When Leaving Sharetribe’s Fees Isn’t Worth the Cost of a Custom Build
Jayen Ashar · 2 min read
A marketplace client wanted to leave Sharetribe’s fees and take payments through PayPal. The custom build would have cost more than $10,000 USD, but most of their transactions were free, so the savings would take a long time to pay it back, if they ever did.
Sharetribe charged a per-transaction fee at the time; since October 2026 it bills usage credits instead.
What it would have cost
Custom payment processing isn’t a small change. Our estimate was more than $10,000 USD, but not by a lot.
What the volume looked like
- Most transactions were free.
- Nobody on the call had a figure for transactions a month.
- The marketplace was running 11 active tournaments, with two companies posting.
The fees were real. The volume to justify replacing them wasn’t there.
The client still wanted off the fees, and still wanted PayPal. That’s a fair thing to want. But a build of more than $10,000 to save fees on mostly free transactions pays back slowly, if at all.
What founders should take from this
- Know your transactions a month before you price the alternative. Without that number, you can’t tell whether the build pays for itself.
- Compare the build with the fees you actually pay. Not the fees you might pay one day.
- Revisit it when the volume is there. The same build can make sense later.
Leaving a platform’s fees is a scaling decision. Make it once you’ve scaled.
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