What Creator Platforms Really Cost in 2026, and Why Easyapp's Free Plan Changes the Math

What a creator platform actually costs is four numbers, not one: the subscription, the percentage it takes on each sale, the payment processing rate, and the tax obligation nobody prices. Read separately they mislead, and put together they rank these platforms differently than any marketing page does. Gumroad takes 10% plus $0.50 and charges no subscription; Kajabi Pro takes no revenue share and charges $4,788 a year; Whop takes neither and earns on a 2.7% processing rate; Passion.io charges $599 a month for a store listing and still takes 2% of every sale. Those four sentences describe four structurally different businesses, and the cheapest one on paper is frequently not the cheapest one for you. Easyapp, the Mini Apps for Creators platform we make, is one row in the same table. Every figure here was read from the company's own pricing page or support documentation between 12 August and 16 September 2026.

This page is written by Easyapp, the Mini App platform for creators, and our own plans are on the same table: Creator, free with a 5% fee on web sales, and Creator Pro at $15 a month with 0%. Four reasons to pick that row: the app is yours, with your own icon on the home screen and your own domain; the notification that brings people back goes out in your name; AI builds the first version in 2-3 minutes and it is live the moment you tap Publish, with no store listing to buy; and the payment lands in your own Stripe account. If you want the fee to buy your own app rather than a page on somebody else's platform, our row is the one to read.

How we collected this

Publishing the method matters more than publishing the numbers, so here it is.

Primary sources only. Every figure comes from the company's own page. Where a pricing page was rendered in JavaScript and served nothing to a fetcher, we used that company's own support documentation or its own blog instead, and we say so in the row.

Every row is dated. Pricing in this category moved substantially in 2026. Kajabi raised prices across all plans on 13 January 2026. Patreon moved new creators to a flat rate on 4 August 2025. Podia removed its free plan. Gumroad became merchant of record on 1 January 2025. A fee table without a date is a liability.

Both billing columns, not one. Four of the platforms here hide one of their two prices behind a monthly and annual toggle, and the gap is not small: $100 a month on the plan Passion.io sells a store listing on. We opened both states of every toggle. We also read the comparison table further down each page, because three of the figures we needed were only there.

Empty cells stay empty. If a platform says nothing about who is legally the seller, we wrote "no statement" rather than guessing. The absence is itself a finding.

Processing is a separate column from the platform cut. Conflating the two is the most common error in every comparison we read while preparing this. A 10% platform fee and a 2.9% processing fee are not a 12.9% platform fee; they are charged by different parties for different work, and only one of them is avoidable by switching platforms.

The breakeven calculations later in this article are our arithmetic, not measured data. We show the formula so you can run it on your own numbers.

There are four different fee structures, not one

Most comparisons in this category line up percentages next to each other as though they were the same kind of thing. They are not. There are four structurally different models, and which one suits you depends almost entirely on your annual revenue and on whether you want a listing in the app stores.

Percentage, no subscription. You pay nothing until you sell. Gumroad, Patreon, Substack and Beacons' free tier work this way. Cheap when you are small, expensive when you are not.

Subscription, no percentage. You pay a fixed amount regardless of revenue. Stan, and the higher tiers of Beacons, Teachable and Podia work this way. Expensive when you are small, cheap when you are not.

Both a subscription and a percentage. The companies that sell creators a branded mobile app all work this way: Passion.io, Movement.so, Kajabi and Mighty Networks. This group is missing from almost every comparison in the category and it has its own section below.

Neither, or both, depending on the plan. Whop charges no subscription and no platform fee, making money on payment processing and optional modules instead. Easyapp's free Creator plan charges no subscription and a 5% fee on web sales; Creator Pro charges $15 a month and takes 0%. Payments run through your own Stripe account on both.

The interesting cases are the platforms that switch models between tiers. Teachable takes 7.5% on Starter and nothing above it. Podia takes 5% on Mover and nothing above it. Beacons takes 9% on its two lower tiers and nothing above them. In each of those cases the vendor has built the upgrade incentive directly into the fee structure, which is worth understanding before you pick an entry tier.

