Compared to Stripe

Overview

Stripe moves money. Cladior handles the sign-in, the balance and the metering, and moves money as a consequence. Most products should use Stripe. This page is about the ones that cannot.

The fixed fee decides it

Stripe's standard rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. The percentage is cheap. The 30 cents is what sets the floor.

On a $50 subscription the fee is under 3%. On a $1 charge it is 33%. On a tenth of a cent the fee is thousands of times the amount being collected, so the transaction is not expensive, it is impossible. Anyone billing per request, per page or per kilobyte through Stripe has to invent a workaround: a minimum purchase, a monthly invoice, a credit pack. Each one is billing code you now own and maintain.

Cladior takes 20% on top of the rate you set, so a reader pays 1.2 times your price and you receive your full rate. That is far more than 2.9% and it is flat, because the card fee was already paid once when the reader bought credit. The two numbers answer different questions. Stripe's is cheap per transaction and has a floor. Ours is dearer per transaction and has none.

Use Stripe when

You sell a subscription, a plan or anything priced in whole dollars. You want your own checkout, your own customer records, invoices, tax handling and dunning. You need pricing Cladior does not model, like seats or tiers. You want the relationship with the buyer to be yours alone.

Stripe is also the mature option by a wide margin. It has been doing this for over a decade and we opened in beta in July 2026.

Use Cladior when

The thing you sell is small and there is a lot of it. An API priced per request, an archive priced per article, a dataset priced per megabyte. Anything where asking for a $5 minimum to read one page would lose the reader.

It also fits when the signup form is the thing costing you readers. Nobody creates an account to read one page. A reader who already holds Cladior credit consents once and reads, and never gives you a card number, which is one fewer thing for you to hold.

The catch

Cladior only helps if the reader already has a balance. Somebody arriving cold still has to sign up and buy credit, and that is the same friction as any other checkout, plus a company they have not heard of. Our network is small, so today that is most visitors.

This is the honest weakness of the model and it gets better only as more readers hold credit. If your traffic is cold and one time, Stripe with a real checkout will convert better than we will.

Using both

They are not exclusive. Sell subscriptions through Stripe and meter the long tail through Cladior, or price the free pages at nothing and charge for the rest. The free paths setting exists for exactly that.