SamCart vs Stripe is really Stripe alone versus Stripe plus SamCart, because most SamCart sellers charge cards through Stripe or SamPay, SamCart’s Stripe-backed processor. Stripe alone (2.9% plus 30¢ a sale, no monthly fee) suits sellers who only need a payment page. SamCart adds sales pages and courses from $59 a month, billed yearly.
The difference is the add-ons. Stripe’s free Payment Links include promo codes and up to 10 optional items. SamCart’s $59 Core plan has no order bumps or upsells, and Pro at $149 a month has both. CartMango, which I run, has bumps from $10 a year once paid plans start in November, free right now, with no cut on top of the card fee.
Search for a way to take card payments and both names keep turning up, often on the same page, as if you had to pick one of them.
Get it wrong on the SamCart side and you pay $59 a month for a plan that turns out to have no order bumps. Get it wrong on the Stripe side and you end up wiring file delivery together yourself.
Below, you’ll first see what 100 sales of $47 a month costs on each route. Then the choice is split into 5 jobs, with what Stripe covers and what SamCart adds, plan by plan.
Key Takeaways
- SamCart mostly runs on Stripe. Most sellers charge through Stripe or SamPay, its Stripe-backed processor, so the 2.9% plus 30¢ card fee stays either way.
- Stripe alone has add-ons the ranking comparisons skip. Free Payment Links take promo codes and show up to 10 optional items before payment.
- SamCart’s order bumps need Pro. Core at $59 a month billed yearly has no bumps or upsells. Pro at $149 adds both, plus failed-payment recovery.
- Closing SamCart stops some billing. Payment plans stop the day you close the account, and so does every PayPal subscription. Subscriptions on your own Stripe keep running.
- The monthly gap is the plan price. At 100 sales of $47, Stripe alone costs $166 in card fees. SamCart Pro makes it about $315.25.
- CartMango connects to your own Stripe or PayPal. CartMango puts order bumps on its $10 a year plan and takes no cut of each sale.
SamCart vs Stripe: one sits on top of the other
SamCart is a checkout and sales-page tool that hands every card charge to a payment processor, usually Stripe. SamCart’s own processor, SamPay, was built with Stripe for SamCart only, and Stripe’s case study on SamCart says 99% of new SamCart customers choose it during onboarding.
Before you spend $59 a month on a checkout, it helps to know which selling mistakes are already costing you sales. The Online Selling Mistakes Challenge walks through 5 of them in 5 short emails.
Sellers on SamCart’s Core plan can connect their own Stripe account or PayPal instead of SamPay, and Pro adds Braintree, Authorize.net and Easy Pay Direct. On card processing, SamCart’s pricing FAQ says it “does not take a dime over what the credit card companies charge” when you use SamPay or Stripe, both at 2.9% plus 30¢. SamCart’s plan price has to buy enough on top of Stripe to pay for itself.
What 100 sales of $47 a month costs on each route
On 100 sales of $47 a month, Stripe alone costs $166 in card fees, SamCart Core on Stripe about $225.25, SamCart Pro about $315.25, and CartMango’s $20 a year Gold plan about $167.67 once paid plans start. Every plan price below is the yearly bill divided by 12, so all 4 rows sit on the same basis.
| Route | Plan, per month | Card fees | Total | Bumps, upsells |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe alone | $0 | $166.00 | $166.00 | Add-ons before payment only |
| SamCart Core | about $59.25 | $166.00 | about $225.25 | Neither |
| SamCart Pro | about $149.25 | $166.00 | about $315.25 | Both |
| CartMango Gold | about $1.67 | $166.00 | about $167.67 | Both |
CartMango is the checkout I run, and it is free right now, so today that row is just the $166 in card fees. From November, CartMango’s $10 a year plan covers order bumps and its $20 plan adds upsells.
The card fee is the same $1.66 on every $47 sale, because all 4 routes use Stripe’s standard 2.9% plus 30¢ from Stripe’s pricing page. Buyers paying with a card from another country add 1.5%, plus 1% more if a currency conversion is needed. SamCart prints $59 and $149 on its yearly toggle, billed as $711 and $1,791 a year. Paid month to month, Core is $79 and Pro is $199, which makes the totals $245 and $365.
None of these totals includes sales tax collection. SamCart lists a tax collection rate of 0.5% on Core and 0.35% on Pro, and Stripe’s own tax tool charges 0.5% per transaction in places where you are registered to collect. If all $4,700 were taxable, that adds $23.50 a month at 0.5%, or $16.45 at 0.35%.
Watch for old prices on this search. 2 of the pages ranking for it quote SamCart prices that are no longer on its pricing page: imnights lists Launch at $49, Grow at $99 and Scale at $199 a month, and SourceForge shows $39 a month. SamCart’s help center says Launch, Grow and Scale are “no longer available to new customers”. Our SamCart pricing breakdown lists the current plans side by side.
