systeme.io vs Kit (2026): The Fee Gap Is 0.6%, Not 3.5%

Here is the same $30 ebook sold twice, once through Kit and once through a systeme.io checkout connected to a US Stripe account.

The difference is 18 cents.

The pages ranking for this search frame it differently. systeme.io's own Kit comparison puts it this way: "systeme.io charges 0% transaction fees; Kit Commerce charges 3.5% plus $0.30 per sale." Both halves are true, and they measure different things. Kit's number already contains the card processor. systeme.io's number leaves the processor out, because on systeme.io you connect your own Stripe or PayPal account and pay that company separately.

The real fee gap between these two tools is 0.6% of what you sell. On cards issued outside your country it turns the other way, and PayPal, which only systeme.io offers, costs more per sale than Kit's checkout. In three of the four seller profiles below, the plan fee decides the choice long before the per-sale fee does. The fee only becomes the deciding line for one kind of seller, and I'll show where.

Where Kit's 3.5% goes

Kit's help center is direct about it: "The 3.5% + $0.30 per transaction is the only cost of selling through Kit." The same article says "Stripe processes your payments," and Kit's commerce page gives the split: "Keep more of what you earn with 0.6% + card processing fees." Take Stripe's standard US card rate, 2.9% + 30¢, out of Kit's 3.5% + 30¢, and what's left is the 0.6% Kit advertises as its own.

On systeme.io, the pricing page lists "No transaction fees" and "Accept payments using Stripe or PayPal at no extra cost." The help article on connecting Stripe sends you to log in to your own Stripe account or create one. From then on, Stripe's price list applies to every sale.

That price list has more lines than the headline rate. Stripe adds 1.5% for international cards and another 1% when currency conversion is needed. PayPal's US fee page lists PayPal Checkout at 3.49% plus a fixed fee of 0.49 USD. Kit's FAQ doesn't list a surcharge for foreign cards, and it calls the 3.5% + 30¢ the only cost. Per sale, in US dollars, each route takes:

Two things in that table matter more than the 3.5-versus-0 line:

• Against a US card on Stripe, the gap is a flat 0.6% of the price. Both sides charge 30¢ per order, so the fixed parts cancel. It's 18¢ on $30, 60¢ on $100, $1.80 on $300.
• Against a foreign card or PayPal, systeme.io's 0% route costs more per sale than Kit. A foreign card through Stripe adds 1.5 points before any conversion. PayPal Checkout's 3.49% + 49¢ is above Kit's 3.5% + 30¢ at any price under $1,900, but Kit doesn't take PayPal at all, so for buyers who insist on it, that's the cost of offering it.

Kit's fee does vary by currency: its table lists 3.5% + £0.20 for pounds and 3.5% + €0.25 for euros, across six currencies in total. systeme.io's help center also has setup guides for Mollie, Razorpay, Mercado Pago, Xendit, Flutterwave and GoCardless; each has its own price list, which I haven't modelled.

The real fee gap, in dollars a year

I price a checkout per year, as two numbers added together: the plan fee, and what each sale loses multiplied by the number of sales. For a US seller on Stripe, the second number differs between these tools by 0.6% of annual sales:

Now the plan fees, on annual billing:

Billed monthly, Kit Creator runs $39, $59, $89, $119 and $139 at those sizes, and systeme.io $17 for Startup and $47 for Webinar.

Set the two tables side by side and the order of magnitude is plain. Between Kit Creator and systeme.io, the plan fee gap is $390 to $920 a year at these sizes, or $220 at 1,000 subscribers once an account has outgrown systeme.io's Free plan. Matching even that smallest gap with Kit's 0.6% would take $36,667 a year in sales; the largest would take $153,333. Between Kit Free and a paid systeme.io plan, the plan gap runs the other way, and Kit's fee has to grow to $170 or $470 before systeme.io catches up.

So the first question isn't the fee. It's which Kit plan you'd be on, and that depends on one feature.

Four sellers, priced

Kit's help article on its Free plan lists what needs a paid plan: "Visual automations and the automation template library," "Email sequences," "Rules and RSS campaigns," and a few more. Free covers up to 10,000 subscribers, broadcasts, forms, landing pages, tags and selling. systeme.io's Free plan holds 2,000 contacts and includes one email sequence (systeme.io calls them campaigns), one workflow, one automation rule and one tag. Startup raises those to 10 campaigns, 5 workflows, 10 rules and 10 tags.

That split gives four sellers four different answers.

1. A newsletter that sells nothing, 6,000 subscribers. Kit Free: $0. systeme.io: Webinar, $470 a year, since 6,000 is past Startup's contact limit. Fees don't enter into it. Kit wins by the whole plan price, and it keeps winning up to 10,000 subscribers.

