Working for yourself gives you the freedom to work whenever and from almost any location. When it’s time for another adventure, you can always take your laptop and keep your retainer clients. Six months in, you’re still sending invoices from a template and chasing the same client instead of enjoying life, which adds up to additional work hours. Also, the fees andx watching a chunk of each payment disappear between a US processor, a European bank, and the ATM downstairs. The work travels fine, the money part – not so much.
This guide will be useful for anyone who wants to run their business from a single dash and worry less about juggling multiple tools and templates. It walks through how to run a small business on Whop, from the first checkout link to the first payout, with the fees spelled out, so you can decide whether it fits the way you want to work and move.
What Whop is
Whop is a platform where businesses run their checkout, subscription billing and payouts from one dashboard. You set up what you sell, share a link or embed the checkout on your own site, get paid by card, wallet or local payment method, and withdraw the balance to your bank. It works for one-off projects and for anything billed monthly, and the whole dashboard runs on a phone, which matters more than it sounds when your office is a café with one good outlet.
It’s built for people running a consultancy, coaching, or agency business with recurring clients, and anyone selling a service with a price attached. If your income is one-off gigs through a freelance site, you don’t need it yet. If your clients pay you directly and more than once, keep reading.
Set up the account and get verification
Sign up, name the business, and complete identity verification. Whop needs to verify who you are before it will pay out, and if your business is registered in the US, you’ll be asked for a tax identification number, so have your EIN or SSN to hand. Doing this at the start means the first payout isn’t going to be held up when you actually need the money.
If you run a US company from abroad, this is also the moment to make sure the business address, bank account and tax details all match the registration. The rules for keeping a US business clean while you travel are covered in The Wanderlover’s guide to running a US-based online business from abroad.
Create what you sell
On Whop, everything you sell starts as a product, and each product has a plan – which simply is how you price your product/service. For example, you sell a copywriting service, and it’s either going to be a one-off payment or a subscription that renews on a schedule, depending on a project.
Say you’re a freelancer with retainer clients. You’d create two plans. One is a one-time plan for a project deposit, for example $1,500. The other is a monthly plan for each retainer, for example $2,000. A client on the monthly plan is charged on the same date every month, and you don’t have to send a new invoice each time.
You can also add a promo code, which is quite handy if you want to give early clients a lower founding rate. And you can add an order bump, an extra the client can choose at checkout – something like a 1:1 call or a longer consultation. Both are options inside the plan, so there’s nothing extra to set up.
Every plan generates a checkout link, which you can send in a proposal, drop it in an email, or pin it in your booking confirmation. The client opens it, pays, and you get notified.
If you have your own website, you can use Whop’s embedded checkout there instead so the client never leaves your site. If you don’t have one, Whop will build one for you from a short description and host it free on a .whop.site address, which is enough for a service business that mostly sells through referrals and needs somewhere to send people. You can also use existing website blueprints on Whop.
When you’re travelling it can be confusing what the client on the other side sees. Whop’s checkout shows payment methods according to the buyer’s location, from more than 100 available: a client in Amsterdam sees iDEAL, one in São Paulo sees Pix, and a US client sees cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay. You don’t have to configure any of that manually. It means a client’s preferred way to pay is already on the page, which also means that there’s no reason for a client to delay payment.
Know the fees before the first sale
Whop publishes its fees in US dollars, and there’s no monthly charge. The rate on a domestic card payment is 2.7% plus $0.30. International cards add 1.5%, and currency conversion adds 1% when it applies.
Let’s use the same copywriting example from earlier. Two US retainers at $2,000 cost $54.30 each in fees. A UK client paying $2,000 on a British card, with conversion, costs $104.30. That’s the honest cost of having clients in more than one country, and it’s the number to build into your rates instead of discovering it on the statement.
A few optional fees that are worth knowing:
- Tax handling is 2% per transaction if you want Whop to calculate and collect sales tax or VAT at checkout, and it can file the returns too. Handle tax yourself and there’s no Whop tax fee.
- Payment orchestration is 0.8% per transaction when switched on. It routes each payment to the partner provider likeliest to approve it and retries a decline through an alternative in real time. If you’re dealing with failed transactions a lot – this is very useful.
Get paid
Money first lands in your Whop balance, and you can choose how it reaches your bank. For a US account, a next-day ACH payout is $2.50 and a bank wire is $23. Payouts to local bank accounts outside the US are available in 200+ countries, with a fee that varies by destination, so check the fee for your country before you pick a method.
The travel-specific advice here is the same as for any processor: withdraw in larger, less frequent amounts, because a fixed fee on a $200 payout hurts more than the same fee on $4,000.
Take payments in person when you need to
If your business is something like a workshop or you’re selling products and need to be paid on the spot, Whop supports Tap to Pay on iPhone. Under the QR code of any checkout link, there’s a Tap to Pay button, and the client taps their card or phone against yours. You’ll receive the money in the same balance as your online sales.
This only works for one-time payments, so a retainer still needs a subscription link.
Test everything beforehand
To avoid any awkwardness with your clients, you can test it all yourself. Whop has a sandbox, a separate copy of the platform with fake money and test cards. Run your own checkout link through it. Try paying with the card that works, then the one that declines, and see what the client would see in each case. Ten minutes here saves you from embarrassment.
If you’re comfortable in a terminal, or you use an AI assistant for admin, Whop also has a CLI (command line tool). It can create a product, generate a checkout link and pull revenue figures from a single command, or from an assistant bot you’ve told what to do. It’s optional, but very convenient.
Will it fit you?
The short answer is yes! Whop works for almost any business you can run from a laptop. Everything lives in one dashboard, so you don’t need a separate invoicing app, a subscription tool and a payments provider to keep it running. Whop also has a phone app, which makes it even easier.
The one thing to weigh up is currency. Fees are in US dollars, so if your clients and your costs are entirely in another currency, build the exchange rate into your prices.
Beyond that, the setup takes an afternoon. Verify the account, price what you sell, send your first link, and the business side is handled while you get on with the work and the travel.
Read Next
How to Make Your First $5k Online
The Exact Game Plan to Hit Your First $100K
8 Proven Online Business Ideas That Allow You to Travel the World
The ONE THING To Focus On If You’re Struggling With Getting Started
The Wanderlover Story: From 9-5 to Full-Time World Traveling Entrepreneur
How to Choose the Right Online Business Model for You
Essential Tools and Platforms to Launch Your Online Business
10 Reasons Why Most Entrepreneurs Will Fail
My Signature Online Business Model
When and How to Quit Your Corporate Job
