Economics
Does GoHighLevel take a cut of your payments? No. Here is what GHL actually charges, where the transaction fee myth comes from, and the cost that does add up.
Andrew Lee Jenkins · 2026-07-13 · 10 min read · Updated 2026-08-23
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If you are trying to work out GoHighLevel's transaction fees before you run real money through it, good instinct. Most people work it out afterward, when the payout is smaller than the invoice and they go looking for the reason.
Here is the straight answer, and it is not the one I expected when I went looking.
I need to correct something. An earlier version of this post said GHL skims a percentage off every payment that passes through it. That is wrong, and I would rather say so plainly than quietly edit it and hope nobody noticed.
Go through HighLevel's own pricing and billing documentation and there is no platform fee on money you collect. You connect your own Stripe account, your client pays, Stripe takes its normal cut for doing the processing, and the rest lands in your account. GoHighLevel is not standing in the middle of that with its hand out.
The only fee on a payment is the processor's. Stripe charges roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents on a card charge. Everybody pays that, on every platform, forever. That is not GHL's fault and it is not something owning your software fixes either.
If you came here because your payout looked short, the gap is almost certainly Stripe, a refund, a chargeback, or a surcharge somebody switched on. Which brings me to where this myth comes from.
Three things get tangled together and they are all different.
Your own surcharge. HighLevel has a feature that lets you add a processing charge or convenience fee to what your customer pays. That is a fee you set, on your customer, shown at checkout. If someone on your team turned it on, your customers are paying more and it is not GHL collecting it.
Rebilling in SaaS mode. This is the big one. Agencies on the higher tier resell GHL to their own clients and mark up usage. That markup is real money changing hands, and it is a fee on a transaction, so people call it a transaction fee. But the agency sets it and the agency keeps it. On the Unlimited plan the markup is fixed at 1.05x. On Agency Pro the agency picks its own multiplier, and 2x to 3x is common. If you are a client buying a rebranded GHL from an agency, you are paying that markup. You are just not paying it to HighLevel.
Wallet charges. Every sub-account has a prepaid wallet that funds SMS, email, and calls. It drains as you send, and it auto-recharges when it drops past a threshold, ten dollars by default. Watching money leave a wallet on its own feels like a cut being taken. It is not. It is usage you spent.
This is the part worth knowing, because it is where the money really goes.
There is the plan, which at the time of writing runs $97, $297, or $497 a month depending on tier, with SaaS mode and your own rebilling markup living on the top one.
Then there is usage, on top of the plan, out of that wallet. Text messages run around $0.0079 per segment. Email is around $0.675 per thousand sends, so a hundred thousand sends is roughly sixty seven dollars. Phone numbers, calls, and AI features draw down the same wallet.
Then there is A2P 10DLC registration, which is the carrier compliance layer for business texting in the US and catches people out because it is not on the pricing page. Expect a one time brand registration around $24.49, a one time campaign vetting fee around $15.75, and a recurring charge of up to about $11 a month per active campaign.
Worth saying clearly, because it cuts against the story I would rather tell. HighLevel passes carrier costs through without a markup, and the markup that used to sit on usage was removed on October 1, 2025. On usage they are not gouging you. They make their money on the subscription.
Check these against your own account before you plan around them. Vendor pricing moves and this is a snapshot.
Explore Seedly's codebases and read the setup guides before choosing your software.
Explore the codebasesSo if there is no transaction fee, what was I actually paying for?
The subscription. Every month, whether it was a good month or a bad one, whether I used a feature or not. Plus the wallet. Plus the compliance fees. Plus the add-ons I needed to make the thing actually work the way I wanted it to.
Mine landed between $600 and $700 a month by the time all of that was stacked up. That is a car payment. Every month, for software I did not own a line of.
That is the honest version of the complaint, and it is less dramatic than a secret skim off every payment. It is just rent. It does not scale with your revenue, it scales with time and with how much you use and how many pieces you need bolted on, and it never stops.
And the part that got me in the end was not the number. It was that none of it bought me anything I kept. Cancel and the automations, the pipelines, and the client portals are gone. Years of payments and you own nothing at the end of it.
I want to be careful here, because the whole reason I am rewriting this post is that I overstated the case last time.
Owning your CRM source code does not make Stripe's 2.9% go away. Nobody can do that. Stripe did the work of moving the money and Stripe gets paid. If a vendor tells you their platform means you keep 100% of a card payment, they are either confused or lying.
What owning changes is the rest of it. The subscription stops. The tier upgrade you were dreading stops. The wallet still costs you what the messages cost, because Twilio and the carriers still get paid, but there is no plan sitting on top of it. My hosting is a few dollars a month per instance, and it does not care whether I have three users or three hundred, because there is no vendor counting logins.
That is a smaller, truer claim than the one I made before, and it is the one I will stand behind.
Before you take anyone's word for it, mine included, go pull an actual payout statement and put it next to your GHL invoice.
The payout tells you what Stripe took. The invoice tells you what the plan and the wallet took. Add them up and you have your real number. Most people have never once looked at those two documents side by side, and it is the fastest way to find out whether your software costs what you think it does.
If you want the full picture on what renting versus owning costs over a few years, I mapped it out in What Your CRM Actually Costs Over 5 Years. If you are weighing the switch, the open-source GoHighLevel alternatives you actually own is the honest comparison. And if you want to resell a CRM as your own, The White-Label CRM Playbook is next.
No. HighLevel does not charge a platform fee on money you collect through invoices, order forms, or funnels. You connect your own payment processor and the only cut taken from a payment is the processor's own, which for Stripe is roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents on a card charge.
Almost always the payment processor's fee, a refund, or a chargeback. The other possibility is a processing charge or convenience fee that somebody enabled in your account, which is a surcharge you add to your customer rather than a fee HighLevel collects. Compare a payout statement against the invoice to see which one it is.
The plan is $97, $297 or $497 depending on tier, but that is rarely the real number. Add the prepaid wallet for texts, email and AI, the A2P registration fees, and whatever add-ons you need to make it work the way you want, and it climbs. Running my agency on it, mine landed between $600 and $700 a month once everything was stacked up.
The monthly plan, which at the time of writing runs $97, $297, or $497 a month by tier, plus usage drawn from a prepaid wallet for text messages, email, calls, and AI features, plus A2P 10DLC registration fees for business texting in the US. Carrier costs are passed through without a markup and the old usage markup was removed on October 1, 2025.
It is a markup, but it is set and kept by the agency reselling GoHighLevel, not by HighLevel. On the Unlimited plan it is fixed at 1.05x. On Agency Pro the agency chooses its own multiplier and 2x to 3x is common. If you buy a rebranded CRM from an agency, that markup is part of what you pay them.
It eliminates the software subscription, not the payment processing fee. Stripe still charges its normal rate because Stripe still moves the money, and any platform claiming otherwise is misleading you. What goes away is the monthly plan, the tier upgrades, and the per-seat and per-sub-account pricing, because there is no vendor metering you.
Check your own numbers first. Then decide.