Job 1: the page your buyer pays on
Stripe gives you a hosted payment page through Payment Links, set up in the Stripe Dashboard with no code. You add a product, pick your logo and colors, and share the link anywhere. The page lives on Stripe’s domain unless you pay Stripe $10 a month to use your own.
That page is a checkout and nothing more, so your sales pitch has to live on a website, a link-in-bio page or an email.
SamCart covers both halves. Its plans include a page builder for sales pages, link-in-bio pages and opt-in pages, plus its own checkout. Core has a catch: SamCart’s plan guide lists the Core checkout as “SamCart-branded”, and customizable checkout branding starts on Pro.
The page also decides what happens when a buyer leaves without paying. SamCart sends cart abandonment emails on Core. Stripe’s guide to abandoned carts has you collect the buyer’s consent, listen for the expired checkout, and send the reminder yourself or through another tool.
Job 2: a second product in the same order
Stripe Payment Links can show up to 10 optional items at checkout, which buyers add with a tap before they pay. You set them up in the Dashboard by clicking “+ Add recommended products”, according to Stripe’s Payment Links guide. The same guide covers promo codes and an upgrade from a monthly to a yearly subscription. All 3 features work before the buyer pays, and none of them is a 1-click extra after the card goes through, which is what a post-purchase upsell does.
Stripe’s own Payment Links docs. Read the first line: up to 10 optional items, added before the buyer checks out.
SamCart has both kinds, on Pro. An order bump is a checkbox add-on on the checkout page, and a 1-click upsell is an offer on the page after payment, charged to the card already on file. SamCart’s plan guide marks both with a dash for Core.
SamCart’s help-center plan guide. The Core column is a dash on every row, including order bumps and 1-click upsells.
Add-ons like this work, and I fall for them myself. After my daughter’s birthday dinner we stopped at a gelato shop, and the large cup cost only a little more than the regular one. We all got large, full as we were, and I couldn’t finish mine. As I wrote to my list back then, I’m a marketer and “I still fall to this sales tactic. Shows that it works.”
The question is what the bump costs you to run. Moving from Core to Pro adds $90 a month on yearly billing, so your bumps and upsells have to bring in at least that much extra before they earn anything. On CartMango, order bumps are on every plan, from $10 a year, and upsell pages need CartMango’s $20 a year plan.
Job 3: getting the product to the buyer
Stripe does not deliver your product. After a Payment Link sale, Stripe’s post-payment guide offers 2 screens: a thank-you message, or a redirect to a page you choose. You can redirect buyers to a download page, but anyone who has that address can open it, paid or not. Anything smarter, like emailing a personal download link, means connecting Stripe to another tool through its webhooks or a service like Zapier. Our Gumroad vs Stripe post walks through the same gap.
SamCart handles delivery on every plan. It sends digital products after payment with protected links, and Core already includes its courses app with a members area.
Job 4: renewals and failed cards
Stripe can bill subscriptions on its own, and Payment Links can sell them. When Stripe Billing runs the subscription, Stripe adds 0.7% of the billed amount on top of the card fee, per Stripe’s pricing page. On a $47 monthly subscription that is about 33¢ a renewal. That 0.7% buys the boring but valuable parts. Smart Retries tries a failed card again on its own, and a customer portal lets subscribers update their card without emailing you.
SamCart sells subscriptions on Core. Its version of the retry tool, Subscription Saver, which its plan guide also calls dunning, is Pro only, and so is its customer portal. A Core seller gets subscriptions without SamCart’s automatic recovery tool.
Our guide to selling subscriptions online compares what 6 tools keep from a $10 a month subscriber.
Job 5: what keeps billing after you close SamCart
Closing a SamCart account stops part of your recurring income, and which part depends on the processor. SamCart’s cancellation guide spells it out:
- Stripe subscriptions keep going. Active recurring subscriptions “continue to bill normally even when the SamCart account is closed”, and you manage them from Stripe afterwards.
- Payment plans stop. Plans with a set number of payments “are stopped immediately and will not continue to bill”, because SamCart itself manages them.
- PayPal stops everything. On PayPal or any processor other than Stripe, “charges for recurring and limited subscriptions are stopped right away upon the cancellation of your account.”
The guide names Stripe, not SamPay. Ask SamCart support how SamPay subscriptions behave on exit before you build a membership on it.
Stripe alone has nothing to leave, since every subscription and payment plan already lives in your own Stripe account. CartMango works the other way from SamCart: if you leave CartMango, your subscriptions keep paying you.
SamCart vs PayPal: the same choice at a higher card fee
SamCart vs PayPal asks the same question, since PayPal is another processor SamCart connects on every plan.