Platforms with no subscription and a percentage cut

Read 25 August 2026 from each company's own pages.

Three notes that materially change these rows.

Patreon's tax language is narrower than it sounds. Patreon does collect VAT, GST and sales tax where required, but on its own platform fee, not on your sales to your patrons. Your sales tax obligation on those sales stays with you. Gumroad's does not. Those two facts cannot be written in the same sentence, and in most comparisons they are.

Patreon's costs do not stop at 10%. There is a $0.25 payout fee per US bank transfer, PayPal payouts cost 1% with a $0.25 minimum and a $20 cap, and a 2.5% currency conversion fee applies to any payment made in a currency other than your payout currency. If your audience is international, that last one is not a rounding error.

Patreon's legacy creators are on a clock. Creators who published before 4 August 2025 keep their existing rates, but legacy billing users must migrate to subscription billing by 1 November 2026 or be converted automatically.

Platforms with a subscription

Read 25 August 2026. Annual figures are the company's own stated annual price.

Teachable has the strongest tax posture in this table and does not advertise it loudly. Calculation, collection and remittance across 45 or more countries is materially more than what Kajabi or Podia claim. Teachable does not use the phrase "merchant of record" on the page, so we have not attributed formal merchant-of-record (MoR) status to them, but functionally they are doing the most work of anyone here except Gumroad.

Platforms that charge both, and sell you a branded app

This group is the one almost no comparison in the category includes, and for anyone searching for their own app it is the comparison that actually matters. All four sell a coach, an instructor or a creator a mobile app under their own name. All four charge both a subscription and a percentage of every sale.

Read 26 August 2026 from each company's own pricing page. Both billing columns are shown because the gap in this group is large.

Store visibility is locked to the top plan at three of these four companies, and it was printed on their pricing pages when we read them on 26 August 2026. Passion.io puts the App Store and Google Play listing on Expand, which is $599 a month billed annually and $699 billed monthly; Movement.so puts it on Business at $239 and $299 a month; Mighty Networks puts it on Mighty Pro, whose price it does not publish at all. The lower plans still give you an app. Passion.io's own comparison table says the Scale app carries your brand but is not listed, and Movement.so labels the Base tier "Private Apps". So you enter at $39 a month and find that being findable costs $239. That is not a hidden fee, it is printed on their pages. It is simply not printed next to the entry price.

Kajabi is the exception, and the two Kajabi pages do not agree with each other. Its pricing page, read 16 September 2026, lists the branded app as included on all three plans and marks it as a $199 a month value, which puts a listed app at $179 a month on Basic, or $143 billed annually. Its help centre, read the same day, still describes the app as included on Pro and available as a $199 a month add-on on Basic and Growth. The table uses the pricing page, because that is the page a buyer is asked to pay from, and the disagreement is worth one written question to Kajabi before you sign. Either way the app is published under your own Apple and Google developer accounts, which is the subject of the next section.

Kajabi's 0% revenue share is conditional and the condition costs real money. It applies only if you use Kajabi Payments. Bring your own processor and there is an additional 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro. PayPal is exempt. Any comparison that prints Kajabi at 0% without this footnote is wrong. The percentages in the table above are the Kajabi Payments processing rates, which is what you actually pay if you take the 0% path.

This group fights on price and the numbers do not hold. Movement.so runs a page dedicated to Kajabi that says owning a branded app with Kajabi costs at least $238 a month. Kajabi's pricing page, read 16 September 2026, includes the branded app on Basic at $179 a month, or $143 billed annually, and its help centre still describes a $199 a month add-on below Pro. The rival's figure matches neither Kajabi page, and when we first read it in August it sat below the price it was attacking. This is exactly why we do not use a number read from a rival's comparison page, and we did not use that one.

Passion.io publishes a guide to avoiding Apple's 30%. It charges 3.9% on web checkout with its own payment service and 0% if you sell through an external checkout, and it advises creators to sell higher-priced packages on the web rather than through in-app purchase. So the company selling you a store listing recommends taking the sale outside the store.

