Every guide to selling art online lines up the same column of percentages and calls it a comparison.
The percentage is the least useful number on the page.
The question that decides your income isn't “what's the commission.” It's “what does a buyer have to pay for me to end up with what I need?” On that measure the answers range from about €1,320 to €2,400 for the same €1,200 in the artist's pocket.
The Received Wisdom: Commission Is The Business Model
It's recited like a catechism. Galleries take a cut. Always have. Thirty to fifty per cent is the going rate. Don't fight the toll booth.
All of that is true and none of it is inevitable. A commission taken off the top is a decision somebody made in a spreadsheet, not a law of physics — and there's a second arrangement that almost nobody publishes, because the first one makes more money for the people not publishing it.
Decode Every Platform, Verified
| Platform | Cut | Other costs | Payout |
|---|---|---|---|
| Saatchi Art | 40% | No listing fee. Promo discounts come off before your cut, so a 20% sale costs you, not them. Open-edition prints pay 60% of profit, not price | 14–19 days after delivery, then request it yourself through a payment portal |
| Artfinder | 45% (Core) or 40% (Premium) | Subscription about €12 or €35 a month. UK sellers pay 20% VAT on the commission. Managed shipping keeps the shipping money | After the delivery window |
| Singulart | 50% | Subscription tiers roughly €30–€200 a month. Full-service logistics and an advisor, which is real work for the money | After the delivery window |
| Etsy | ~10% stacked, ~24% with off-site ads | 6.5% transaction fee including shipping; 3% + flat processing; $0.20 per listing per four months; 2.5% currency conversion; 15% off-site ads, dropping to 12% and becoming mandatory above $10,000 annual sales | Weekly, or same-day for 1% — best in the business |
| Mus3ums.com | Margin added on top — about 9.1% of what the buyer pays | None. You type your net price and that is what you receive | On settlement |
The Key: Reverse The Arithmetic
Stop comparing percentages. Ask what a buyer has to say yes to.
| Platform | Buyer pays | You receive | Extra the buyer pays vs the cheapest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Singulart | €2,400 | €1,200 | +€1,080 |
| Artfinder Core | Over €2,100 | €1,200 | +€780 |
| Saatchi Art | €2,000 | €1,200 | +€680 |
| Etsy | About €1,340 | €1,200 | +€20 |
| Mus3ums.com | €1,320 | €1,200 | — |
Same money in your pocket. Up to €1,080 difference in what a stranger has to be willing to pay.
That gap isn't profit anybody is pocketing. It's demand you're not scaring off — and it never appears as a loss anywhere, because a sale that didn't happen leaves no record. It just looks like art doesn't sell much.
The Payout Clock, Which Matters More Than It Should
For a working artist buying canvas out of last month's sales, cash-flow speed can be worth more than five points of commission.
- Marketplace: weekly by default, daily available, same-day transfer for about 1%. Genuinely excellent and rarely credited.
- Curated gallery platforms: 14 to 19 days after delivery, which means three to five weeks from sale — and several require you to go and request it through a third-party portal, like collecting a parcel nobody told you had arrived.
Nobody puts this column in a comparison, and for a lot of artists it's the column that decides whether the month works.
The February 2023 Tell
One dated fact explains the whole commission model.
In February 2023, Saatchi Art quietly raised its commission from 35% to 40%. No redesign. No new services. Nothing extra done for the artist. One morning the number that used to be 35 was 40.
That's the structural weakness of any off-the-top arrangement: the platform can raise the price of being represented at any time, because you never see an invoice. It just comes quietly out of a sale you were already pleased about, and you register it as “that felt smaller than I expected” and then forget, because you're an artist and not an accountant.
An added-on-top margin can't do that invisibly. If it changes, the buyer's price changes, and buyers notice prices.
One Artwork, Several Ways To Get Paid
The commission platforms give you one shot: list the original, hope it sells, take the hit if it doesn't. The failure mode is a painting sitting there.
One approved artwork can instead run on several channels at once — the original itself, prints made from it, hand-painted reproductions, a licensed digital file, or a timed auction — and none of the print, reproduction or licence channels require you to pack a box. The original sells once. The rest keeps earning off the same upload.
And if you have studio capacity, inbound commission work — a custom piece, a photo turned into an oil, a hotel fit-out — arrives as a quotation rather than a listing hoping to be noticed.
The Market You're Actually Selling Into
An uncomfortable number, from the public visitor statistics: over a rolling twelve-month window, Contemporary work — everything after 1970 — accounts for about 1.7% of what people choose to look at. The Renaissance takes about 29%, the nineteenth century 27%, the modern period 24%.
That's the weather. It doesn't mean don't paint, and it doesn't mean nobody buys contemporary work.
It means: be extremely suspicious of any business model taking 40 to 50 per cent off the top in exchange for “discovery” in a category that gets one visit in sixty. That's a lot of money for a service whose value the data does not obviously support.
Three Questions Worth Asking
What's the cheapest platform to sell original art?
By percentage, a marketplace at around 10% beats every curated gallery platform. But percentage is the wrong axis. On the question that decides your income — what a buyer must pay for you to net your number — a platform that adds its margin on top rather than deducting it wins, because it doesn't force you to inflate your list price by two-thirds.
How long until I actually get paid?
Marketplace: weekly, or same-day for about 1%. Curated gallery platforms: 14 to 19 days after delivery, several requiring you to request it yourself. If you buy materials out of last week's sales, that gap can outweigh five points of commission.
Does a lower commission mean fewer buyers?
Not reliably, and that's the assumption high-commission platforms depend on. A 40% deduction forces your price up 67%, and every one of those extra units is a sale that quietly doesn't happen.
The Verdict
Nobody ever asks why the toll booth is built the way it is.
It's built that way because it works — for the people who built it. A cut taken off the top is invisible to the artist and enormous to the buyer, which is the ideal arrangement if you hold the gate and a catastrophic one if you hold the brush.
You don't have to storm it. Just do the reverse arithmetic once, out loud, with real numbers: what does a stranger have to pay for me to end up with what I need?
Then go and sell wherever that number is smallest.
Sources
- Saatchi Art Help Center — commission rate, promotional discount and commission split, payout process.
- Artfinder Seller Support — seller plan subscriptions, managed shipping, commission and fees policy.
- Singulart artist subscription pages and FAQ.
- Etsy published seller-fee guidance and payout-schedule documentation, including the $10,000 off-site ads threshold.
- Mus3ums.com published seller terms.
- Public visitor statistics — period shares.
All fee figures verified 8 August 2026 against each platform's own published terms. Re-check before republishing past February 2027 — these change without notice, as February 2023 demonstrated. Visitor figures read 11 August 2026 and move daily.
