The fee a platform advertises and the share it actually collects are different numbers. Computed from eight companies' own annual reports, alongside the fees they publish to sellers — and the gap is between three and five times.
Revenue divided by everything transacted through the platform. If sellers move $100 of goods and the platform books $24 of revenue from that activity, the take rate is 24%. It counts every way the platform earns — commission, payment processing, listing fees, advertising — not just the headline commission.
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About the Author
Sujit KarkiFinance Researcher & Market Analyst
Independent finance researcher and market analyst with expertise in macroeconomics, equity markets, and personal finance. I help regular investors make better-informed decisions through rigorous, data-driven analysis.
Etsy advertises a 6.5% transaction fee. Its revenue was 24.2% of everything sold on it last year — 3.7 times the headline number.
Airbnb advertises a 3% host service fee and collected 13.4% of gross bookings: 4.5 times.
Upwork's published freelancer fee tops out at 15%. It collected 19.6% of gross services volume — more than the maximum fee it charges freelancers.
Fiverr keeps the most of any platform measured, at 40.2% of marketplace volume.
Every figure is computed from the companies' own annual reports. Where a company publishes its own take rate, recomputing it reproduces their number exactly.
There are two numbers attached to every selling platform, and only one of them
gets advertised.
The first is the fee. Etsy's is 6.5%, stated plainly in its
fee policy: "you will be charged a
transaction fee of 6.5% of the price you display for each listing plus the
amount you charge for shipping and gift wrapping."
The second is what the company actually collects per dollar that moves through
it — commission plus payment processing plus listing fees plus the advertising
a seller buys to be found at all. That number is called the take rate, and
because it is a headline metric for investors, it sits in the annual report
every one of these companies files with the SEC.
For Etsy, in the year ended December 2025, it was 24.2%.
The fee is not the take
Both numbers are true and they measure different things. 6.5% is what Etsy
charges on a sale. 24.2% is Etsy's total revenue divided by Etsy's total gross
merchandise sales — $2.88 billion against $11.92 billion.
The gap is not hidden and it is not an accusation. It is the sum of everything
else on the price list. Etsy charges $0.20 to list an item, again every four
months whether or not it sells. It charges payment processing. It charges a
Regulatory Operating fee in some countries. And it charges an Offsite Ads fee
of 15% of the order — 12% for larger shops — which shops that have passed
$10,000 in sales cannot opt out of.
Add those together across every seller and you get 24.2%, not 6.5%.
Pro Tip
Take rate is the right number for "what share of this economy does the platform
capture" and the wrong number for "what will this cost me". No individual
seller pays 24.2%. A seller who never buys ads, lists few items and sells them
all pays close to the headline rate. The company-wide figure is what the
average dollar experiences, and averages include the sellers buying ads.
What eight platforms actually keep
Fiscal year 2025. Gross volume is each company's own headline metric — GMS, GMV, GBV, GSV, Marketplace GOV or Gross Bookings.
Platform
Gross volume
Revenue
Take rate
Revenue basis
Fiverr
$1.07B
$0.43B
40.2%
net
Lyft
$18.5B
$5.90B
31.9%
gross
Uber
$193.5B
$52.0B
26.9%
gross
Etsy
$11.9B
$2.88B
24.2%
net
Upwork
$4.03B
$0.79B
19.6%
net
eBay
$79.6B
$11.1B
13.9%
net
DoorDash
$102.0B
$13.7B
13.4%
gross
Airbnb
$91.3B
$12.2B
13.4%
net
Two of these are checkable against the companies themselves. Etsy publishes a
"revenue take rate" and defines it as revenue divided by GMS — the same
calculation — and reports 24.2%. eBay reports 13.94%. Recomputing both from
the underlying figures reproduces them exactly, which is the only independent
evidence available that the extraction is reading the right rows.
Advertised against realised
For the marketplaces that publish a seller-facing fee, the two numbers can be
put side by side. These fees were read from each platform's own policy page.
Advertised fees quoted from each platform's published policy, read September 2026
Platform
Advertised
Realised
Multiple
What the policy says
Etsy
6.5%
24.2%
3.7x
"a transaction fee of 6.5% of the price you display"
Airbnb
3%
13.4%
4.5x
"Most hosts pay a 3% service fee, but some pay more."
Upwork
0–15%
19.6%
1.3x
"The fee ranges from 0% to 15% per contract"
eBay
2.5–15.3%
13.9%
0.9x
"This final value fee ranges from 2.5% to 15.3%"
Three things stand out.
Etsy and Airbnb are the widest gaps, at 3.7 and 4.5 times. Both advertise a
low, memorable commission and earn most of their revenue from everything
around it.
Upwork collects more than its own maximum. Its freelancer service fee tops
out at 15% per contract, and it collected 19.6% of gross services volume. That
is not a contradiction — Upwork also charges clients, and sells ads and
subscriptions — but it does mean the number a freelancer sees quoted is
structurally incapable of describing what the platform takes out of the work.
eBay is the honest one, and it is the only platform here whose realised
take lands inside its advertised range rather than above it. Its 13.9% sits
just under the 15.3% top of its final-value-fee band.
Where the other eighteen points go
Etsy's own fee policy is the clearest map of the gap, because it lists every
charge in one place. Beyond the 6.5%:
$0.20 per listing, charged when you list and again on every four-month
renewal, "whether or not the listed item sells".
