You know the take rate. Most sellers find the second fee the hard way. Here's the full accounting of what platform commerce costs in 2025, and why AI-powered discovery agents are changing the math.

Platform strategy is running on expired assumptions. The metrics that once predicted durable participant value stopped working around 2020, and most operators never updated the dashboard. This piece breaks down what platform health actually looks like now: transaction quality over transaction quantity, ecosystem resilience over ecosystem size, and the engagement-to-outcome ratio almost nobody publishes but every honest operator should calculate.