Payment methods, ranked by what they actually cost you

Every payment rail charges you twice: once as a percentage, and once as a number of days. Freelancers optimize the percentage because it appears on a statement, and ignore the days because they do not, which is how a "free" bank transfer routinely ends up more expensive than a card fee of 2.9%.

This post compares the rails on those two axes and nothing else. Not on which feels professional, not on which your accountant prefers.

The days are the expensive axis, and they are not the ones you think

The gap between rails is rarely two days versus three. It is two days versus twelve, and the extra ten come from a human step rather than from the banking system.

A card or payment-link charge can be completed by the person who received your invoice, at their desk, in ninety seconds, on a corporate card they already hold. A bank transfer cannot. It has to reach whoever operates the bank account, get queued for the next payment run, and be released. That is where the ten days live. The rail is fast; the approval path in front of it is not. Which rails you accept determines how many humans stand between your invoice and your bank, and that is a bigger lever than any fee on this page.

The second-order effect matters more than the first. Missing a client's weekly payment run by one day does not cost you one day, it costs you seven. Missing a monthly run costs you thirty. A rail that lets the invoice be paid the moment it is approved skips the run entirely.

What each rail takes, and how long it holds

Fees are the current published rates from each provider. Settlement is time to funds available in your processor balance, before the payout to your own bank.

Two things stand out. Flat-fee rails invert the ranking as invoice size rises: iDEAL at €0.29 costs the same on €300 and €30,000, while a standard EEA card at 1.5% costs €4.50 and €450. And percentage rails with a cap behave like flat fees above the cap, which is why ACH at 0.8% capped at $5 is close to free on a $9,000 invoice and a real 0.8% on a $400 one.

The fee you see is not the fee you pay

Fees stack, and the stack is where the surprises are. Take an illustration: a $5,000 invoice, paid by a European client with a European card, into a US Stripe account, in dollars.

The base card fee is 2.9% + 30¢, which is $145.30. The international card surcharge adds 1.5%, or $75. If the client's bank converts, a further 1% applies somewhere in the chain. You are at roughly $270 on a headline rate of 2.9%, and the number you will quote to yourself later is 2.9%.

The same invoice through PayPal, cross-border: 3.49% + $0.49 plus the 1.5% cross-border fee is about $250, and if it involves currency conversion PayPal applies a 3% or 4% conversion spread on top. Pulling it out instantly rather than waiting adds 1.75%, capped at $25.

Rebuild the arithmetic for your own mix once a quarter rather than trusting the headline. If the total is uncomfortable, the fix is usually in the rate rather than in the rail, and the gap between the rate you quote and the rate you keep is the more productive place to look.

Cash is not cleared until it cannot be taken back

"Days to cleared cash" has a second half that most comparisons skip. Money in your account that can be reversed is not settled, it is provisional, and the reversal windows differ by an order of magnitude.

SEPA Direct Debit can be disputed by the payer on a no-questions-asked basis for eight weeks, and for up to 13 months where the debit is claimed to be unauthorized. ACH Direct Debit gives a personal account 60 calendar days and a business account two business days; those disputes are final and cannot be appealed. iDEAL sits at the other end: customers cannot dispute an iDEAL payment with their bank at all.

This does not make direct debit a bad rail. It makes it a bad rail for a first invoice to a client you have not worked with, and a good one for a retainer that has run cleanly for a year. Match the reversal window to how much you know about the payer.

Bank transfer is cheap because you are doing the labor

The transfer itself is fast and getting faster. In the UK and across the EU, the payer's provider must credit the payee's provider by the end of the business day following receipt of the payment order. Euro instant payments have been receivable across the euro area since January 2025 and sendable since 9 October 2025, at no higher charge than a standard credit transfer. UK Faster Payments runs in real time, day and night, up to £1m.

None of which helps if nobody presses the button. The cost of a bank transfer is not zero, it is displaced onto you: matching an unreferenced credit to an invoice, emailing to ask which of two invoices a round number covers, and re-sending your IBAN to someone who typed it wrong. That work is unbillable and it recurs monthly. Matching those credits back to invoices is what a read-only bank feed does, without asking you to move the account to a new provider, which is the comparison drawn on the Qonto alternative page. It is also the reason the free rail can produce a worse effective outcome than the 2.9% one, and why time-to-cash rather than fee percentage is the metric worth watching.

Bank transfer earns its place on large invoices to established clients, where the percentage saved is real money and the client's finance team pays on a schedule you already know.

Pick a default and one fallback

More options on an invoice does not mean faster payment. It means a decision, and a decision is a delay. Two rails, chosen by invoice size and geography.

• Under about €1,000, any geography. Card or payment link as default. The percentage is small in absolute terms and you are buying the ability for one person to settle it without involving anyone else.
• €1,000 to €10,000, domestic. Card as default, bank transfer offered on request. Above roughly €5,000 the percentage starts to be worth a conversation, but only if the client's finance process is one you have seen work.
• Above €10,000, or any public-sector client. Bank transfer, with the invoice built to survive procurement: purchase order reference, correct legal entity, itemized lines, sent to accounts payable rather than to your contact.
• Recurring work with a client of known quality. Direct debit, once the relationship is old enough that the reversal window stops mattering.
• Netherlands. iDEAL for anything, at €0.29 flat and with no dispute route.

Whatever you choose, put the payment details on the invoice itself rather than in the covering email, and put them in the same place every time. The invoice generator builds an itemized PDF in the browser with your own fields, no signup and no watermark, if you want a fixed template to copy.

The platform layer takes its own cut, on top of the processor

Marketplaces and tools add a collection fee above the processor fee, and they present it differently. Contra charges freelancers no commission on project earnings and monetizes the client side instead, with per-payment fees of $2 to $29 by payment size, halved on Pro. Freelancer.com's withdrawal fees are the other pattern: $1 to PayPal, Skrill or Payoneer, free to a local bank account, $25 for an international wire, with a $50 minimum withdrawal.

The "free tool plus a transaction fee" model is common enough to be worth pricing explicitly rather than assuming, which is the comparison behind pages like Worklyn versus Wave. Worklyn's own collection fee is 1% on Free, 0.5% on Pro at €19.99 a month, and 0% on Business at €39.99, on top of whatever Stripe charges for the rail.

Those numbers make the break-even calculable rather than a matter of taste. Moving from Free to Pro saves 0.5% of everything you collect for €19.99 a month, so the fee saving alone covers the subscription at about €4,000 collected per month. Moving from Pro to Business saves a further 0.5% for another €20, so the same €4,000. Below that the plan has to earn its keep on features; above it the fee difference pays for itself. Run the same arithmetic on whatever tool you currently use, because most of them do not publish the collection fee anywhere near the sticker price, and weigh the result against the four numbers a billing tool has to move before you switch for the fee alone.

What to change this week

1. Add up last quarter's payment fees from your processor statement, including cross-border and conversion lines, and divide by revenue collected. That single percentage is the number to manage.
2. Set one default rail and one fallback per client segment, and remove everything else from your invoice template.
3. For your three largest clients, find out which day of the week or month their payment run goes out, and move your invoice date to land two days before it.

Worklyn's invoicing takes card, SEPA, iDEAL and bank transfer through Stripe on the same invoice, so the rail becomes a choice you make per client rather than a default you inherited.