How Much Does Clearco Cost? Real Fees and True APR for DTC

Clearco sells revenue-based financing with a headline that sounds cheap: a flat fee of 6% to 12%, no equity given up, no fixed monthly payment. For a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand that has maxed out its credit card and does not want to dilute, that pitch lands. The problem is that the flat fee is not an interest rate, and the number that actually matters, the effective APR (the annualized cost of the money), is usually two to four times the headline. This post breaks down what Clearco's three products really cost, shows you the math to convert any flat fee into a true APR, and stacks Clearco against Wayflyer and 8fig for the founder deciding where to put their next dollar of working capital.

How Clearco's flat fee structure actually works

Clearco does not make a loan in the traditional sense. It buys a slice of your future receivables at a discount. You take, say, $100,000 today and agree to repay a fixed total, the "Specified Amount," of $112,000. That $12,000 gap is the flat fee. It is set in dollars the day you sign, and it does not move.

That single design choice is the whole story. Because the fee is a fixed dollar amount rather than a rate that accrues over time, two things follow. First, there is no benefit to repaying early. Pay it off in two months or eight, you owe the same $112,000. Second, and this is the part founders miss, the speed of repayment is the entire driver of your real cost. The faster your revenue sweeps the balance to zero, the more you are paying per unit of time you actually had the money.

A flat fee feels like a price tag. An APR is a speed. When you only see the price tag, $12,000 on $100,000 looks like "12%," and 12% sounds like a reasonable rate. But if a fast-growing brand repays that balance in four months, it rented $100,000 for a third of a year and paid $12,000 for the privilege. Annualize that and you are north of 35%. When I talk to founders running brands at this stage, the flat fee is almost always the number they quote me, and the repayment speed is almost always the number they never calculated. That gap is where the real cost hides.

Clearco does cap each weekly sweep at 30% of that week's revenue, which protects your cash flow in a slow week. That is a genuinely useful floor. Just do not mistake it for a cost cap. It changes how fast you repay, not how much.

Clearco's three products and what each costs

Clearco is not one product with one price. It is three, and they price differently.

Marketing Capital is the one most DTC brands meet first, and it is the trickiest. The advertised fee is 6%, but the actual structure is a 12% gross fee with a 6% rebate credited back only on spend that goes to eligible vendors (Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon Ads, MailChimp, and a short list of others). Spend the entire advance on eligible ads and your net fee lands at 6%. Spend less, and the rebate shrinks while the 12% gross fee stays put. This is the utilization trap, and it is steep.

Invoice and receipt funding is the most transparent product, because Clearco publishes the tiers. You repay in fixed weekly payments over a set term, and the fee scales with the term: 5.00% at four months, 6.25% at five months, 8.00% at six months. This is the one place where a longer term costs more in flat-fee dollars but does not blow up your APR, because the published tiers are deliberately modest.

Cash Advance (working capital) is the broadest product and the least transparent on price. Fees here run higher, roughly 8% to 12.5% flat, and repayment is a daily sweep of revenue, commonly 10% to 17% of daily sales for a Shopify-connected brand. Clearco does not publish a clean tier table for this one; the rate you get depends on your revenue history and risk profile. This is the product where the effective APR runs hottest, because it pairs the highest fees with the fastest repayment.

Flat fee to effective APR: the conversion every founder needs

Here is the formula worth memorizing. The quick approximation for any revenue-based advance is:

Effective APR is about (flat fee % divided by months to repay) times 12.

That is it. A 10% flat fee repaid in 4 months is (10 / 4) times 12, which is 30% APR. The same 10% fee stretched over 12 months is (10 / 12) times 12, which is 10% APR. The fee never changed. The repayment speed changed everything.

The table below runs that math across the fee tiers Clearco actually charges, so you can read your own situation off it. Find your flat fee column, find the row for how fast your revenue will realistically sweep the balance, and that cell is your real cost of capital.

The pattern jumps off the page. The top-left and bottom-right of that table are different planets. The same product, the same brand, the same fee tier produces a 48% APR or a 12% APR depending purely on how fast the money comes back. The brands that grow fastest, the ones Clearco most wants to fund, sit in the expensive top rows. When we have worked through this with founders, the moment the 36% lands is usually when they stop treating the advance as cheap growth fuel and start treating it as the genuinely expensive money it is.

Clearco vs. Wayflyer vs. 8fig: cost for a $100K advance

Clearco does not exist in a vacuum. The two providers a DTC founder most often weighs it against are Wayflyer and 8fig, and they price on different logic. The snapshot below is the head-to-head for a brand shopping a roughly $100,000 advance.

Read the effective-APR column, not the fee column. On a short, fast payback, Clearco and Wayflyer are in the same neighborhood, and Clearco often sits at the top of it. 8fig looks more expensive on nothing, but its tranche model deploys capital as you hit inventory milestones, so you are paying for the money closer to when you actually use it. On a 9-to-12-month inventory cycle that pushes its effective APR into the low-to-mid teens, well below Clearco's. The catch is the comparison is not apples-to-apples on horizon: 8fig is built for long inventory holds, Clearco for short marketing and growth bursts. Match the tool to the cash-conversion cycle, not to the headline fee. For a deeper look at the inventory-focused options, our inventory financing options comparison and the full cost teardown of 8fig go further than this snapshot.