Offsite Ads at 15% of an attributed order, dropping to 12% once a shop
passes $10,000 in trailing sales — and at that point participation is
mandatory. A shop under the threshold may opt out; a shop over it may not,
"for the lifetime of your shop".
Payment processing, which varies by country.
A Regulatory Operating fee, a fixed percentage that also varies by
country.
Etsy Plus at $10 a month, and Pattern at $15 a month, both optional.
A 2.5% currency conversion fee if you list in a currency other than your
payment account's.
None of this is concealed — it is all in the policy, which is exactly where I
read it. But the 6.5% is the number in the marketing, and 24.2% is the number
in the annual report.
Why Uber's number is not a driver's cut
The delivery and rideshare companies are in the table and they should be read
differently, which is why the "revenue basis" column exists.
Etsy, eBay, Airbnb, Upwork and Fiverr book revenue net — broadly, their own
cut. Uber, Lyft and DoorDash book substantial revenue gross, meaning
amounts that pass through to drivers can be recognised as revenue depending on
how each arrangement is structured. Uber's 26.9% is therefore not the share a
driver loses, and it cannot be compared against Etsy's 24.2% as though the two
measured the same thing.
They are included rather than dropped because leaving them out would hide the
incomparability instead of documenting it. Among the five net-basis
marketplaces, the honest range is 13.4% to 40.2%.
What I could not get
Two gaps, both stated rather than papered over.
Fiverr has no advertised fee in this piece. It has the highest take rate in
the set at 40.2%, which makes its seller fee the most interesting one to quote,
and I could not read it from a primary source: Fiverr returns an error to
direct requests and its domain was not readable in the browser session used for
the others. Its take rate comes from its 20-F, which is a filing and needs no
scraping. The fee is simply absent, and I would rather leave a hole than quote
a number I did not verify.
The original plan for this piece was broader and failed. It was going to
normalise payout thresholds, instant-cashout fees and payout schedules across a
dozen gig platforms by fetching their help documentation. That is not possible.
Every platform tried serves a bot wall: eBay's fee page returns 95 characters of
text to an automated request, Gumroad's 39, Lyft's 74. Rendering the pages in a
real browser engine did not help — eBay returned 817 characters, Etsy 259,
Gumroad 32. The numbers are not in the HTML at all.
That is why this piece is built on SEC filings, which are public by law and
served to anyone who asks, and why the four advertised fees were read by hand
in a browser rather than collected by a script. The take-rate half is
reproducible by running one command. The fee half is not, and is dated and
quoted so it can be checked.
Methodology
Take rate. Revenue divided by gross volume, for the most recent fiscal year
in each company's latest annual report — all FY2025, ending December 2025.
Revenue comes from XBRL company facts on data.sec.gov, which is
structured data each company tagged itself, matched to the fiscal year by start
and end date. Gross volume is not in XBRL — it is a non-GAAP operating
metric that lives in the narrative under a different name at every company
(GMS, GMV, GBV, GSV, Marketplace GOV, Gross Bookings) — so it is extracted from
the filing text.
Three guards on the extraction, because reading numbers out of prose is the
part that goes wrong:
The unit scale is declared per company and then checked against the scale
the filing itself states near the figure. Upwork reports in thousands and
everyone else in millions; getting that backwards is a factor of a thousand.
Gross volume must exceed revenue.
The resulting rate must fall in a plausible band.
Any failure stops the run instead of writing a number.
Two bugs these checks caught, both worth naming because both would have
been invisible in the output:
Etsy's discussion contains the sentence "GMS was $10,460.7 million", which is
the Etsy marketplace alone, excluding Depop and Reverb — while revenue is
consolidated. Dividing all of the company's revenue by one segment's volume
gave 27.6% instead of 24.2%. The mismatch against Etsy's own reported take
rate is what exposed it.
DoorDash's metrics table runs 2023, 2024, 2025 across the columns, and
Airbnb's runs 2024, 2025. The first pattern took the leftmost figure and so
read the oldest year against the newest revenue, understating DoorDash by
seven points and overstating Airbnb by one and a half. Column order is not
consistent between companies: Uber's current year is second, Lyft's and
Etsy's is first, DoorDash's is third.
Cross-check. Etsy and eBay both publish a take rate defined the same way
this one is, and recomputing reproduces 24.2% and 13.94% exactly. Fiverr and
Upwork publish a marketplace take rate — only the marketplace slice of
revenue over the same denominator — so their published 27.7% and 18.7% are
legitimately lower than the 40.2% and 19.6% computed here, and the script does
not assert equality against them.
Advertised fees were read in a browser from each platform's own policy page
in September 2026 and are quoted verbatim with their source URLs in
platform-fees.json. Etsy's policy was last updated 13 February 2026. This half
is hand-collected and says so.
Reproducibility. The script is
research/platform_take.py.
It caches each filing on first run. The dataset is platform-take.csv, and the
hand-read fee quotes are in platform-fees.json.
Disclosure. Figures are computed from primary filings by the script above;
the analysis and conclusions are mine. The commentary was drafted with AI
assistance. No language model produced any figure in this post.
Warning
This is educational information, not investment or business advice. Take rate is
a company-wide ratio and does not predict what any individual seller will pay.
Fee schedules change — the ones quoted here were read in September 2026, and the
platform's current policy page is always the authority.
Sujit Karki||9 min read