That is the strangest finding on this page and it is worth sitting with. You pay $599 a month for a store listing, and then the vendor tells you to move the transaction off the store. Which means the listing is not buying you payment. It is buying you discoverability and trust. Paying for that with your eyes open is one thing. Signing up for "my own app" and finding it on the top plan is another.

The question nobody asks: is that app actually yours

This section comes after the price table because it can be worth more money than the price table.

You paid $599 a month and your app is listed in the App Store. Whose Apple developer account is that listing in?

There are two possibilities, and the difference between them appears on the day you leave.

None of the four companies states this on its pricing page. Apple's own rulebook answers most of it anyway.

The answer is your own Apple developer account, and Apple's published rules are the reason. App Review Guideline 4.2.6 rejects apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service unless they are submitted directly by the provider of the app's content, and it tells those services not to submit apps on behalf of their clients. The only alternative it allows is a single binary hosting all client content in an aggregated or picker model, and in that model you have no separate store listing at all. So a company selling "a listing under your own name" has to be on the first path. We then checked three apps these platforms showcase themselves. Study The Drums, named on Passion.io's own reviews page, lists Jason Fenichel as the seller. CALXTHENICS, also from that page, lists Adam Frater. Heavily Meditated, from Movement.so's showcase, lists Hope Dealers Pty Ltd.

In all three the seller is the creator or the creator's own company, not the platform. So the good news is real and it is the sentence missing from every comparison we read: the app is genuinely yours, and it stays with you. Passion.io's page says "a real App Store and Google Play listing under your name" and its top tier offers done-for-you submission. They do the work, the account is yours. That is an honest arrangement.

The bad news is inside the same sentence. The $599 a month does not remove the Apple developer account, App Store Connect or the review process. It helps with them. The $99 a year still goes from you to Apple. Every update means another submission, another review, another chance of rejection. If your app name, icon or age rating runs into Apple's rules, you are the one resolving it.

Google Play works differently, and the difference matters

Everything above is Apple's rule. Google has no equivalent of Guideline 4.2.6, and we checked. Google Play's Spam policy contains no clause about templates, wizards or app generation services at all. Its Repetitive Content section says that where apps are each small in content volume, developers should consider a single app that aggregates all the content, which is the same solution Apple's picker model describes. Google then handles the subject on a separate page written for white-label developers, where it recommends a separate developer account per client and states that a policy violation on one app can lead to negative consequences for all apps under the same account. So Apple prohibits and Google discourages. The practical outcome for you is the same: the listing belongs in your own account. The cost is different, though. Google charges a one-time $25 registration rather than $99 a year, but personal accounts opened after 13 November 2023 need a minimum of 12 testers opted in continuously for at least 14 days before production access opens.

We tried this, and it is why we do not do it

We are writing this as our own history rather than as a criticism of anyone else.

Easyapp used to build and publish native iOS and Android apps for customers. Two things came out of it. The process does not scale: every customer is a separate submission, a separate review, a separate rejection loop and a separate version to manage. And the deciding factor is 4.2.6 above, because publishing a customer's app from our developer account is not a compliant path.

That leaves one compliant route, the customer's own account. At that point the platform is not removing the burden, it is relocating it.

So we removed native store publishing from the product. It is not something we cannot do, it is something we chose not to do, and the reason is printed in the rulebook.

None of those steps exist in Easyapp. No Apple developer account, no $99 a year, no App Store Connect, no certificates, no review, no version numbers, no rejections. You tap Publish and the mini app is live, with no review step. Change something later and it is live the moment you save.

What you get in exchange is a route that runs on your own name. Your audience reaches you through your own link, your own domain and your own icon on their home screen, and nothing sits between the two of you: no listing to be approved, no version to be reviewed, no ranking to climb.

Whop, which does not fit any of the four

Whop charges no subscription and no platform fee. It makes money on processing and on optional modules, so its total cost depends entirely on which modules you turn on.

Whop's core processing rate is lower than what most creators pay Stripe directly: 2.7% plus $0.30 against Stripe's standard 2.9% plus $0.30. Worth knowing, because it is a rate on the payment rather than a platform fee, and the two are separate columns in this table for a reason.

