Application fees

Receiving application fees

An easy way to earn on a transaction is by charging an Application fee on any incoming payments of a connected account.

In this set-up the connected account pays their own Mollie payment fees, receives a Mollie invoice, and remains liable for potential refunds and chargebacks. If you want to split a payment with another party, for instance if you are a marketplace, we offer Split payments.

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Example

A ticketing platform wants to charge a fee per successful payment to each connected theatre. In this case, each theater has an account with Mollie, and they have the ticketing platform’s OAuth app authorized to create payments on their behalf.

The ticketing platform can add an application fee to each payment. When the payment is successful, the fee specified in the application fee is automatically transferred from the theater’s account to the platform’s account.

Note that the ticketing platform itself is responsible for invoicing the theaters for the incurred Application fees, and for handling VAT.

Enabling application fees

In order to be able to charge application fees with your app, you must first register to become an app developer. This can be done from the Dashboard. When you sign the developer agreement, application fees will automatically be available.

How to create an application fee

One-off application fees can be created on payments or orders. Application fees can also be set on Subscriptions, in which case the application fee will be added to each Payment created for the subscription.

They are created by passing additional parameters to the Create payment, Create order, or the Create subscription endpoint:

applicationFee object

Adding an application fee allows you to charge the merchant for the payment and transfer this to your own account. The application fee is deducted from the payment.

amount object required

The amount the app wants to charge, e.g. {"currency":"EUR", "value":"10.00"} if the app would want to charge €10.00. Read more about maximum application fees.

  • currency string required

    An ISO 4217 currency code. For application fees, this must always be EUR regardless of the currency of the payment, order or subscription.

  • value string required

    A string containing the exact amount you want to charge in the given currency. Make sure to send the right amount of decimals. Non-string values are not accepted.

description string required

The description of the application fee. This will appear on settlement reports to the merchant and to you.
The maximum length is 255 characters.

Testing application fees

You can submit the applicationFee parameter in test mode.

The application fee will be visible in the payment details in the dashboard of the transaction owner. However, the application fee is not added to the balance if the payment was created in test mode. It is advisable to do test payments with application fees in a live environment to verify the correct implementation of application fees.

You cannot use application fees with the same organization on which you created the oAuth application. In order to test or use application fees, you need to create another organization.

Maximum application fees

Payments API

Since Mollie usually also charges a fee on every payment, there is a limit to the maximum application fee amount.

The Mollie fee charged will depend on which method the consumer selects. To keep things simple however, we reserve €0,35 + 6% of the payment amount for us to be able to charge the Mollie fee.

This means the maximum can be calculated as follows:

Max application fee = amount of the payment - 0.35 + (0.06 × the amount of the payment)

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Example

The connected account of the ticket platforms has a payment of €10.-:

Max application fee = €10 - (€0.35 + 0.06×€10) = €10 - €0.95 = €9.05

The minimum amount is €0.01.

Orders API

The maximum application fee per payment is 10% of the total amount, up to a maximum of €2.00. If a higher maximum is required for your business, you can request this via Mollie’s customer service or your account manager at Mollie.

Multicurrency

Application fees are supported on all payments regardless of currency. However, the currency of the application fee must match either:

  • The primary balance currency of the sub-merchant: e.g. €1.00 if the primary balance is in euros;
  • The currency of the payment being created, provided the sub-merchant has an active balance in that currency: e.g. US$3.00 fee on a US$10.00 payment.