What is Lodgify Payments, and what does it cost per booking?
Lodgify Payments is Lodgify's own card processing, with Stripe underneath it, so the deposit, the balance and the payout all happen inside the system where the booking already sits. Lodgify's guide to setting up a Lodgify Payments account calls it "powered by Stripe". Payouts go out daily, per the Lodgify Payments product page, which says the product is available to US-based hosts. The bigger decision this one sits inside is whether to build a checkout of your own at all, and I wrote that up separately as Stripe for direct bookings at a small hotel, B&B or serviced apartment: should you build it, and what does it cost you.
A second fee sits alongside the card rate: a flat 1% on every payment that passes through any gateway connected inside Lodgify. Lodgify's fees article says so plainly: "The Transaction Fee is a percentage fee applied on all payments processed by the payment gateway that you configured within Lodgify."
|
Lodgify Payments |
Your own Stripe account inside Lodgify |
| Domestic US card |
2.90% plus $0.30 |
2.9% plus 30 cents, Stripe's public rate |
| International card |
4.40% plus $0.30 |
Not published as one figure |
| Lodgify's 1% fee |
Applies |
Applies |
| Currency conversion |
1% on anything but USD, EUR or GBP |
Stripe's own conversion fee |
| A chargeback |
$15, and $15 more to contest it, back only if you win |
$15 on arrival, $15 to answer it, back only if you win |
| A refund |
Neither fee comes back |
Free to issue, original fees gone |
| Merchant account held by |
Lodgify, through Stripe |
You |
Fees read from Lodgify Payments: Fees and stripe.com/pricing, checked on September 2026.
The arithmetic is on that same fees page, done by Lodgify: a $1,000 reservation on a US card costs $49.80 in fees and pays out $950.20, and on a card issued outside the US it costs $64.80 and pays out $935.20. Put your own month through the commission savings calculator before you compare the two.
Can I keep my own Stripe account and still run Lodgify?
Yes. Lodgify's payment processing page says you can "Accept Visa, MasterCard and American Express through Stripe or other gateways", and its help material names Braintree, Authorize.net and PayPal too. Bringing your own account does not remove Lodgify's 1%.
An operator asked exactly that under Lodgify's launch post for the product in 2025: "I'm confused on payment fees... By switching over, will Lodgify payments avoid that fee?" A Lodgify representative, Miquelle Radich, answered in writing: "The 1% Lodgify Application Fee listed there is our standard transaction fee. It applies to all gateways connected through Lodgify, including Lodgify Payments." Stripe's documentation for connected accounts shows the mechanism: a platform "can specify an application fee, which transfers to your platform's account balance when the connected account collects the payment". In plain terms, Lodgify names its slice of each payment and Stripe takes it out before the rest reaches your bank.
What breaks when you sell more than one rate
The 1% rides on both routes, so what you are choosing between is how much of the payment setup you can reach. For most operators that comes down to the property-level policy: one cancellation and deposit rule, set once for the whole property, that governs every rate plan you sell from it rather than each rate on its own.
Why you cannot change one rate plan without moving the other
Maxine and I run MINT @Naschmarkt in Vienna: 18 serviced apartments in five apartment types. Our refundable rate is 50% at booking, balance charged five days before arrival on the stored card, and a non-refundable rate sits beside it behaving differently on purpose. We tested delaying the charge on the refundable rate by changing the property-level cancellation policy text, expecting only the refundable rate to move. The same change moved the non-refundable rate too, because one property-level policy governs every rate plan sold from it, whether or not that is the rate you meant to change. We reverted it the same day.
We do not run Lodgify at MINT, and the property system we do run would have taken a 1% platform fee on every payment it handled for us, which is why we charge guests on our own Stripe account. MINT is in Austria, where Booking.com applies no rate parity, so a US or Canadian contract is stricter: read yours before you copy our structure.
Rolling reserves, and why a refund does not refund the fee
A rolling reserve is money Stripe keeps back out of your payouts to cover chargebacks and refunds before releasing the rest. Lodgify's setup guide is straight about it: "A percentage of your volume is held back by Stripe and kept in a reserve balance for a set period (often 30, 60, or 90 days)." Stripe decides whether you get one, and it decides after you are already taking bookings.
Refunds cost you either way. Lodgify states that "Lodgify Payment Fees and Transaction Fees are not returned because these fees are incurred at the time of the original payment", and Stripe takes the same position: nothing to issue the refund, and the original fee stays gone. A bad season of cancellations leaves you paying a fee on every booking that never happened. The same trade in another system is in the Mews Payments comparison we ran first.
The test to run this week
- Write down the deposit schedule you want on your refundable rate and on your non-refundable rate.
- Change the deposit or cancellation setting on one of them only.
- Open the other rate and read what it says now.
- Ask Lodgify support in writing whether a per-rate deposit schedule is possible on your plan, and keep the reply.
If both rates keep their own schedule, your setup holds. If changing one moves the other, every rate plan you invent from here lives under that single rule.
Should you use Lodgify Payments or your own processor?
Keep Lodgify Payments if the whole property runs on Lodgify and every rate you sell can live under one cancellation and deposit policy. Move to your own processor the day you want a refundable rate collecting on a different schedule than your non-refundable one, or a cancellation policy Lodgify does not offer.
| If this is you |
What I would do |
Why |
| Everything runs on Lodgify, nobody on staff builds software |
Keep Lodgify Payments |
One vendor, one invoice, daily payouts |
| You want a different deposit schedule per rate type |
Own the processor |
One property-level policy governs every rate under it |
| You have developers, or an agency that does this |
Own the processor |
You hold the merchant account and can trace a charge yourself |
| You are outside the United States |
Start from your own processor |
Lodgify publishes no country-by-country fee table, and points you to Stripe's availability list |
Read from Lodgify Payments: Fees and Lodgify Payments: Set up your account, checked on September 2026.
Three things you hand over when Lodgify holds the merchant account:
- The reserve decision, made on Lodgify's account rather than yours.
- A direct line to whoever holds your money, since a question about one charge goes through Lodgify first.
- Any payment schedule Lodgify's own settings do not offer.
None of that is a reason to leave a setup that works: if your rates are simple, Lodgify Payments at 2.90% plus $0.30 plus the 1% is a fair deal with nothing hidden in it. The other route is in the reconciliation we built for MINT, and the same comparison on another system is in the Cloudbeds Payments fee comparison we ran first.
If you are still not sure
Lodgify's pricing page states that "Lodgify does not take a cut of your bookings", at $14 to $42 a month across four plans billed yearly, and its company page puts hosts in over 180 countries on it. What it does not publish anywhere is a fee table for Lodgify Payments outside the United States, so if you are in Canada that is the gap to close in writing before you commit.
Fullstreak is the direct booking practice at Ekamoira: a checkout on your own website, connected to whichever property system you run, Lodgify included, plus the pages that get your property quoted by Google and the assistants. The whole system goes live in three weeks. We take on properties billing about $350,000 a year or more, because below that the commission we win back does not pay for the build in its first year. Book a call and bring the two rate plans you are trying to price.
