A brand approves a deliverable, signs off on the invoice, and sets payment terms at net 60. The freelancer now holds a piece of paper worth real money that will not turn into cash for two months, and a bill of their own is due before that. Selling or borrowing against that invoice for a fee is a real option, but the headline percentage a vendor quotes is not the number that matters. The fee schedule underneath it is.
A signed invoice on net-60 terms and a bill due before it
This is a different product from the software a freelance social media manager uses to write and send that invoice in the first place. The invoicing tools freelancers use to send those invoices cover issuing the document and tracking whether it has been opened or paid. What follows is about getting paid early against an invoice already sent and accepted, and what that costs.
Searching for this turns up two overlapping categories. Invoice factoring means selling the invoice to a factoring company, which then collects from the client directly. Invoice financing, or an invoice advance, means borrowing against the invoice as collateral while the freelancer keeps collecting from the client. Vendors do not use these terms consistently, so a company calling itself a factor may structure its product like an advance, or the reverse. Because the label is unreliable, the fee structure underneath it is what determines whether an offer is cheap or expensive, not which word sits on the vendor’s homepage.
What the fee is actually a fee on
Two separate numbers get blurred together in a lot of vendor marketing copy. The first is the advance rate: the percentage of the invoice’s face value the vendor pays out immediately, with the rest held back in reserve until the client actually pays. The second is the factoring rate, sometimes called the discount rate: the percentage fee charged against the invoice’s face value, which is the number that determines what the early cash actually costs.
Resolve’s own pricing page states that its invoice advance payment rate and percentages are typically 90%, 75%, or 50%, offered as a choice on the same product rather than a single fixed number. That is one real vendor putting more than one advance-rate tier in front of the same customer.
A higher advance rate is not automatically the better deal. If the tier that pays out 90% up front carries a higher fee percentage than the tier that pays out 50%, the freelancer is trading a smaller reserve holdback for a larger cost. The two numbers, advance rate and fee rate, have to be read together, not separately, before either one means anything.
The two fee structures a freelancer will actually be quoted
Fee schedules in this market generally take one of two shapes: a flat percentage, or a tiered schedule that changes with time.
altLINE publishes its own tiered rate table as an example of how this works: 1.5% for an invoice outstanding 0 to 30 days, 2.0% at 31 to 40 days, 2.5% at 41 to 50 days, 3.0% at 51 to 60 days, 3.5% at 61 to 70 days, 4.0% at 71 to 80 days, and 4.5% at 81 to 90 days. altLINE is explicit that this is its own stated table, not an industry average, and that actual factoring fees generally run 1% to 5% of invoice value depending on the specific deal.
A flat fee works differently. It is a single percentage charged against the invoice regardless of how many of the 60 days actually pass before the client pays. The cost is fixed the moment the advance goes out, whether the client pays on day 10 or day 60.
The trade follows directly from that difference. A tiered schedule is cheaper than a flat fee when the client pays early, since the freelancer never climbs into the higher tiers. It costs more when the client pays late or rides out the full net-60 term, since each step raises the fee. A flat fee is the mirror image: predictable, but not the cheapest outcome when the client pays quickly. altLINE states its own reasoning plainly, that a factoring company has to account for the time value of money, and the longer its cash is out on an unpaid invoice, the higher the fee needs to be to compensate. A 60-day wait is priced higher than a 30-day one on the same schedule for that reason, not arbitrarily.
Running the math on one net-60 invoice
Take an illustrative invoice of $4,000. This is a round number chosen to make the arithmetic easy to follow, not a real client’s invoice.
Run through altLINE’s own published 51 to 60 day tier of 3.0%, a $4,000 invoice factored at the full net-60 mark costs $120 in fees. Run the same $4,000 invoice through the 0 to 30 day tier of 1.5% instead, and the fee is $60. Same invoice, same vendor’s own schedule, half the cost, because the client paid inside 30 days instead of taking the full 60.
