An 8.75% fee that works out to about 85% a year. A revenue-based cash advance is repaid out of your bank account every day; Spring is repaid by your retailer, once, when the invoice is due. The arithmetic, shown on a real Wayflyer offer.

NMNico Mottesi

Last edited 6 min read

An 8.75% fee sounds cheaper than a 36% rate. It is not. On a real Wayflyer offer a brand showed us this spring, 8.75% worked out to about 85% a year. The same $100,000 from Spring, against a retailer invoice, costs between 12% and 36% a year.

The gap is not a trick and it is not hidden. It comes from one design choice: a revenue-based cash advance is repaid out of your bank account every day, starting tomorrow. Spring is repaid by your retailer, once, when the invoice comes due. This post shows the arithmetic, so you can run it on your own offer. We sell the other side of this comparison, so check our work. It is not legal or financial advice.

Revenue-based financing is the product Wayflyer is best known for, and the same design is sold to consumer brands by Clearco and, inside the store you already run, by Shopify Capital. The fee, the share of sales and the term differ from offer to offer; the arithmetic below works on any of them once you have three inputs: what you were advanced, what you will repay in total, and the payment schedule. We use the Wayflyer offer because it is the one we have in hand.

The same $100,000 on one 72-day axis: a cash advance repaid in 72 daily debits, and a Spring advance on a net-60 invoice. The bars are what you still hold; the pale bars, what you were handed.

  1. On the left, a cash advance: $100,000 against your sales history. On the right, Spring advances 80% of a $125,000 invoice you have just raised to a retailer on net 60. Day zero looks identical. Every day after it does not.

  2. The advance plus the 8.75% fee is $108,750. Spread over 72 payments, that is about $1,510 leaving your bank account each day, starting tomorrow. The money you raised to buy inventory begins going back before the inventory has arrived.

  3. By the halfway mark you hold less than half of what you were advanced. The $8,750 fee was fixed on day one and is owed in full whether repayment takes 72 days or 40. Across the whole period you had the use of about $50,000 on average, and paid a fee priced on $100,000.

  4. Nothing leaves your bank account. The full $100,000 is yours for the entire term of the invoice, which is the period you needed it for in the first place.

  5. The retailer pays the $125,000 invoice into the collection account it was re-pointed to. That settles the advance, and the remaining $25,000 is released to you. The fee is an annual rate on $100,000 for the 60 days it was out: between $1,973 and $5,918, depending on where your business sits in the range.

  6. Turn the cash advance into an annual rate, the way a disclosure would. Seventy-two level daily payments of $1,510 against $100,000 works out to roughly 85% a year. If the debits only run on business days, so the 72 payments stretch over about 100 calendar days, it is roughly 61%. Even the top of Spring's range is well under half of that.

Why a flat fee is not a rate

It is the most common mistake we see founders make when they line offers up side by side, and it is an easy one to make, because the two numbers measure different things.

A rate is a price per year on the money you actually have. A flat fee is a price on the money you were handed on day one, regardless of how quickly you hand it back. With daily debits you hand it back continuously, so on average you only ever hold about half of it, and you hold it for ten weeks, not a year. 8.75% for the use of half the money for a fifth of a year is how you arrive at a number between 60% and 85%.

Two consequences follow, and neither is intuitive.

Selling faster makes it more expensive. The debit is a percentage of sales. A great month repays the advance sooner, the fee is unchanged, and the annualized cost rises. Wayflyer says as much in its own writing: a shorter term raises the annual cost, and unexpectedly high sales shorten the term.1

Paying it off early saves nothing. There is no penalty for early repayment, and no discount either. The fee was the price of the advance, not of the time.

California and New York now require providers of sales-based financing to disclose an estimated annual rate.2 Most states do not. If your offer has no annual rate on it, ask for one, or work it out: the inputs are the advance, the total to be repaid, and the estimated daily payment.

