Where the fee on an $800 invoice actually goes
Ask a freelancer what their invoicing software costs and most will answer with the subscription — $0 for Wave's Starter plan, maybe $19 for Pro. Ask them what they paid in fees last year and almost nobody knows. For a service business billing by card, the fee is not a detail of the subscription. It is the subscription.
The arithmetic, done once
Wave publishes its card fee openly: 2.9% + $0.60 per online card transaction (3.4% + $0.60 for American Express). On a representative $800 client invoice that is $23.20 in percentage plus 60 cents flat — $23.80, or about 3% of the invoice.
Scale it: a consultant sending ten such invoices a month pays $238 a month in fees — $2,856 a year — on $96,000 of card-billed revenue. The invoicing software itself costs $0. The "free tool" is a rounding error on top of a 3% tax on your revenue. We built the same comparison across three invoicing options in the cheapest way to invoice clients, and the conclusion there is the one that matters here: the subscription is rarely the decision.
So where does the $23.80 go?
The fee is two businesses stacked together:
- The card system takes most of it. When a client pays by Visa or Mastercard, several parties are paid before the platform sees anything: the bank that issued the client's card (interchange), the card network, and the payment processor that physically moved the money. This is the same whether you invoice through Wave, FreshBooks, Stripe or a terminal on a shop counter. Nobody publishes an exact per-transaction breakdown — the schedules are commercial — but the bulk of a 2.9% rate is consumed before the software company takes a cent.
- The platform takes the rest. The spread between what the card system costs the invoicing company and the 2.9% it charges you is the software company's real revenue line. That is why Wave's Starter plan can be free: the software is paid for by the margin on the payment, not by the subscription. The same logic explains why Wave's Pro plan, at $19 a month, is only worth it above roughly 32 card transactions a month — we showed that crossover in Wave vs FreshBooks.
The flat 60 cents behaves differently from the percentage. It exists because small transactions cost nearly the same to process as large ones. On a $50 invoice, 60 cents is 1.2% on top of 2.9% — a 40% premium. On an $8,000 milestone it is invisible. If you invoice small amounts often, or large amounts rarely, your effective rate differs enormously, and no pricing page will surface that for you.
The disclosure gap
Here is the part that turned this explainer from arithmetic into a warning. Wave publishes its full card schedule. FreshBooks — a company whose entire product is invoicing — does not publish its card processing rates on its pricing page at all. Its plan prices are on the front page; the number that will likely dominate your total cost is behind a sales conversation. We flagged it in the Wave vs FreshBooks comparison and treat it as a decision-relevant fact in its own right: if a vendor will not print the number that scales with your revenue, that tells you what it thinks of comparison shopping.
What you can actually do
- Move the big invoices off the card. Bank transfer costs a flat fee or nothing. On a $8,000 invoice, switching from card to transfer saves around $230 — more than a year of most invoicing subscriptions.
- Batch the small ones. Because of the flat fee, one $500 payment costs less to process than five $100 payments. Consolidating invoices is free money.
- Price the fee in, not out. If clients insist on card payment, a line on the invoice (or simply a rate that assumes card) is cheaper than absorbing 3% silently.
What we cannot verify
Wave's rates are published on its pricing page and were verified October 23, 2026; promotional or regional variations may exist. FreshBooks's card rates are not published and we have not obtained them — that absence is reported, not circumvented. The internal split of a card fee between issuing banks, networks and processors is not publicly itemised by any party, so our description is directional, not a breakdown with figures. Your own effective rate depends on card mix and invoice size; run your own twelve months of statements before acting on any number on this page. See How We Test.