It’s hard not to feel like Wix has quietly engineered a second tollbooth right in the middle of the road—one that hits small businesses exactly where it hurts most: predictable, recurring revenue. You do the work to design your offer, you build the site, you market the plan, you finally convince a customer to commit to a subscription, and then—after you’ve already paid for a “Pricing Plan” upgrade—you find out Wix is also taking a cut of every charge simply because you used their platform to sell it. They call it a “transaction fee”, but let’s be honest: it’s a platform tax on top of everything else.
And the really frustrating part is how it’s framed. Wix makes a big point of saying the fee is “automatically deducted from your earnings, not added to your customer’s total”. As if that makes it better. The customer pays $100, you get $98 with a 2% fee (4% if you are on Core plan!!!), and Wix expects you to shrug because the checkout didn’t show $102. But the money still comes out of your pocket. It still reduces your margin. It still punishes you for scaling. If anything, hiding it from the customer makes it worse because it forces the business owner to absorb the cost quietly or raise prices pre-emptively and hope it doesn’t hurt conversion. Either way, you’re the one paying for the privilege of getting paid.
Then there’s the terminology game: “processing fee” versus “transaction fee”. Processing fees, fine—everyone understands card networks, payment rails, Stripe, banks, risk. That’s the cost of moving money. But the Wix Pricing Plans “transaction fee” isn’t payment processing; it’s a “service fee” charged for using the feature you already pay for through your plan. It’s essentially double monetisation: you pay to unlock the functionality, then you pay again every time you successfully use it. That’s not a neutral administrative cost; it’s a revenue strategy that scales with your success. The more you grow, the more Wix takes, not because they’re processing more complicated payments, but because they can.
And the tiering makes it feel even more cynical. The transaction fee is “tiered based on your site’s plan” and “viewable in the upgrade page”. So your reward for upgrading—presumably because you’re taking your business seriously—is that the platform can attach a different fee structure to you. The details are tucked in a dashboard page instead of being presented upfront like a core pricing pillar. If a fee meaningfully affects your revenue, it shouldn’t be something you discover after you’ve committed to building your business around the product.
What really grates is how this lands on small operators. Large businesses can treat platform fees as a line item, negotiate alternatives, or build custom stacks. Small businesses can’t. They’re the ones relying on simple tools because they don’t have a dev team, and they’re exactly the ones who need predictable costs. Wix knows that. It sells convenience: “use our system, don’t worry about the complexity.” Then it turns around and says, “Also, we’ll take a percentage of each plan payment—separately from your payment provider fees.” So now the small business owner is paying: (1) the Wix subscription, (2) the payment provider’s processing fees, and (3) Wix’s additional “service fee” on top. That’s a three-layer toll system on the same transaction.
And yes, Wix notes that when you refund a customer, the transaction fee is returned, and partial refunds reduce it proportionally. That’s basic fairness, not generosity. The bigger issue is that the fee exists at all—especially on recurring billing, where margins can be thin and retention-based. Subscription businesses live and die by small percentage shifts. A couple of points on each payment adds up quickly over months and years, particularly if you’re running a membership, offering online lessons, selling digital services, or trying to build stable cashflow. You’re not just paying a one-time cost; you’re signing up for a permanent haircut on revenue.
It also creates a weird incentive structure: Wix profits more when you use their monetisation tools successfully. That sounds fine until you remember you’re already paying for access to those tools, and the payment processor is already being paid for the transaction. So what exactly is the transaction fee “for”? It isn’t risk underwriting (that’s the payment provider). It isn’t shipping or fulfilment. It isn’t customer acquisition. It’s simply a fee for the platform’s role as gatekeeper. You want to sell plans through the system? Pay a cut, every time, forever.
The whole thing leaves you feeling nickel-and-dimed. Wix markets itself as an all-in-one solution: build, brand, sell, grow. But “all-in-one” shouldn’t mean “all-in-fees”. The pricing plan transaction fee turns what should be a straightforward SaaS cost into a variable tax that you can’t control unless you change platforms, change your sales model, or do awkward workarounds. And for many small businesses, “just switch platforms” isn’t a casual choice—it’s migration costs, downtime risk, SEO risk, customer confusion, lost momentum. Wix benefits from that lock-in, and the fee structure takes advantage of it.
It’s especially galling when the fee is positioned as a technical detail rather than the meaningful business cost that it is. Small businesses don’t need another hidden percentage quietly drained from earnings—they need clarity, predictability, and pricing that doesn’t punish growth.