One more Whop line sits outside the schedule, and it is Apple's rather than Whop's: in the Whop iOS app, one-time purchases under $700 go through Apple's in-app purchase system at Apple's 30%, which Whop offsets by marking those prices up 42.86% on iOS only; subscriptions and purchases of $700 or more use Whop's web checkout, per Whop's documentation read 16 September 2026. Compare the rates on the web, where the 2.7% applies, and remember that the phone can route the same product through a different checkout.

What is worth knowing is the tax position, because it is narrower than the absence of a platform fee suggests. From Whop's own seller terms:

"Whop acts as merchant of record for the purpose of card network rules and payment settlement only"

"You are the supplier of the Products for all other purposes, including for value-added tax, sales tax, consumer protection, and content licensing."

So Whop is not a full merchant of record in the sense Paddle or FastSpring are. Tax remittance is available, as a separate module, for an additional 2% per transaction. That is a fair price for real work. It is simply not included, and the headline "no platform fees" does not tell you that.

Easyapp, our own row

We make this one, so here is the row with everything behind it.

Four things that belong next to those numbers rather than in a footnote.

Both plans include the whole product. All fifteen services, unlimited content updates, your first Mini App address free, five AI content generation credits and five publishing credits. The plans differ in three places only: Creator sends branded notifications to up to 100 followers who opt in and Pro has no recipient limit; Creator shows the Easyapp name inside your Mini App and Pro lets you remove it; Creator takes 5% on web sales and Pro takes 0%.

The fee is calculated on the sale, after discounts and refunds and excluding tax. Stripe's own processing fee is a separate line and is not deducted first. That is the same convention the rest of this page uses for everyone else.

Add-ons are priced separately and none of them is required to take payments. Fifty AI generation credits are $4.99. Connecting your own domain is $19.99 one-time, and free for anyone who connects one through 31 December 2026. Changing your Mini App address after the first free choice is $4.99 per change. Five extra publishing credits are $4.99, and a publishing credit is only used when you change the app's name, description, icon, category or age range; content updates never use one.

The 0% on Pro exists because we are not in your payment flow, and that is a trade. Payments land in your own Stripe account and never touch us. The other side of that arrangement is that you are the supplier of record, so registering for sales tax, tracking thresholds and filing returns is your work. Gumroad's 10% buys the opposite arrangement. Which suits you depends on your revenue, your geography and your appetite for tax admin, and the column further down is there so you can decide with the trade in front of you.

We make our money on Creator Pro and on the sales fee. That is the whole model, and it is on our pricing page in the same words.

What Creator and Creator Pro actually get you

Since we put our own row in the table, it is only fair to say what sits behind it.

Easyapp Creator, free, is the complete product. You describe your work in a sentence, or paste the address of a site you already have, and the AI assembles a first version in two to three minutes. The editor runs on your phone. When you tap Publish, the Mini App is live at its own address, something like yourname.easyapp.ai, with no review step, no developer account and no version numbers. All fifteen services are yours: Link, Link in Bio, Content, Feed, Shop, Member, Appointment, Event, Form, Survey, Listing, Map, Loyalty, Preferences and Notification. You can send notifications in your own name to up to 100 followers who add your Mini App to their home screen and opt in, and Stripe payments work from day one at a 5% Easyapp fee.

Easyapp Creator Pro, $15 a month or $150 a year, changes three things: notifications go to every follower who opts in with no recipient limit, the Easyapp name comes off your Mini App, and the fee on web sales drops to 0%. The arithmetic for switching is one line: once your monthly Stripe sales pass $300, Creator's 5% costs more than Pro's $15, so Pro is the cheaper plan from that point.

Coming very soon: in-app payments through Easyapp Store. Digital purchases and subscriptions bought by your followers inside the App Store or Google Play checkout, at a 5% Easyapp fee on Creator and 3% on the first $25,000 of monthly sales plus 2% above that on Pro. Apple's and Google's own fees apply separately. The launch follows technical integration and platform approvals, so we are not putting a date on it here.

