This PayPal Fee Calculator is my Google find of the day. It is a free web-based tool that allows people to calculate what their PayPal fees would be to receive a certain amount or to reverse calculate their fees to determine what amount a person would have to send them for them to receive a certain amount after fees. Created by Ryan Olbe, a 28-year-old freelance web developer from central Florida. Thank you, Ryan!
Can you give me an example of a situation in which you would use this?
Mar 4th, 2011 / 7:15 am
yes, but the advanced mode doesn’t work :-(
Mar 4th, 2011 / 10:25 am
You only get charged when you send an invoice right? Why not just send them an email with the amount and tell them to pay you via paypal?
Mar 4th, 2011 / 3:23 pm
Very useful resource – we’ve battled with this more than a few times in our office and wished that someone would create a tool like this. Thanks for sharing!
Mar 7th, 2011 / 2:37 pm
There’s a nice, simple iPhone app called “Etsy Fees” that calculates both PayPall and Etsy fees (and you can turn the Etsy fees setting off to only calculate PayPal fees). It also does the reverse calculation thing.
Mar 8th, 2011 / 1:56 pm
Wonderful tool. Thanks Ryan! Especially helpful to an etsy newbie like me. I’ll check out the iPhone app too:-)
Cheri
Unique Handcrafted Jewelry
Trinkets2Treasure1.etsy.com
Mar 15th, 2011 / 7:55 pm
Just to let everyone know, with the greatest respect, I’m a developer and a Mathematician and can confirm that Ryan’s calculations are wrong. Given a net amount they do NOT calculate the gross, he is simply added say 3.4% to the net which is inaccurate but quite some amount.
For example in one post he says: $77.55 is how much you’d have to pay to get EXACTLY $75 back. So let’s work that out…
$77.55 – 2.9% = $75.30105
$75.30105 – $0.20 = 75.10105 = $75.10 or 10 cents MORE
It should actually be: $77.45 which is:
$77.45 – 2.9% = $75.20395
$75.20395 – $0.20 = $75.00395 = $75.00
Below are the step by step instructions for working this out.
Plus you can see this in action at: http://matournament.co.uk/calculate_pp_fees.php
So lets assume the fee is 10% NOT 3.4% just to make it easy to read and understand…. we’ll also ignore the 20p for the moment…
– So if we want £90 into our account….
– now we KNOW that £100 less 10% = £90 (due to simple numbers)
– BUT £90 + 10% = £99 not £100 (so we’d lose out!)
– so to calculate the fees that we need to be paid to end up with £90 after fees, we need to add 10% on each of the amounts we add until we’re adding less than 1p:
£90 * 10% = £9
£9 * 10% = £0.90
£0.90 * 10% = £0.09
£0.09 * 10% = £0.009
which gives us: £9.999 or £10 when rounded up to 2 decimals places
thus £90 + the £10 fees = £100 less the 10% = £90
So if they want to pay us £10 we would ask them to pay £11.11 by the same equation above using the 10% structure.
Of course we are working with 3.4% and £0.20 (in the UK at least). So you add the £0.20 first THEN calculate the same as above with the 3.4% instead of 10%.
In my algorithm I run the iteration 7 times to ensure that we end up adding less than 1p to the final total which would of course not affect the rounded to 2 decimal places value, so why 7 iterations?? …because with an amount of £100,000,000 after 7 iterations we’d be adding £0.002 to the paypal fees, so I think that accuracy is good enough for me, given most people will be dealing with under £1000.
If you’d like a full working example with the code, let me know and I’ll pop it up on a website.
Thanks
Gareth
Apr 30th, 2011 / 5:03 pm
Apologies after discussions with Ryan his calculations are correct, in PHP this would be expressed much more simply as:
$paypal_percent = 3.4;
$paypal_fee = 0.20;
$original_amount = 100;
$pp_perc = (100 – $paypal_percent) / 100;
$plus_amount = round(($original_amount + $paypal_fee) / $pp_perc, 2);
$minus_amount = round(($original_amount * $pp_perc) – $paypal_fee, 2);
$plus_fees = round($plus_amount – $original_amount, 2);
$minus_fees = round($original_amount – $minus_amount, 2);
Hope this helps someone.
Gareth
May 1st, 2011 / 7:24 am
RIP Ryan Olbe
Sep 19th, 2012 / 1:45 pm
Your style is very unique in comparison to other folks I’ve read stuff from. Thanks for posting when you have the opportunity, Guess I will just bookmark this web site.
Feb 12th, 2013 / 3:49 pm
Hey there just happened upon your blog from Yahoo after I entered in,
“swissmiss | PayPal Fee Calculator” or perhaps something similar (can’t quite remember exactly). Anyhow, I’m pleased I found it because your content is exactly what
I’m searching for (writing a college paper) and I hope you don’t mind if I gather some
material from here and I will of course credit you as the reference.
Thank you very much.
Jul 17th, 2013 / 4:14 pm