Every freelance marketplace advertises the work, not the math — you find out what Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer.com, or Toptal actually keeps only after the payment lands and the number on your bank statement is smaller than the number you quoted. This calculator does that math up front: enter the project amount and pick your platform, and it shows the exact fee, your real net earnings, and the take-rate percent behind both, so you can price the work with the platform's cut already priced in instead of discovering it after the fact.
How it works
Each platform charges its cut as a straight percentage of the project or order amount, and that percentage is the whole calculation: multiply the project amount by the platform's take rate to get the fee, then subtract the fee from the project amount to get what actually lands in your account. There's no tiering by client history and no bracket that changes with volume in the version used here — one flat rate per platform, applied to whatever amount you enter.
The platforms themselves don't all work the same way, though. Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.com all deduct their fee directly from what the client pays before it reaches you. Toptal is structured differently — talent set their own hourly or project rate, and Toptal states plainly that it does not take a cut from that rate at all. Instead, Toptal negotiates its own separate markup with the client, on top of what you're quoted, so your net earnings equal your full rate rather than a client-paid amount minus a platform fee. That's why Toptal shows a 0% take rate here: it isn't a rounding artifact, it's how the platform actually works.
Worked example
Say you land a $1,000 project through Upwork, whose freelancer service fee runs 10%.
- Platform fee: $1,000 × 10% = $100
- Net earnings: $1,000 − $100 = $900
- Take rate: 10%
Run the same $1,000 project through Fiverr instead, at its flat 20% cut, and the fee doubles to $200 with $800 landing in your account — a $100 difference on an identical project, purely because of which marketplace it went through. Route it through Toptal and, per Toptal's own stated model, none of that $1,000 quoted rate gets deducted as a platform fee at all.
How to interpret your result
Net earnings is the number that actually matters — it's what you'll see in your account, not the headline amount the client agreed to pay. If you're quoting a project and have a specific take-home number in mind, work backward: divide your target net earnings by (1 − take rate as a decimal). Wanting to net $900 on a platform with a 10% fee means quoting roughly $1,000, since $900 ÷ 0.90 = $1,000 — the fee comes out of the markup you built in, not out of the number you actually needed.
Take rate is also worth comparing before you commit to a platform, not after you've already delivered the work. A client willing to pay the same amount off-platform or through a lower-fee marketplace can be worth more to you than the identical gross number routed through a 20% cut — but weigh that against what each platform actually provides in exchange, since Upwork and Fiverr's fees also buy you discovery, dispute resolution, and payment protection that a private arrangement doesn't automatically include.
Methodology & sources
The formulas: platformFee = projectAmount × (takeRatePercent / 100) and netEarnings = projectAmount − platformFee, both rounded to the cent. Take rates used here (checked 2026-07-08): Freelancer.com charges freelancers 10% of the project value, confirmed directly on its own fees and charges page. Toptal's own talent FAQ states that talent set their own rate and "Toptal does not take a cut from that" — its margin comes from a separate markup charged to the client. Fiverr charges a long-standing flat 20% on every order, extra, and tip, per its seller-facing fee guidance. Upwork charged a flat 10% freelancer service fee from April 2023 until May 2025, when it switched to a variable, algorithm-set fee between 0% and 15% per contract that Upwork does not publish the formula for; this calculator uses 10% as the typical rate cited in current freelancer reporting on that change, not a guarantee of what any single contract will show. Platform fees change — re-check the rate your specific contract or gig actually displays before you rely on it for pricing.