Docs · Billing & plans

The wallet, the fees, and what a shipment really costs

Forto's money model is deliberately boring: a prepaid wallet you approve once, a published fee schedule, and one statement line per shipment. This page is the whole thing — there is no fine print elsewhere.

The wallet

During onboarding you add a card and approve payments once. That single authorization covers your subscription, wallet top-ups, and duty settlement — you won’t be asked to re-approve routine charges. The wallet pre-funds shipping and duties; costs draw down from it as parcels ship, and it tops up automatically.

·A small reserve is held per label against estimate variance and later carrier corrections, and released when the shipment settles.
·VAT collected from your customers (IOSS) is held in a segregated account until it’s remitted — never mixed with operating cash.
·The money layer is built so the same charge can’t land twice, even across retries and webhook replays.

How plans are billed

Starter, Growth and Pro are self-serve. Install from the Shopify App Store and you pick a monthly plan on Shopify’s plan page; Shopify bills it on your Shopify bill, with the duty and tax calculation fee as usage; labels are paid from your Forto wallet at Forto’s prices. If you paid Forto first, Forto bills them monthly or yearly through Stripe, which prorates plan changes on your next invoice. Cancel any time; you keep access until the period ends. Each plan costs the same whether your orders ship on Forto’s carriers or on carrier contracts of your own connected to Forto. Enterprise is agreed with your account team and invoiced separately.

Every price, limit and fee is on Pricing. This page explains how they are counted and charged.

How limits are counted

·Orders. Each plan includes a number of orders a month. An order counts once: as a label when it ships on a label purchased through Forto, or, on Enterprise contracts that ship cross-border on their own carrier account, as a quoted order when Forto calculated its landed cost at checkout. A cross-border order Forto priced at checkout that your own carrier shipped. Counted once, when it ships — an order Forto ships counts as a label instead, never both. Domestic orders, page views and abandoned checkouts never count.
·Past the order limit — a small fee per extra order, debited from your wallet after the month closes (one line per month on your statement), or you upgrade. On the free plan, label purchases stop until the next month instead.
·Classified variants. Forto HS-classifies a number of your variants; codes you set yourself never count. Past the limit nothing is billed — the rest of your catalog quotes at an estimated (high) duty until it has a code.
·Taxpayer coverage. Where Forto holds the registration, it is the taxpayer of record on Pro: it charges, files and pays the tax, and answers to the tax office for it. Pro covers up to $25k of your cross-border sales a month; orders past that continue under your own number or with duties paid at the door. Going past the line is never billed and never blocks an order. On Enterprise the line is set with your account team at the size you need and priced into the monthly fee.

The numbers for each plan are in the limits section of Pricing.

What each fee is charged on

·Labels — the carrier rate plus $0.07 per label on every plan, on the label before you buy, paid from your wallet.
·Your own carrier wins — your carrier bills you directly at your rate; Forto charges $0.07 per label on plans it bills, nothing on a plan Shopify bills.
·Duty calculation fee — a percentage of the duty and tax Forto prepays at the border. The carrier’s own fee for paying duty at the border is passed on at cost and included in what your customer pays at checkout.
·VAT-carried fee — A percentage of the VAT Forto carries under its own registration (Pro 4%, Enterprise 3%). VAT filed under your own number carries no fee.
·Own-carrier orders past the limit — Enterprise contracts only: a small fee per order, at month end.

Duty and tax themselves pass through to carriers and tax authorities. Plans and Forto’s service fees are priced in USD and billed by Shopify or by Forto as described above; labels are paid from your wallet in its currency. The plans side by side are in the compare table.

A worked example

Growth plan, a DDP parcel to the US: the label at the carrier rate plus $0.07, on the label before you buy; duty $32.75 passed through; the duty calculation fee at 10% of $32.75 ($3.28); no US VAT. On the shipment’s statement line the label, the duty and the calculation fee each have their own entry.

The statement

Every shipment closes as one line: carrier, duty, tax, fees, and any refund or later correction, with receipts attached. Corrections settle against the order they belong to — not as a separate mystery invoice. Export as CSV whenever finance asks.

What your customer sees vs what you pay

Your customer pays one total at checkout (goods + shipping + duty + tax). You pay the carrier rate and Forto’s published fees. The two are itemized separately everywhere — Forto’s fee is never presented to your customer as a government charge.