing this month.
A typical online store works the other way. You pay a monthly plan fee whether you sell anything or not, and card processing comes out of every sale on top of that.
Which one is cheaper depends on how much you sell. I’d rather show you the math than tell you we always win, because we don’t.
The comparison
Let’s say a typical store plan costs $39 a month, and card processing runs 2.9% plus 30 cents a sale. Those are made-up but realistic numbers. Swap in your own.
On each sale, Slidebit costs you a little more than the store’s processing fee. Every month, the store costs you $39 before you sell anything. So the question is how many sales it takes for those small per-sale differences to add up to $39.
Here’s where that line falls:
| Your price | Slidebit per sale | Store per sale | Slidebit costs less below |
|---|---|---|---|
| $10 | $1.20 | $0.59 + $39/month | about 64 sales a month |
| $20 | $1.90 | $0.88 + $39/month | about 38 sales a month |
| $50 | $4.00 | $1.75 + $39/month | about 17 sales a month |
Say you sell a $20 ebook. If you sell fewer than about 38 copies a month, Slidebit costs you less. If you sell more than that every single month, a monthly plan starts to save you money.
Run it for your own numbers
Take the store’s monthly fee and divide it by this: 4.1% of your price, plus 20 cents.
That 4.1% and 20 cents is the gap between Slidebit’s fee and typical card processing. The answer is how many sales a month you’d need before the monthly plan pays for itself.
For a $15 product on a $29 plan, that’s $29 divided by about 82 cents, or roughly 36 sales a month.
What the table leaves out
A few things don’t show up in the math but probably should count.
Slow months cost nothing. Most people selling downloads don’t sell the same amount every month. A launch month might be great and the next three might be quiet. On a monthly plan, you pay for the quiet ones too.
There’s nothing extra to add up. Slidebit doesn’t charge for storage or bandwidth, so a big video file or a popular download doesn’t change your bill.
The money goes straight to you. Payments land in your own Stripe account. Slidebit never holds your money, and there’s no minimum payout.
So which one should you pick?
If you’re starting out, selling a few things, or your sales come in bursts, per-sale pricing is hard to beat. You can’t lose money on a month where nothing sells.
If you’re selling hundreds of copies every month like clockwork, do the math above. A monthly plan might be the better deal, and we want you to know that going in.
We built Slidebit for the first group. One fee per sale, the same for everyone, and if you don’t get paid, we don’t either.