Side by side

What it is sized on
Wayflyer cash advanceYour past sales: store, ad and bank data
SpringA specific retailer invoice, purchase order or demand plan
Who repays it
Wayflyer cash advanceYou, from your bank account
SpringYour retailer, when it pays the invoice. Demand plan financing is repaid by you, monthly
When
Wayflyer cash advanceA share of sales, debited daily, from day one
SpringOn the invoice's own due date
What it costs
Wayflyer cash advanceA flat fee, typically 5% to 10% of the advance, fixed on day one
Spring12% to 36% a year, on the days the money is actually out
If the cash comes back sooner
Wayflyer cash advanceThe fee stays the same, so the annualized cost goes up
SpringFewer days outstanding, smaller fee
Speed
Wayflyer cash advanceHours to a day or two
SpringDays. The first funding waits on your retailer acknowledging a notice
Best for
Wayflyer cash advanceOnline sales that arrive every day
SpringWholesale and retail revenue that arrives in large, late payments
Wayflyer's column describes its merchant cash advance. It also sells a fixed-term loan and a wholesale product repaid in set instalments, covered below.

Wayflyer's fee range is its own published figure.3 How each Spring product works is on its own page: invoice factoring, purchase order financing and demand plan financing.

Daily debits and a wholesale business

Cost is half the story. The other half is whether the repayment schedule resembles the way your cash arrives.

A direct-to-consumer brand is paid a little every day. A brand selling into retail is paid a lot, rarely, and late. You ship to a distributor in March and the money arrives in May, in one payment, less deductions. A debit that runs every day through March and April is drawing on a bank balance the retailer has not yet replenished. The financing is supposed to cover that gap. A daily debit re-opens it.

Invoice factoring has the opposite property. Its repayment is the retailer's payment, so it cannot fall due before the cash exists. If the retailer takes 70 days instead of 60, the schedule moves with it.

What Spring asks of you

One thing, and you should know it before you apply: a Notice of Assignment. Invoice factoring, purchase order financing and demand plan financing all require one. It is a letter to your retailer's accounts payable desk re-pointing payment on your vendor account to a collection account Spring holds for you. Your retailer will know you have a financing partner, and your first funding waits until the retailer acknowledges the notice, which takes days and occasionally a couple of weeks. We wrote a whole post on what a NOA is and what it does to your money.

The one Spring product that does not need a notice is Bridge Funding, which is built for businesses without retailer invoices to fund against.

When revenue-based financing is the better choice

  • Most of your revenue is online. No retailer invoices means nothing for Spring to factor. A brand that is 90% Shopify and Amazon is the customer Wayflyer, Clearco and Shopify Capital were built for.
  • You need the money this week. Wayflyer can fund in hours. Spring's first funding waits on the notice.
  • You are small. Wayflyer starts at around $10,000 a month in revenue with six months of trading.4
  • The spend pays back inside the term. An advance against an ad campaign or a fast-turning restock, where the return arrives in weeks, can be worth a high annualized cost. The arithmetic only turns against you when the money is tied up for longer than the repayment.

Wayflyer also now sells a wholesale product for brands in physical retail, repaid in set weekly, fortnightly or monthly instalments rather than as a share of daily sales.5 If you are offered it, compare it on its own terms, and ask what happens in the weeks where an instalment arrives before your retailer's payment does.

Five questions to ask of any offer

  1. What does it cost per year? Not the fee. If it is not on the page, compute it from the advance, the total repaid and the payment schedule.
  2. Who repays, and from which account? Your operating account every day, or your customer on the due date.
  3. What happens if I repay early? Does the cost fall, or is it fixed?
  4. What happens in my slowest month? And in my best one.
  5. Who else gets told? A notice to your retailer, a filing, access to your store and bank accounts.

Ask them of us too. If you sell into retail and want to see real numbers for your business, get started or talk to the team.

1 Wayflyer, The consumer brand financing stack, read September 2026.

2 California: 10 CCR §930 and following, under SB 1235. New York: 23 NYCRR Part 600, under the Commercial Finance Disclosure Law. Both set out how an estimated annual rate is calculated for sales-based financing from a projection of the recipient's sales.

3 Wayflyer Help Center, What is Wayflyer funding?, read September 2026.

4 Wayflyer Help Center, What are the requirements to get funding from Wayflyer?, read September 2026.

5 Wayflyer, Wholesale financing, read September 2026.