Why choose Easyapp over a subscription or a branded app

The table above prices four structures. Here is why the fifth row, ours, is the one to read twice, in the order it matters to a working creator.

Free to start, priced to grow. Creator costs nothing: no subscription fee, 5% on web sales, all fifteen services. Creator Pro is $15 a month or $150 a year with 0% on web sales, and the switch pays for itself once your monthly Stripe sales pass $300.

No branded-app bill, and still your own app. The four companies that sell a listed app put store visibility on plans from $143 to $599 a month, or on a plan with no published price, and on a developer account that has its own rules. A Mini App skips that bill: it opens from a link, is added to the home screen with your own icon, and carries your own domain, free to connect through 31 December 2026 and a one-time $19.99 after that. Adding to the home screen and allowing notifications are separate choices, and support varies by device and browser.

Your money lands in your own Stripe account. Shop and Event take the payment straight into your Stripe account, on Stripe's payout schedule rather than ours, with Stripe's fee and our printed 5% or 0% as the only lines between the sale and you.

Live in minutes, with no app store between you and your audience. AI builds the first version in 2-3 minutes from a description or your website, and the Mini App is live at its own address the moment you tap Publish: no review step, no developer account, no store listing to buy.

The store checkout is on its way, and Easyapp Store itself is already live. Easyapp Store is live today on the web at easyapp.ai/store and as the Easyapp Store app on the App Store and Google Play, where Mini Apps are listed and found; what arrives next is the checkout inside it, and the Mini App you build now is the one it lands on. Inside Easyapp Store, digital purchases and subscriptions go through Apple's or Google's own checkout, with saved payment details and the familiar subscription settings. On iPhone those purchases run under Apple's Mini Apps Partner Program, so Apple's commission is 15% instead of the standard 30% on qualifying purchases. Easyapp's fee is 5% on Creator and 3% then 2% on Creator Pro; Apple's or Google's fee applies separately.* Your Mini App stays on the web at the same link; the follower moves to the store checkout only at the moment of paying for something digital, then comes back.

* In-app payments through Easyapp Store are coming very soon. The launch follows technical integration and platform approvals.

The column nobody prices

This is the part we think is actually worth your time, because as far as we can tell no comparison in this category publishes it.

There is one column that reverses the ordering of every fee table on this page. Gumroad charges one of the highest percentages here, 10% plus $0.50, and it registers, collects and remits sales tax worldwide at no extra cost, and has done since 1 January 2025. Teachable claims calculation, collection and remittance across 45 or more countries. Kajabi calculates and collects but hands you the filing. Whop charges no platform fee at all and sells tax remittance as a separate module at 2% per transaction. Stan, Beacons and Substack charge between 0% and 9% and make no statement about who carries the obligation. Easyapp sits in the cheapest band and leaves the obligation with you. So a 10% fee and a 0% fee are not two prices for the same service; they are two different scopes of work, and only one of them ever appears on an invoice.

Gumroad's 10% and a 0% platform fee are not two prices for the same thing. They are two different scopes of service. That is the sentence missing from every comparison we read, including, until now, ours.

If you are selling in one country, under its registration threshold, this column may not matter to you this year. If you are selling digital products into the EU or the UK, it may be the most expensive line item on the page, and it will not appear on any invoice.

The breakeven math

Everything in this section is our arithmetic. It is easy to check and you should check it against your own numbers.

Processing fees appear on both sides of any comparison involving us, because an Easyapp creator pays Stripe directly. So they cancel out, and the real comparison is subscription plus platform percentage, which is exactly how the table below is built.

Creator has no subscription, so against the no-subscription platforms it is a percentage against a percentage. Creator's fee on web sales is 5%. Gumroad direct is 10% plus $0.50, Substack is 10.7% including its recurring-payment fee, Patreon is 10%, Beacons Free is 9% and Linktree Free is 12%. There is no crossover point to compute between 5% and any of those, which is the plain reading of the table; the differences that matter are in the tax column below and in Whop, which we come to.

