Fees

5% flat on the amount collected. That is the number, and it is the only number the donor’s money passes through.

What the donor pays

Exactly the amount you asked for. There is no processing fee added at checkout, no “cover the fees?” toggle, no surcharge line item. If you mint a link for 50000 COP, the donor is charged COP 50.000.

What the cause receives

	COP
Donation	50.000
Vaki fee (5%)	2.500
Credited to the cause	47.500

The fee is taken from the collected amount, so the arithmetic is the same at every size: the cause receives 95% of what its donors gave.

Vaki absorbs the gateway’s cost

Every payment method has a cost of its own — PSE charges a flat fee per transaction, card networks charge a percentage plus cross-border and FX spread where it applies. Vaki absorbs those costs out of the 5%.

Concretely, and this is the part that matters when you compare us to a card-only checkout:

• The donor is not charged a separate processing fee, in any currency, on any payment method.
• The cause is not charged a separate processing fee. The 5% is the deduction.
• Your integration does not need to model gateway costs. There is no per-method fee table to keep in sync, and a donor switching from a card to PSE does not change what the cause receives.

This is why fee_percent on a checkout link is a single number rather than a breakdown. There is nothing else to break down at your layer.

fee_percent on the API

POST /v1/checkout_links returns fee_percent on the link it mints:

{
  "id": "chl_01J9Z4M2K7QF3B",
  "amount": 50000,
  "currency": "COP",
  "fee_percent": 5
}

And a cause carries its fee in finance_data.comision:

{
  "key": "clinicalaliga",
  "finance_data": { "comision": 5 }
}

comision is a percentage, not a fraction

5 means 5%, not 500%. It is a percentage in Vaki’s data model and this API passes it through unchanged rather than quietly normalising it. If you compute an expected net for display, divide by 100:

const fee = Math.round(amount * (link.fee_percent / 100));
const net = amount - fee;

Do not hardcode 0.05. Read fee_percent from the response — a cause can be configured with a different rate, and reading the value you were given is free.

The fee is set on the cause when it is created, not per donation. You cannot override it on a checkout link, deliberately: the fee that applies is resolved server-side from the cause, never from anything a request or a URL carries. A donor editing a query string can change what they pay; they cannot change what anyone is charged for it.

What is not on this page

Some fee-adjacent mechanics are outside this API and are not documented here because we would be guessing at your case:

• Withdrawal mechanics — minimums, timing and any fees on getting money out of a cause to a bank account. Those live with the withdrawal flow in the Vaki dashboard today, and they will be documented on this site alongside the withdrawals endpoint, not before.
• Taxes and tax receipts. Colombian tax treatment depends on the cause’s legal entity. For US donors, Vaki does not issue donor acknowledgments today — see Known limitations before you tell anyone what their gift does for their taxes. Ask us about your specific case rather than inferring it from a docs page.
• Negotiated rates. If 5% does not work for your volume, that is a conversation with Vaki, not a field in the API.

If you need any of these in writing before you integrate, mail soporte@vaki.co and ask for the specific number. We would rather answer than have you build against an assumption.