Creator Fee Schedule

Candidate pricing for one-time digital-product orders through Aethera Exchange and Stripe Connect.

Engineering draft candidate · No effective date · Not approved for production use

Unapproved policy candidate

This candidate describes the implemented payment model for review and testing. Owner approval, qualified legal and tax review, production policy configuration, and launch evidence are still pending. This page is not an effective fee schedule and does not authorize paid Exchange sales.

Aethera platform fee

The candidate Aethera fee is 12.5% of the discounted pretax product price.

Discounts are applied before the fee is calculated. Tax is excluded from the fee base. The implementation records the exact fee rate, fee base, rounding, tax, and creator-proceeds amounts with each seller-specific order.

Destination charge and processing costs

For an Exchange order, Aethera creates the Stripe payment on the platform and sets the creator's connected account as the destination. This is a platform-created destination charge, not a direct charge on the creator account.

Stripe's application_fee_amount for this flow retains two separately recorded components: the Aethera fee and any sales tax for which an approved policy makes the platform liable. Tax is not creator revenue. Aethera pays Stripe processing fees for these Exchange destination charges; those processing fees are not deducted from the creator-proceeds snapshot.

How proceeds are calculated

Creator proceeds equal discounted pretax product revenue minus the 12.5% Aethera fee. For a discounted pretax price of $10.00, the candidate Aethera fee is $1.25 and creator proceeds are $8.75. If platform-liable tax of T applies, the buyer total is $10.00 + T, the provider application-fee amount is $1.25 + T, and the destination transfer remains $8.75. Stripe processing costs are charged to Aethera separately.

This arithmetic example is not a tax classification, registration, rate, or availability promise. Exact order snapshots and integer-minor-unit rounding control the implemented calculation.

Refunds and disputes

  • Approved full or partial refunds use the original platform payment and the order's immutable line-level pretax, tax, Aethera-fee, and creator-proceeds allocations.
  • The destination transfer is reversed for the refunded creator-proceeds portion. The related provider application-fee refund returns the allocated Aethera fee and retained platform-liable tax, subject to exact cumulative rounding.
  • Stripe debits destination-charge disputes from the platform. Creator proceeds are not reduced for an Exchange dispute unless a separate creator-recovery policy is approved and then executed through the audited recovery workflow. No such recovery policy is currently approved.
  • Aethera bears any Stripe processing cost that Stripe does not return for this destination-charge flow.

Refund eligibility and digital-delivery considerations are described in the unapproved Refund Policy candidate.

Payments outside this schedule

This schedule does not apply when a customer buys a first-party service directly from Aethera, including eligible Aethera subscriptions, VTT plans, hosting, storage, or premium platform tools. Those are Aethera transactions, not Exchange creator revenue. Creator memberships retain their separately recorded recurring Connect flow, with the creator as seller and licensor; they are not the one-time Exchange destination charges covered by this schedule. This candidate also does not rewrite historical transactions.

Review gates still open

  • Owner and qualified legal review have not approved the fee, allocation, refund, or dispute terms.
  • Qualified tax review, registrations, product classification, and allowed sales regions remain pending.
  • No approved version or effective date is configured for this candidate.
  • Production provider, reconciliation, and fee-allocation evidence remains a separate launch gate.

Acknowledging this test-mode candidate does not enable paid creator features. Aethera will publish a dated, effective fee schedule before live creator commerce is offered.

Questions

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