# Pricing and fees

> Soca pricing in one table: 1.5% when a business gets paid (and customers pay 1% less with a Soca account, online or in person), free personal transfers, free refunds, and no chargebacks, with no monthly or setup fees.

Part of the Soca documentation (https://soca.finance/docs). Human version: https://soca.finance/docs/pricing
Soca charges one simple fee when a business gets paid, and nothing otherwise. Customers signed in to a Soca account pay **1% less** than the listed price, with the discount taken off the total right on the receipt. This page lists every fee that exists and confirms the ones that don't.

## What does Soca cost?

| Payment type | Business receives | Customer pays |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Online, paid with a Soca account** (checkout, invoices, subscriptions) | **$98.50** on a $100 sale (price − 1.5%) | $99 on a $100 purchase (1% less) |
| **Online, paid from a connected wallet** (no Soca account) | **$98.50** on a $100 sale (price − 1.5%) | The full listed price ($100 on a $100 purchase) |
| **In-person** (scan a QR at the counter) | **$98.50** on a $100 sale (price − 1.5%) | Same as online: $99 with a Soca account, $100 from a connected wallet |
| **Personal transfers** (sending money to people) | Free | Free |
| **Refunds** | No fee: only the amount refunded | Nothing |
| **Chargebacks** | None: chargebacks do not exist on Soca | Not applicable |

> **The 1% discount is Soca’s cost, not yours**: On a $100 sale the customer pays $99 with a Soca account or $100 from a connected wallet — but **either way you receive $98.50** (the $100 price minus the 1.5% fee). Soca funds the customer’s 1% discount out of its own fee; it never comes out of your share. The discount brings you customers at no cost to you.

> **No fixed costs**: No monthly fee, no setup fee, no minimums, no per-seat pricing. Every product, from checkout and subscriptions to analytics and the API, is included. Soca only makes money when a business does.

## How does the 1% customer discount work?

When a customer pays with their Soca account, the checkout applies a 1% discount to the listed price before the payment is made. A $100.00 purchase costs $99.00. It is not cashback and not a rewards balance: there is nothing to accrue, claim, or redeem. The price is simply lower, and the receipt shows it.

### Who gets the discount?

The discount is a Soca account benefit: it applies when you are signed in to a Soca account and paying from a wallet registered to it. Paying from a connected wallet without a Soca account works exactly the same way, at the full listed price. The business pays the same 1.5% either way, so a customer without an account costs the business nothing extra.

The business's 1.5% platform fee is charged on the listed price, not the discounted one, and settles to the business in the same moment the customer pays. Soca covers the 1% discount out of its own fee, so the business receives the same net whether or not the customer used their Soca account. It works the same online and in person: paying with a Soca account takes 1% off the listed price, paying from a connected wallet pays the full price, and the business pays 1.5% either way.

## Why can Soca be cheaper than cards?

A card payment is split between the issuing bank (interchange), the card network, and the payment processor, which is why cards typically cost 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction, settling in days. A Soca payment has none of those intermediaries: money moves directly between two wallets on a public network whose per-transaction cost is a fraction of a cent (and Soca sponsors even that).

The other structural saving is fraud economics. Payments are push-based wallet transfers, so card-style chargebacks (and their fees) do not exist. That removes the chargeback fees, dispute operations, and fraud-reserve overhead that card pricing has to cover. The result is a margin wide enough to charge the business less **and** discount the customer's price at the same time.

## Are there any hidden costs?

- **Network fees**: none for customers. Customers never pay network fees. Soca sponsors gas on every transaction.
- **Currency conversion**: none within Soca. Everything is priced, paid, and settled in USDC, a fully-backed digital dollar, so $1 in is $1 out.
- **Payout or withdrawal fees**: none, because there is no payout step. Funds settle directly to the business's own wallet inside the payment transaction.
- **Refund fees**: none. A refund is a new merchant-signed USDC transfer back to the customer, never a reversal, always visible on-chain.

Fees are disclosed at checkout and itemized on every payment record, so what you see in the dashboard is exactly what happened on the network.