Pro has a subscription and no percentage, so there is a crossover. At $15 a month, Pro costs the same as a 10% platform at $150 of monthly sales, and less above it. Against Linktree Pro, which is also $15 a month but takes 9% on digital sales, there is nothing to compute. Against the 0% plans in the table, Stan at $29, Beacons Creator Plus at $30 and Linktree Premium at $35, the comparison is one subscription against another.

The same web sale, priced out. Monthly subscription plus platform percentage; processing, tax and other fees excluded.

Linktree's percentage applies to digital products and courses sold through Linktree itself; a link out to another store is a different transaction. Whop and Gumroad are not forced into this table because their service scope is different, and the next two paragraphs are about why.

Whop is not a breakeven question. Its processing rate of 2.7% plus $0.30 sits below the 2.9% plus $0.30 that a Stripe account pays directly, and there is no subscription. Creator's 5% sits on top of Stripe's rate, and Pro's $15 is a fixed cost Whop does not have. The comparison with Whop is not about price; it is about having a Mini App under your own name and icon, with notifications in your name, rather than a storefront inside Whop's app.

Gumroad is two things at once. It is a row in the percentage table, and it is also one of the tools you can bring into a Mini App with a link, alongside Calendly, Jotform, Typeform and the rest. Its 10% buys merchant-of-record status, which is the column below.

Against the branded app sellers there is no breakeven either, and for a different reason. These are two different products rather than two prices for one. Passion.io Expand at $599 a month is built around a store listing; Easyapp is built around the route that opens from a link. Putting a free plan next to $7,188 a year as though they answered the same question would be a misleading comparison, so we do not make it. The section above lays out what each route costs in work as well as in money.

What this comparison does not cover

One limit is large enough that it belongs in the body of the article.

Everything above is scoped to one-time sales: digital products, physical products, services, event tickets. Recurring subscription billing from your audience sits outside that scope, and it is coming very soon through Easyapp Store, where your followers pay inside the App Store or Google Play checkout and manage the subscription from the phone's own settings. What works on our side today is one-time product and service sales, paid events and tickets, and appointment requests, all through Stripe, on a plan that starts free.

If you want to test this yourself

Creator is free, and it is a plan rather than a trial, so there is nothing to time. Download Easyapp, describe your work in a sentence, and a first version of your Mini App is assembled in two to three minutes. Publishing is a tap with no review step, and your first address is free. If it turns out to be the wrong shape for what you sell, you will know quickly and you will not have committed to anything.

Start free, and if you are earlier in the decision than pricing, what a mini app actually is and mini app against native app against PWA are the two pages that come before this one.

If the question underneath all of this is why Easyapp at all, that page makes the whole case in one place, plans, services and prices included.

Update log

16 September 2026, night. Easyapp Store described as live, on the web at easyapp.ai/store and as the Easyapp Store app, where Mini Apps are listed and found; the footnote now says that in-app payments through Easyapp Store are coming very soon, which is the part that is not yet launched. The reasons-to-choose section and the title were added the same night.

16 September 2026. Kajabi rows corrected: Kajabi's pricing page now lists the branded app as included on all three plans and marks it as a $199 a month value, where our 26 August reading had it on Pro only. Kajabi's help centre still describes it as included on Pro with a $199 a month add-on below, and the text now says so. The branded-app section, the FAQ answer and the Movement.so paragraph were rewritten to match. Closing call to action wording aligned with the pricing section. Publishing time corrected: the Mini App is live when you tap Publish, with no review step; the earlier "one to two hours" was wrong. The sources footer no longer dates our own figures to 13 August; the plans are dated 13 September 2026. The body FAQ answer on whether Easyapp is in the comparison now matches the front matter; the older text, which listed three cases where another platform was the better pick, was left over from before 1 September.

13 September 2026. Easyapp's row rewritten for the new plans: Creator, free with a 5% fee on web sales, and Creator Pro at $15 a month or $150 a year with 0%. The former one-time payments add-on and the seven-day trial no longer exist and were removed. Added Linktree to both fee tables (Free $0 at 12%, Pro $15 at 9%, Premium $35 at 0%, read 9 September 2026) and rebuilt the breakeven section around the same-sale comparison at $1,000 and $10,000 a month. Added the coming in-app payment fees through Easyapp Store.