Now compare that against a hypothetical flat fee, labeled hypothetical because no rate is attributed to any named vendor without verification against that vendor’s own page. If a flat-fee vendor quoted a flat 2.2% on the same $4,000 invoice, that would be $88 regardless of when the client paid. On a client who reliably pays by day 30, the tiered schedule at $60 beats the flat fee. On a client who takes the full 60 days, the tiered schedule at $120 costs more than the flat fee. The two structures land on opposite sides of the same invoice depending on the client’s actual payment behavior, not on which fee type sounds cheaper on the sales page.
The decision test that follows: get the vendor’s fee schedule in writing before signing anything. Apply it to the number of days this specific client has historically taken to pay, not the stated net-60 term, since a client who is contractually on net 60 but usually pays in three weeks changes which structure wins. Then compare the resulting dollar fee against what it would cost to carry that same gap on a business line of credit or a credit card for the same number of days, if either is available. The fee for early access is only worth paying if it is cheaper than the next-best way to cover the same cash gap.
What changes when the payer is a brand, not a typical B2B client
Factoring and invoice-advance rates are commonly priced in part on the paying customer’s credit and payment history, not the freelancer’s own. altLINE lists debtor credit and debtor concentration among its own stated rate factors, meaning the factor is underwriting the brand that owes the money, not primarily the freelancer selling or borrowing against the invoice.
That has a specific implication for a freelancer whose income comes from occasional brand deals rather than a recurring roster of paying retainer clients. Vendor marketing pages are generally written with the recurring, multi-invoice case in mind, a business factoring regularly against a stable base of repeat customers. A freelancer with a single brand-deal invoice and no ongoing relationship with that brand may be evaluated differently, since debtor concentration and payment history look different with exactly one invoice and one payer rather than a portfolio.
What rate that freelancer would actually be offered is not something this post can supply. It depends on the brand’s creditworthiness, the vendor’s own underwriting, and terms this piece has no visibility into. Treat it as a variable to ask the vendor about directly, not a number to estimate in advance.
Ancillary fees that sit outside the headline rate
- Ask whether the quoted percentage is the total cost or only the base rate, before additional fees are layered on.
- Ask specifically about an ACH fee, which altLINE’s own page names as a transaction fee some factoring companies assess whenever funds move by ACH, without assuming any dollar amount applies to a given offer.
- Ask whether an origination fee, a wire fee, or a renewal fee applies, and get each one quoted as a specific dollar figure or percentage rather than a verbal description.
- Ask whether the fee schedule discussed on a call matches what is written into the contract itself. A verbal quote is not binding until it appears in the document being signed.
Ready to see what an invoicing tool actually costs before payment day even arrives
None of this replaces the tool that gets the invoice out the door in the first place. See invoicing tools freelancers use to send those invoices for what the free tiers on that side of the workflow actually cap.
FAQ
Is invoice factoring the same product as the invoicing software freelancers use to send invoices?
No. Invoicing software issues and tracks the invoice itself, covered separately in the sister post linked above. Factoring or invoice-advance services are a different product: they pay the freelancer early against an invoice that has already been issued and accepted by the client, in exchange for a fee.
Does a higher advance rate always mean a better deal?
No. The advance rate and the fee percentage have to be compared together. Resolve’s own pricing page offers multiple advance-rate tiers, typically 90%, 75%, or 50%, on the same product, and a vendor offering a higher advance rate is not necessarily charging a lower fee to go with it.
Sources
- Resolve pricing page, fetched 2026-09-09, for the stated invoice advance payment rate and percentage tiers of typically 90%, 75%, or 50%.
- altLINE, “Invoice Factoring Rates Explained”, fetched 2026-09-09, for the tiered rate table, the 1% to 5% general range, the time-value-of-money rationale, the debtor credit and debtor concentration rate factors, and the ACH and origination fee disclosures.
- Invoicing tools for social media freelancers: free tier caps, fetched 2026-09-09, the sister post on issuing invoices rather than getting paid early against one.