2. A broadcast seller, 4,000 subscribers, $20,000 a year in sales. That list is already past systeme.io Free's 2,000 contacts. This is the reader who sends broadcasts with a product link and never builds a sequence. It's close to what one Kit customer described in a four-star review in May: "Broadcasts and Product Sales are what I focus on as I'm comfortable using them." That reviewer also runs a few simple automations, which this reader skips. Kit Free costs $0 plus $120 a year of extra fees. systeme.io Startup costs $170. Kit is ahead by $50.

This is the one case where the fee decides. The break-even on annual billing is $28,333 a year in sales against Startup ($34,000 if you'd pay systeme.io monthly), and $78,333 against Webinar for lists between 5,001 and 10,000 ($94,000 monthly). Below those figures Kit Free is the cheaper checkout; above them, systeme.io.

3. A seller with sequences, 3,000 subscribers, $40,000 a year. A welcome sequence, a launch sequence, a post-purchase sequence. On Kit that means Creator, $590 a year, plus $240 of extra fees: $830 a year on top of what Stripe's standard rate would take. systeme.io Startup: $170, with room for 10 campaigns. systeme.io is ahead by $660, and $420 of that is the plan fee. At 10,000 subscribers the plan gap alone is $920 a year (Creator $1,390 against Webinar $470).

4. A first product, 800 subscribers, $4,000 in its first year. Both free plans work, and neither charges a monthly fee. Kit Free would take $24 more in fees than systeme.io over that year and can't run the welcome sequence. systeme.io Free can run one, and lets the account sell until lifetime sales reach $10,000, which at this pace arrives in the third year.

Seller 2 is the only one for whom the fee changes the answer, and it changes it in Kit's favor until sales are well into five figures.

The two free plans, read as checkouts

The comparison pages I read set the free plans side by side by contact count: 10,000 against 2,000. For a seller, two other lines matter more.

systeme.io's Free plan has a sales ceiling. Its help article on plan moderation, updated October 7, 2026, says free accounts have "a lifetime sales revenue limit of $10,000 USD." A banner appears at $8,000. At $10,000 "your payment pages will stop accepting new sales," and selling resumes only on a paid plan. "Affiliate commissions are not included in this limit." None of the comparison pages I could load for this search mentions it.

The same help center describes a separate restriction for free accounts that go over a contact or feature limit: a warning email on each of three days, and from the fourth day the account takes no sign-ups, no payments and no new contacts, and its campaigns sit paused. On a paid plan systeme.io moves you up a tier instead. Tags are one of those counted features; I've worked through how systeme.io's tag allowance changes the plan you need on another page.

Kit's Free plan sells but doesn't follow up. Its products, paid subscriptions and tip jars work on Free, at the same 3.5% + 30¢ as on paid plans. What Free can't do is send anything on a schedule after the sale: sequences and visual automations are paid features, and Kit's help center warns that existing ones "stop running while you're on the Free plan." Several comparison pages still describe Kit Free as including an automation, and systeme.io's own page adds a sequence; Kit's current help article lists neither. The automation line is also where Kit's price jumps, which I've set out in more detail in Kit's automation gate, set against GetResponse.

Kit Free also stops at 10,000 subscribers: past that, its help center says, you'll need a paid plan to keep sending. At 10,001, Kit Creator costs $1,690 a year on annual billing; systeme.io's Unlimited plan is $970.

What the fee doesn't price

A checkout is also an account somebody else runs, and the two tools run it differently.

On Kit, Stripe is the only option. "Stripe is the only payment platform Kit supports," and you set up a new Stripe account through Kit "even if you already have one." Payouts go out weekly, on Fridays; the first one comes 7 to 14 days after your first sale. Kit's FAQ notes, in its advice on test purchases, that processing fees aren't refunded when you refund a buyer. For EU and UK sales, Kit can calculate VAT and send a VAT receipt once you've entered the jurisdictions you're registered in. The registering is yours to do. Under a January 2026 Hacker News post titled "I discovered I'm a tax criminal in 25 countries," a commenter listed ConvertKit among creator platforms that use "Stripe exclusively" and put the exposure on digital sales in one line: "One international subscriber = immediate tax liability." That's one creator's alarm, not tax advice, and it applies on systeme.io too, where the processor account and the tax are both yours.

On systeme.io, the processor account is yours. You connect Stripe, PayPal or one of the other gateways its help center lists, and payouts, refunds and disputes follow that processor's rules. Stripe's price list charges $15 for each dispute you receive. Kit's help pages that I read don't state what a dispute costs on its side. Any VAT the systeme.io checkout adds lands in that same account, and who files that tax is what decides systeme.io against Teachable.