PayPal Checkout costs 3.49% plus a 49¢ fixed fee in the US, on PayPal’s merchant fee page. On a $47 sale that is $2.13, against $1.66 through Stripe. Over 100 sales a month the PayPal route costs $47 more, the price of 1 extra sale.
If your buyers ask for PayPal, offer it next to Stripe. Run subscriptions through Stripe, though, since every PayPal subscription on SamCart stops when you close the account. Our breakdown of what PayPal charges covers the international and currency fees.
Who covers each job, and on which plan
Stripe alone handles add-ons before payment for no monthly fee and failed-card recovery for Billing’s 0.7%, SamCart Core adds delivery and abandoned-cart emails for about $59.25 a month, and Pro adds order bumps, upsells and its own recovery tool for about $149.25.
| Job | Stripe alone | SamCart Core | SamCart Pro | CartMango |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price a month, billed yearly | $0 | about $59.25 | about $149.25 | about $0.83 to $2.50 |
| Abandoned-cart emails | Webhooks plus your own email | Yes | Yes | On the $20 plan |
| Add-ons before payment | Up to 10 optional items | No | Order bumps | Order bumps |
| Offers after payment | No | No | 1-click upsells | Upsells on the $20 plan |
| File delivery | Redirect only | Protected links | Protected links | Protected links |
| Failed-card recovery | Smart Retries, with Billing’s 0.7% | Not included | Subscription Saver | Not on its plan table |
| Billing after you leave | Nothing to leave | Payment plans and PayPal stop, SamPay unclear | Payment plans and PayPal stop, SamPay unclear | Subscriptions keep running |
CartMango’s prices are its $10, $20 and $30 a year plans divided by 12. CartMango’s abandoned-cart emails send through the email tool you connect, and CartMango’s pricing table shows which plan carries what.
FAQ
How much does SamCart cost per month?
SamCart Core costs $79 a month, or $59 a month billed yearly at $711 a year. Pro costs $199 a month, or $149 billed yearly at $1,791. Enterprise is a custom quote. Every plan has a 7-day free trial, and card fees of 2.9% plus 30¢ come on top. Our SamCart pricing breakdown has the full plan list.
What payment processor does SamCart use?
Most SamCart sellers use SamPay, SamCart’s own processor built with Stripe. Stripe’s case study puts it at 99% of new SamCart customers. On any plan you can also connect your own Stripe account or PayPal, and Pro adds Braintree, Authorize.net and Easy Pay Direct.
What’s the difference between Stripe and Stripe Checkout?
Stripe is the payment account that charges cards and pays you out. Stripe Checkout is its ready-made payment page, included in the standard 2.9% plus 30¢ with no extra fee. Payment Links are the no-code way to create a Checkout page, so you can sell without writing any code.
What are the downsides of using Stripe?
Stripe alone does not deliver files or offer a 1-click upsell after payment, and its public docs set up abandoned-cart emails through webhooks. Cards from other countries add 1.5%, and each dispute costs $15. Stripe also limits what you can sell, per its prohibited and restricted businesses list. In an r/stripe thread about selling digital products, a commenter says digital products are fine “as long as what you are selling is not prohibited” and you keep chargebacks low, whether you charge through a shopping cart or Stripe’s own dashboard.
What are some good alternatives to SamCart?
Common SamCart alternatives include other checkout tools such as ThriveCart, Gumroad, SendOwl and Sellfy, and for a single product, Stripe Payment Links alone can be enough. CartMango is another, with order bumps on its lowest plan. Our list of SamCart alternatives compares 8 of them.
Is SamCart any good?
SamCart covers checkout, pages and delivery on every plan, while order bumps, upsells and failed-payment recovery need Pro. Billing is the most common complaint in its 1-star reviews: our SamCart review sorted 100 of them, and 59 describe a renewal or a charge after canceling. Check which plan a review is praising before you sign up.
Order bumps and upsells on your own Stripe
The SamCart vs Stripe choice usually comes down to Job 2. If you only need a payment page, Stripe alone already covers it, add-ons included. If you want bumps and after-payment upsells, SamCart puts both on a $149 to $199 a month plan.
CartMango connects to your own Stripe or PayPal and adds no fee per sale. CartMango puts order bumps on its $10 a year plan and upsells and abandoned-cart emails on its $20 plan, and it is free right now until paid plans start in November. If you leave CartMango, your subscriptions keep paying you.
About the Author
👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.
Related Reading
- SamCart vs GoHighLevel: SamCart’s order bumps on Pro against GoHighLevel’s $97 Starter
- ThriveCart vs SamCart: 2 funnel carts compared on what happens to your recurring revenue
- Shopping cart software: the 3 kinds of cart and the 5 jobs each one has to do
- Cart abandonment software: 16 options narrowed by 3 cuts, and what each really costs