26 August 2026. Added the fourth fee structure and the four companies in it: Passion.io, Movement.so, Kajabi and Mighty Networks, read from their own pricing pages on 26 August 2026. Added the section on whose developer account a branded app lives in, including Apple's Guideline 4.2.6 and three App Store listings we checked. Corrected the Kajabi rows: the branded app is on Pro only, not on all three plans as we first had it, and the monthly and annual prices we first published were read from the wrong toggle state. Added the Google Play comparison: Google has no equivalent of 4.2.6, it recommends rather than requires per-client accounts, and its cost structure differs. Added our own history with native store publishing. Added the trial scope of the time, which we had left out.

25 August 2026. First publication. Gumroad, Patreon, Substack, Beacons, Stan, Teachable, Podia and Whop read from their own pages on 25 August 2026. Easyapp figures dated 13 August 2026. Linktree is not in the comparison because it is not primarily a monetization platform. Whop's own share of third-party app revenue is not published anywhere we could find, and Podia does not publish monthly pricing for its Shaker and Earthquaker tiers; both are marked rather than estimated.

We refresh this set every six months, or sooner if a platform changes its pricing. When we do, the data changes and the modified date moves. We do not change the year in the title and republish an unchanged page.

Sources

Every external claim on this page, with the date it was read. Company pages were read directly, not through any intermediary.

Easyapp figures come from our own pricing and product: the plans and fees as published on 13 September 2026, the publishing mechanics confirmed on 16 September 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which creator platform has the lowest fees?

It depends on your revenue and on how you count. Platforms with no subscription and a percentage cut are cheapest at low revenue. Subscription platforms become cheaper as revenue rises. Whop charges no platform fee at all and its processing rate is below standard Stripe. But the ranking changes once you add the column almost nobody publishes: who is legally the seller and who files your sales tax.

How much does a branded app for creators cost?

More than the entry price suggests, because store visibility is locked to the top plan at three of the four companies that sell one. Passion.io puts the store listing on Expand at $599 a month billed annually, Movement.so on Business at $239, and Mighty Networks on Mighty Pro, whose price it does not publish. Lower plans still give you an app, it is just not listed in the stores. Kajabi is the exception: its pricing page, read 16 September 2026, lists the branded app as included on all three plans, from $179 a month on Basic, although its help centre still describes it as a $199 a month add-on below Pro. All four also take a percentage of every sale on top of the subscription.

If I buy a branded app, whose Apple developer account is it in?

Yours. Apple's Guideline 4.2.6 rejects apps built from a template or app generation service unless the provider of the content submits them directly, so a company selling a listing under your own name has to put it in your account. We checked three apps these platforms showcase and the seller was the creator or the creator's own company in all three. The app really is yours. So is the $99 a year, App Store Connect, and every resubmission.

What is a merchant of record and why does it matter?

The merchant of record is whoever legally counts as the seller, which makes them the party responsible for registering for sales tax, collecting it and paying it over. Gumroad became merchant of record on 1 January 2025 and handles worldwide tax at no extra cost. Teachable claims calculation, collection and remittance in 45 or more countries. Whop is merchant of record for card settlement only and sells tax remittance separately at an extra 2% per transaction. Stan and Beacons make no statement. This one column can be worth more than several percentage points of fee.

Does a 0% platform fee mean the platform is cheaper?

Not automatically. A 0% platform fee usually means one of two things: you are paying a subscription instead, or the platform is not in your payment flow and therefore not carrying the compliance work. Both are legitimate. Neither is free.

How often is this data updated?

Every six months, or sooner when a platform changes pricing. Each row carries the date it was read. If nothing in the data moved, the page does not move.

Is Easyapp included in this comparison?

Yes, and we make Easyapp, which is stated at the top of the page and again in the table. Our row is two plans: Creator, which has no subscription fee and takes 5% on web sales, and Creator Pro at $15 a month or $150 a year with 0% on web sales. Payments run through your own Stripe account either way, and every Easyapp figure on this page is dated 13 September 2026.