Cloudbeds Payments is the card processing built into the Cloudbeds property system, with the merchant account in Cloudbeds' name and Stripe running the transactions underneath. Cloudbeds publishes no rate for it anywhere on its own site. The only figures on its domain are examples in a help article, a blended 2.9% on domestic cards and 3.9% on international ones plus $0.30, or interchange plus 1.2%, both labeled illustrative and both said to vary by region. Stripe publishes 2.9% plus 30 cents on each successful domestic card payment, which is the figure to hold any Cloudbeds quote against. Most small properties should take Cloudbeds Payments, because it saves the hours that go into matching payouts against bookings every month. In return you lose direct access to your own records, because refunds happen only on Cloudbeds' screen and anything you want to know about a charge you have to ask Cloudbeds for.
What Cloudbeds publishes, and what it does not
Underneath, the engine is Stripe either way. Stripe's case study on Cloudbeds says Cloudbeds has relied on Stripe since 2019 to process transactions, whether the guest books direct or through a travel site. Since the merchant account is in Cloudbeds' name, Cloudbeds holds the record of every charge, and you see what Cloudbeds reports back to you.
On price, the payments product page lists two ways of charging and gives no rate for either. A blended rate is a flat percentage plus a flat fee on every card, whatever the card is. Cost plus charges you what the card networks take, called interchange, plus a set markup, so your cost moves with whichever card the guest used. Cloudbeds reconciles that the following month.
| Model | What it means | The only numbers on Cloudbeds' own domain |
|---|---|---|
| Blended | A flat percentage plus a flat fee on every card | 2.9% domestic, 3.9% international, plus $0.30, illustrative only |
| Cost plus | Interchange plus a markup, reconciled monthly | Interchange plus 1.2%, illustrative only |
| Chargeback | A fee taken off your next payout | Not published |
Checked on September 2026. The two models and their example figures come from Cloudbeds' cost plus versus blended rate article, which says both vary by region, and the chargeback line from Cloudbeds' own chargeback article, which confirms the fee without naming an amount.
Ask for both quotes in writing, and ask for the chargeback fee in dollars. You need them in writing so you can set them next to Stripe's 2.9% plus 30 cents and see what you are actually paying.
A card that fails
Stripe's published rate applies to each successful domestic card payment, so a decline costs you nothing on that rate. At a small property this comes up more than you would expect, because a refundable booking charges the same card twice, once for the deposit and once for the balance, and cards expire in between.
Ask what a declined card costs. Cloudbeds does not publish it, and a fee on a failed attempt changes the arithmetic on every rate plan that charges twice.
Where the money lands, and who pays for the payout
Stripe Connect, which is how a software platform runs payments on your behalf, carries a fee of $2 per active account and 0.25% plus 25 cents per payout. Stripe's Connect pricing charges those to the platform that set the account up, when the platform sets its own pricing. The platform can fold that cost into the rate it quotes you, so ask the vendor what its own costs are and how much of them are inside your number. Some vendors describe that payout fee as Stripe's charge to the property. Stripe's own pricing page puts it on the platform.
On Cloudbeds Payments, the one deduction Cloudbeds does describe is the chargeback fee, taken off your next payout on top of the disputed amount. The amount is not published.
We hit the same question at MINT @Naschmarkt, where I co-own 18 serviced apartments in Vienna. Our property system offered to handle the card payments, and the giveaway was a platform processing line of 1% on each charge, which is what a system in the middle adds on top of the processing cost. We moved the direct bookings onto our own Stripe account and that line went away. Nobody quoted it to us as a fee. It showed up as a line item after the money had moved, which is why every cost is worth asking for in writing before you sign.
Who owns the card, and who can look a charge up
| Your own Stripe account | Cloudbeds Payments | |
|---|---|---|
| What a card payment costs | 2.9% plus 30 cents, domestic, published | Quoted to you, nothing published |
| Whose merchant account it is | Yours | Cloudbeds' |
| A card the guest has already given you | Yours, and you can charge it again yourself | Cloudbeds will not hand it back for reuse |
| Refunds | From the Stripe dashboard, or automatically from your booking site | On Cloudbeds' dashboard only, by hand |
| A disputed charge | $15 when it arrives, $15 more if you answer it by hand, both back if you win | Comes off your payout, amount not published |
| Working out what a charge was for | You query the account yourself | You ask Cloudbeds |
Checked on September 2026, from Cloudbeds Payments, the Cloudbeds developer docs and Stripe's pricing.
Two of those rows come straight from Cloudbeds' own documentation for developers. Refunds have to be done by hand on the dashboard and cannot be set off automatically by your booking site, and a card a guest has already given you cannot be retrieved for a second charge, which Cloudbeds says it has no plan to change.
Refunding a guest does not give you the processing fee back on either side, and Stripe states plainly that the fees from the original payment are not returned.
Cloudbeds' own page says 99.96% of its payments customers see fewer than one chargeback a month, and Cloudbeds Payments is PCI DSS Level 1 certified, the highest tier of the card industry's security standard. PCI certification covers how card data is handled and has nothing to do with who wins a chargeback. A Cloudbeds customer the company addressed as Jason wrote on Trustpilot that guests filed chargebacks on services they had plainly used and won them, and the card networks settle those whatever your property system recorded. You fight your own disputes on either side of this choice.
Keeping your own account is allowed
You do not have to use Cloudbeds Payments. Cloudbeds states that setting up a gateway is completely optional and that an account you already hold connects instead, with Stripe among the gateways it supports in the US and Canada alongside Authorize.net, Elavon Converge, Fiserv and PayPal Payflow Pro.
Cloudbeds' product page quotes a front desk manager, Jasmin Wilson of Dahl's Motel, saying Cloudbeds cut her reconciliation from 10 hours to 15 minutes. The work she is describing is matching each payout in the bank against the bookings it paid for, which on a separate processor account means exporting one list and lining it up against another. Ten hours a month is a real saving at a property where the owner does that at the kitchen table.
So which one
At 8 to 15 units with no developer and everything already running through Cloudbeds, take Cloudbeds Payments. An owner already cleaning rooms and answering the phone will not be spending evenings querying a processor, and a shorter month end shows up in the week.
A property of 15 to 25 units that already charges cards on its own account should stay on it. Your stored cards remain yours. Stripe's published 2.9% plus 30 cents also gives you a figure to set any quote against.
If you are already on Cloudbeds Payments and it is working, there is little reason to move. Changing processor in season means running two of them for a quarter while the bookings you have already taken pay out through the old one.
If you have ever had to work out what an unlabeled charge on your statement was for, keep the account you can query yourself. If your booking page is the reason you are asking any of this, we wrote separately about what you can and cannot build on Cloudbeds and about choosing the booking engine that sits in front of it.
We build direct booking sites and we do not resell any payment processor, so there is no version of this answer that earns us anything. We only work with properties booking over $350,000 a year, and we say so on our about page. If you are under that line, the two quotes and this page should be enough to decide without us. If you are over it and want somebody to read those quotes with you, book a call.