What Clearco financing actually costs a typical DTC brand

Numbers in a table are abstract. Two scenarios make it concrete.

Scenario A: a $50,000 Marketing Capital advance, fully deployed on eligible ads. This is the best case for the product. The brand spends every dollar on Meta and Google, earns the full 6% rebate, and pays a net fee of $3,000. If revenue sweeps the balance over six months, the effective APR sits around 12%. That is a genuinely competitive cost of capital, and it is the scenario Clearco's marketing is built around. The discipline required is real, though: you have to actually route the whole advance through eligible vendors, and you have to track it.

Scenario B: a $100,000 Cash Advance, repaid in 4 months by a fast-growing brand. This is the case that bites. Say the fee is 12%, so the total owed is $112,000. The brand is scaling, daily revenue is strong, and the sweep clears the balance in four months. Plug it in: (12 / 4) times 12 is a 36% effective APR. The founder paid $12,000 to use $100,000 for a third of a year. That is not non-dilutive growth fuel at a friendly rate; that is among the most expensive money on the menu short of a merchant cash advance.

The cruel irony is that Scenario B is the brand Clearco approves fastest and funds biggest. The healthier and faster-growing you are, the quicker you repay, and the more your real APR climbs. When I talk to founders running brands this size, the ones who got burned are almost never the struggling ones. They are the ones who scaled hard, swept the balance in a quarter, and only did the annualized math afterward. By then they had already paid for it.

When Clearco makes sense (and when it doesn't)

Clearco is a real tool, not a trap, as long as you use it for the job it fits.

It makes sense when you have a high-ROAS paid-social engine with predictable CAC and LTV, you can route the advance through eligible vendors to earn the rebate, and you genuinely cannot access cheaper capital. For a brand pouring fuel on ads that reliably return more than they cost, a 12% to 18% effective APR on Marketing Capital can pencil out, because the marginal revenue more than covers the fee. The speed and the no-equity, no-personal-guarantee structure are worth something real.

It stops making sense in three situations. If you are inventory-heavy with a long cash-conversion cycle, 8fig's tranche model will almost always beat Clearco on APR because you pay for capital closer to when you use it. If you can qualify for a bank line of credit, even a modest one, a sub-10% APR facility beats every revenue-based option here; the application is more painful but the money is far cheaper. And if your growth is fast enough that you will sweep the balance in three or four months, run the APR math first, because that speed is exactly what turns a 12% fee into a 36%+ rate.

The pattern we see again and again: founders reach for revenue-based financing because it is fast and feels painless, then discover six months later that it was the most expensive line on their cap table. The fix is not to avoid Clearco. It is to convert every offer into an APR before you sign, line it up against your other options, and take the cheapest dollar that fits your cash-conversion cycle. That one habit saves more money than any negotiation on the fee itself.

Clearco's flat fee is a price tag; your APR is a speed. The same 12% fee is a friendly 12% if you repay over a year and a brutal 36% if you sweep it in four months. The faster you grow, the more you pay. Always convert the fee to an APR before you sign, then compare it to a bank line, 8fig, and Wayflyer on equal footing.

Sources and methodology

Pricing data was assembled from Clearco's own published materials and corroborated across independent third-party reviews, because Clearco's dedicated /pricing page currently returns a 404 and live fee data is no longer hosted in one clean location.

The invoice-funding tiers (5.00% at four months, 6.25% at five months, 8.00% at six months, with fixed weekly payments and a 30%-of-weekly-revenue cap) come directly from Clearco's blog post on invoice funding fees and payments. Per-transaction advance limits ($25,000 minimum, $600,000 maximum, with multiple transactions permitted up to total program capacity) come from Clearco's published FAQs.

The Marketing Capital structure (a 12% gross fee with a 6% rebate credited only on eligible vendor spend) is documented in Finaloop's analysis of the product, and the utilization scenarios in this post are an Eightx calculation built on that structure. The flat-fee-to-APR conversions throughout use the standard simple-APR approximation (flat fee % divided by repayment months, times 12), which is consistent with the methodology cited in Luca's revenue-based financing comparison. For a precise figure, the actual repayment cash flows should be run through an internal-rate-of-return calculation, since real repayment speed moves with revenue.

The cross-provider comparison against Wayflyer and 8fig draws on a Perplexity synthesis and Parallel.ai research citing Luca, Wayflyer's pricing materials, and 8fig's funding pages. Two caveats apply. Wayflyer's fee range varies by source (its own marketing cites figures from 2%, while real-world ecommerce offers cluster nearer 5-10%), so the higher end is the safer planning assumption. And 8fig's effective-APR range reflects a longer 9-to-12-month inventory horizon, not the 4-month payback used for the Clearco and Wayflyer comparison, so the providers are matched to their natural use cases rather than to an identical term.

Two further limitations are worth stating plainly. Clearco's Cash Advance product does not publish a clean tier table, so the 8-12.5% range is triangulated from multiple independent reviews rather than a single official source. And the $600,000 per-transaction cap (from Clearco's FAQs) sits alongside marketing references to $10M in total funding; these reconcile as a per-draw limit versus a total program capacity across multiple advances for established brands. Anyone evaluating a live offer should confirm current terms directly with Clearco before signing.

For founders weighing this kind of decision, our fractional CFO services exist precisely to convert every capital offer on your desk into a real, comparable cost before you commit.

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