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. The only thing you pay is the payment processing fee when an order is placed.

You pay 2.9% + $0.30 for payment processing per transaction. This goes to Stripe, our payment processor. This is the standard fee to process a credit card online, and it’s lower than some other processors.

How then, does Hotplate make money?

At checkout, we charge your customer 5% of their subtotal + 55¢. That's $1.55 on a $20 order.

Most customers are so used to paying fees on other platforms like DoorDash and UberEats 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 the vast majority of chefs keep the default split.

If you’re accepting payments outside of the Hotplate platform by cash, Venmo, or Zelle, this Hotplate fee will be deducted from your payout amount, and your customer will be instructed to pay you the fee with the external method. For example, if the Hotplate fee is $1.55 on a $20 cash order, your customer will pay you $21.55 in cash and $1.55 will be deducted from your payout amount.

At checkout, any customer can see the fees we charge before they enter their card info, under a line item called Fees (or Taxes and Fees if you charge sales tax).

Though the vast majority of sellers leave the default fee split as is, some prefer to pay a portion or all of the Hotplate fee on behalf of their customers. You can adjust what portion of the fee you pass onto your customers in Settings > Checkout. You can also choose to have your customer pay the payment processing fee. This is what to look for in your Settings: