Charming Seal·Pricing
The software is free. Here is the rest of the bill.
Charming Seal costs nothing and no paid tier is planned, which makes a price list a very short document. So this page is the other thing: an account of the money that does leave your hands, and who ends up holding it.
The whole bill
Three costs. Only one is ours, and it is nothing.
Every checkout costs somebody something. This is the whole list for this one.
The software
$0
MIT licence. Every feature, no tier.
- Card, Link, Klarna, Afterpay, PayPal and crypto, all in the free version.
- Subscriptions, invoices, discount codes, order bumps, upsells, referral codes.
- Analytics, abandoned-cart recovery, the storefront, the theme customiser, CSV export.
- No seat count, no order cap, no feature withheld for a plan that does not exist.
- Read it, change it, fork it, sell the work. Nothing your buyers see has to carry our name.
What it runs on
from $0
Paid to your host. Never to us.
- Vercel's free tier runs the application.
- Supabase or Neon give you a free Postgres to point it at.
- A domain, which in most cases you already own.
- Outgrow a free tier and you move to that host's ordinary published price. We do not quote it here. It is not our number to set and it changes.
- You can leave. It is a Next.js application and a Postgres database, not a runtime only one company can operate.
What Stripe takes
2.9% + 30¢
Standard US card rates. Paid to Stripe.
- Taken from each successful charge before the money reaches your account.
- Rates vary by country, by payment method and by the arrangement on your own account.
- Stripe publishes its own pricing and that page is the authority. Check it there before you take this figure from us.
- PayPal and crypto carry their own fees, set by them, on the same principle.
- None of it passes through anything we run. We never see the money.
The flat fee, converted
$29 a month is a percentage you have to work out yourself.
A platform fee is quoted as a fixed number because a fixed number looks harmless next to "0% of your sales". Divide it by what you actually sold that month and it turns back into a rate.
| Sales in a month | $29 flat fee, as a rate | Charming Seal |
|---|---|---|
| $200 | 14.5% | 0% |
| $400 | 7.25% | 0% |
| $1,000 | 2.9% | 0% |
| $5,000 | 0.58% | 0% |
Note the third row. At $1,000 a month the flat fee works out at 2.9%, the same as Stripe's percentage rate, and only one of those two parties is moving the money. The fee is also paid in the quiet months, when that rate is at its worst.
Three years, added up
The total, with nothing left out.
Thirty-six months of a small shop, counted in full. The Stripe row is a worked example. It assumes ten orders of $40 a month at standard US card rates, so $400 of sales.
| Over 36 months | Charming Seal | A $29-a-month platform |
|---|---|---|
| Software licence | $0.00 | $1,044.00 |
| Hosting and Postgres | $0.00 on the free tiers | Included in the fee |
| Domain | Your registrar's price | Your registrar's price |
| Stripe processing | $525.60 | $525.60 |
| Total, domain aside | $525.60 | $1,569.60 |
| Of that, to the people who wrote the software | $0.00 | $1,044.00 |
The Stripe figure is arithmetic on 2.9% + 30¢, shown here so you can check it rather than trust it. $400 of sales is $11.60, ten orders is $3.00, giving $14.60 a month and $525.60 over three years. Your own rate will differ, and it is the same number in both columns because processing does not become cheaper by renting your checkout.
Outgrow the free tiers and the first column gains a hosting line. It still does not gain a line paid to us.
The money questions
Answered before you ask twice.
Is a paid tier coming later?
None is planned. The stronger answer is that the licence has already been given away. Every copy released under MIT stays MIT, so a change of heart here could only ever apply to future versions, and the version on your server would keep working and keep being forkable. That is the protection, not a promise from us.
Do you take a cut of my sales?
No. The reason is structural, so there is no policy here to revise. The code that calculates what a buyer is charged runs on your server, against your Stripe keys, and you can read it. There is no account of ours anywhere in the path for a cut to be taken into.
What happens if I get huge?
On our side, nothing at all. Your host bill grows, your database grows, and Stripe's fee grows in proportion because it is a percentage. If volume earns you a better processing rate, that is an arrangement between you and Stripe. We are not a party to it and we take no share of it.
What does sponsoring actually buy me?
Nothing, and it is worth being blunt about that. No priority support, no service level, no private features, no place at the front of a queue. It pays for the maintenance of software you already have for free. If you need something in return for money, this is the wrong transaction.
Is there a support contract or an SLA?
There is neither. Nobody is on call and nothing is guaranteed to be up. Issues on the repository get read and a private report of a security flaw gets taken seriously, but none of that is a commitment you can hold anyone to.
Should I be paying for a hosted checkout instead?
Possibly, and that is a respectable answer. If you want an SLA, a support desk and somebody else's name on the outage, buy one. A monthly fee is a fair price for not being the person woken up. This page exists so you can make that trade knowingly rather than discover the arithmetic two years in.
Nothing to buy
There is no checkout on this page. Only a deployment.
The next step costs an afternoon and no money. If it goes on to earn you money, sponsorship is what funds the work of keeping it maintained.