Guides
These guides cover marketplace and platform fees, VAT, and freelance income. Each published guide explains the calculation logic, shows realistic worked examples, states its assumptions clearly, lists its sources, and links to the related calculators.
Each published guide opens with the actual formula or fee schedule, walks through a realistic scenario with specific dollar amounts, points out edge cases, and links to a free reviewed calculator. Fee figures cite the platform's published pricing; scenario-dependent values are labelled as assumptions. See our methodology for how we build and maintain this material.
E-Commerce & Selling
What is in each guide
These are working references rather than overviews. Each one opens with the fee schedule or formula it covers, then walks through a scenario with specific dollar amounts so you can follow the arithmetic rather than take a number on trust. Where a rule has an exception that matters, the guide says so instead of rounding it away.
Every guide carries a source table listing each figure, the document it comes from, and the date it was last checked. Marketplace fees cite the platform's own published pricing pages; tax figures cite IRS forms and releases. Values that depend on your own situation are labelled as assumptions rather than presented as published rates, and each guide links to the calculator that runs its math so you can put your own numbers through it.
Choosing where to start
Etsy Fees Explained covers the four fees Etsy charges and how they stack: the $0.20 listing fee that renews on every sale, the 6.5% transaction fee that applies to shipping as well as the item, payment processing, and the offsite ads fee that only lands on attributed orders but can flip a thin listing into a loss. It also covers shipping labels, currency conversion, and how to price so the fee load does not eat the margin.
Amazon FBA Fees breaks down referral fees by category, fulfillment fees by size tier, the 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge, and the storage rates that nearly triple between October and December. It also covers the fees that catch sellers out because they only appear in certain conditions: inbound placement, low-inventory-level, aged-inventory surcharges, and returns processing.
Freelancer Net Income follows a project from the quoted rate down to the cash that reaches your account, comparing the fee stack across Upwork, Fiverr, and direct clients, then applying a tax reserve and the unbilled hours that determine your real effective rate.
How to Calculate VAT covers adding VAT to a net price and extracting it from a gross total, including the step most people get wrong: a gross figure is divided by 1.20 at a 20% rate, not reduced by 20%.
Looking for tax rather than fees
Guides on self-employment tax, quarterly estimated payments, the 2026 federal brackets, the standard deduction, the home office deduction, the self-employment tax deduction, and the 1099-K reporting threshold live in the tax guides section. Each follows the same structure and cites IRS sources directly. See our methodology for how all of this material is built and maintained, and the validation page for the test evidence behind the calculators these guides link to.