Understanding Hotplate's Pricing

It’s our mission to make the food industry more accessible to anyone with the talent and skills to cook something delicious. With that in mind, we try to take as little money as possible from our chefs so someone from any socioeconomic background or business stage can operate and grow. There’s no monthly subscription or membership fee to use Hotplate which means it’s free to create an account. We only start charging when you process transactions, and even then you will only cover payment processing fees!

Payment Processing

Whenever customers check out, we charge you a 2.9% + $0.30 payment processing fee which goes directly to our payment processor Stripe. This is the standard fee to process a credit card online, and it’s lower than some other processors 😎.

Hotplate Fee

AKA How does Hotplate make money? When customers check out and we charge them a 5% + $0.55 fee per transaction on the subtotal. So on a $20 order, the customer would pay $21.55 (not including tip and tax).

Most customers are so used to paying fees on 3rd party platforms like DoorDash that they don’t even notice it. The benefit of this is that you don’t have to pay anything to use Hotplate.

You can choose to cover a portion of the fees yourself, but 70% of chefs keep the default split and have no problem selling out.

How your customers see our fees

At checkout, any customer can see the fees we charge before they enter their card info, under a line item called Taxes and Fees. See the below screenshot for an example:

I don’t want my customers to pay a fee. Can I pay the Hotplate fee for them?

Some businesses prefer to pay some or all of the Hotplate fee on behalf of their customers. You can easily adjust what portion of the fee you pass onto your customers in your settings. You can also choose to have your customer pay the payment processing fee. This is what to look for in your Settings:

Do you take any additional fees when I payout?

Nope! All our fees are accounted for on a per order basis.