Reviews show where each arrangement can hurt. On systeme.io, a seller in the Netherlands, who called the software otherwise "pretty good," wrote in November 2025: "It has now been 6 months since the payment methods iDeal and Bancontact stopped working on the platform." systeme.io's reply said "the issue originates from our Stripe integration." (Its help center now also lists a Mollie integration; I haven't checked whether that route was open to this seller.) Another customer spent three weeks in autumn 2025 trying to upgrade to Startup before systeme.io found "a bug in their new Stripe payment integration that prevented plan upgrades from being applied." That one was fixed: the reviewer's three-star update says the plan went live on September 28 and "everything works fine now," and faults how long support took to explain the problem. A third, in March 2026, described buttons on an upsell page built from systeme.io's templates that didn't load properly, which "effectively prevented us from launching." systeme.io scheduled a fix and offered three months of credit, that reviewer wrote, after a promised date had slipped.

On Kit, the review that stands out came from a buyer, not a seller. They'd paid $200 for a service through a Kit checkout, never received it, found the seller's account closed, and wrote after contacting Kit: "I was told to open a dispute with my bank." That fits a setup where the seller's own Stripe account takes the payment. It's worth knowing before you sell through either tool: on both, refunds are the seller's job, not the platform's.

These are single reviews, and I can't judge how often either failure happens. What they put next to the fee is scale: on steady sales, one week without working payments loses about 1.9% of a year's revenue, more than three years of Kit's 0.6%.

The case where I'd send you to Kit

There are three readers for whom I'd recommend Kit over systeme.io.

• A newsletter with 2,001 to 10,000 subscribers that runs on broadcasts. Kit Free costs nothing; systeme.io costs $170 or $470 a year.
• A broadcast seller below the break-even. Under $28,333 a year in sales on a list of up to 5,000, Kit Free plus its fee costs less than systeme.io Startup, once you've outgrown systeme.io Free (2,000 contacts or $10,000 in lifetime sales).
• A seller whose buyers mostly pay with foreign cards. If Kit's flat fee holds for those cards, as its FAQ implies, it's lower than Stripe's international rate, so systeme.io's 0% saves nothing.

For everyone who needs a sequence, systeme.io comes out cheaper at every list size in the tables above, by $220 to $920 a year before fees.

Three things the documents don't settle

1. Kit and foreign cards. I took Kit at its word that 3.5% + 30¢ is the only cost. Its FAQ doesn't mention international cards. If most of your buyers are abroad, ask Kit support to confirm that in writing before you count on the advantage.
2. Disputes on Kit. Stripe's $15 dispute fee applies to your own Stripe account on systeme.io. I couldn't find Kit's dispute fee in its help center.
3. Live checkouts. I didn't run test sales on either platform. Every fee here comes from the vendors' and processors' published pages on October 8, 2026, and none of this covers deliverability.

Where each one wins on the numbers

• Newsletter only, up to 2,000 subscribers: either free plan; Kit if you'd rather not count tags.
• Newsletter only, 2,001 to 10,000: Kit Free.
• Selling, with any email sequence: systeme.io. Free covers 2,000 contacts until lifetime sales reach $10,000; past either line, Startup is $170 a year for 5,000 contacts.
• Selling by broadcast only, past systeme.io's free limits: Kit Free under the break-even ($28,333 a year against Startup, $78,333 against Webinar); systeme.io above it.
• Buyers paying mostly with foreign cards: Kit, unless a sequence puts you on Creator, in which case the plan fee gap still favors systeme.io.
• Buyers who want PayPal: systeme.io, the only one of the two that takes it.

If you're looking at these two because a MailerLite renewal went up, I've priced the per-subscriber alternatives against that renewal on a separate page.

FAQ

Does systeme.io really charge no transaction fees?

systeme.io takes no cut of a sale. Your payment processor still charges its own fee: 2.9% + 30¢ for a US card on Stripe, more for foreign cards, and 3.49% + 49¢ for PayPal Checkout.

Is Kit's 3.5% on top of Stripe's fees?

No. Kit's help center calls 3.5% + $0.30 the only cost of selling through Kit, and its commerce page describes it as 0.6% plus card processing.

Can I sell on Kit's Free plan?

Yes. Digital products, paid subscriptions and tip jars work on Free at the same fee as on paid plans. Sequences and automations don't, so nothing goes out automatically after a purchase beyond what Kit's checkout sends.

What happens when I hit systeme.io's $10,000 limit?

Your payment pages stop taking new sales until you move to a paid plan. A dashboard banner warns you at $8,000. Affiliate commissions don't count toward the limit.

Can I use my existing Stripe account, or PayPal?

On systeme.io, yes to both; you connect them. On Kit, no: Kit has you create a new Stripe account during setup, and Stripe is the only payment platform it supports.

Which is cheaper if I sell a course or ebook with a follow-up sequence?

On these prices, systeme.io, as soon as the product needs an email sequence: $170 a year on Startup against $390 to $890 for Kit Creator at 1,000 to 5,000 subscribers.