Patreon vs Ko-fi vs Buy Me a Coffee: Which Fees Actually Leave Creators With More?

Key Takeaway

• Patreon vs Ko-fi comes down to 10% against 5%. Patreon moved every new creator to a 10% platform fee after August 4, 2025, while Ko-fi still runs the free plan at 5% and its $12 Gold plan at 0%.
• The same $1,000 month pays out differently on each platform. Forty $25 memberships keep $859 on Patreon’s 10% plan, $904 on Buy Me a Coffee, and $947 on Ko-fi Gold, and the fees themselves are the $88 difference.
• Buy Me a Coffee’s flat 5% never goes away. There is no premium tier that removes it, and Stripe’s 2.9% + $0.30 processing still rides on top of every payment.
• Ko-fi Gold pays for itself once income passes $240 a month. Below that line the free 5% plan costs less; above $1,000 Gold keeps $47 more each month than the free plan does.

The three biggest fan-support platforms all advertise free accounts, but they sit three steps apart on the fee ladder. The Patreon vs Ko-fi spread repeats at every payment size, and at creator income levels a ladder step is monthly money. This page runs each platform’s own published rates through the same $5 tip, the same $25 membership and the same $1,000 month, then adds the payout and currency steps a Philippine and international creator faces before the money lands. Compute your level, find your row, keep the difference.

Patreon vs Ko-fi vs Buy Me a Coffee: The Fee Table at a Glance

The cleanest way to see the Patreon vs Ko-fi gap is side by side, from the platforms’ own pricing and fee pages:

Each row links back to a primary source: Patreon’s pricing page and its creator fee breakdown, Ko-fi’s pricing page, and the Buy Me a Coffee FAQ, which states its own rule: “We charge a 5% transaction fee, and creators keep 95% of the earnings.” Card processing is quoted at Stripe’s standard 2.9% + 30¢ domestic rate.

Patreon’s Fees in 2026: The 10% Era

Patreon’s fee overview is blunt about the shift: any creator who published a page after August 4, 2025 is on the standard 10% plan. Older pages keep their legacy rates: Founders pay 5% (joined before May 2019), Pro pages pay 8%, Pro + Merch pages pay 11% — but the safety net has holes: unpublish a page (or have Patreon do it) and the re-publish lands on 10%. Legacy rates exist only while the page stays live and untouched.

On top of the platform fee, Patreon runs processing through its own stack: 2.9% + $0.30 on card payments against a USD balance, and 3.9% + $0.30 when members pay by PayPal from outside the US. Payments made in a currency different from your payout currency add a 2.5% conversion fee. One-time purchases (digital products, single posts) carry exactly the same fees as memberships, so the 10% also covers shop-style sales. The one place fees swell further is Apple’s ecosystem: purchases inside the Patreon iOS app pay Apple’s 30% App Store fee, still alongside Patreon’s platform cut.

A worked line shows what that means per membership. A $25 payment from a US card member on the 10% plan carries $2.50 of platform fee plus $1.02 of processing (25 × 2.9% = $0.73, plus the $0.30 fixed part), for $3.53 in total, and you keep about $21.47 of each $25 before payouts.

Ko-fi’s Fees: 5% Everywhere, or $12 for 0%

Ko-fi’s pricing page runs on a simple two-column logic: a free plan with a 5% service fee, or a $12-a-month Gold plan with 0%. The 5% plan (labeled Standard, and the default for new creators) applies to every payment type: tips, memberships, commissions and shop sales. Accounts created before the change keep the older shape: 0% on tips, 5% on memberships, shop sales and commissions, which is why some veteran Ko-fi creators still advertise fee-free tips.

The structural difference matters as much as the percentage: Ko-fi never holds your money. Payments go directly into your own PayPal or Stripe account the moment a supporter pays, and Ko-fi states plainly that it charges no payout fees; the only extra cost is your payment processor’s standard rate, the same 2.9% + $0.30 class of fee every direct platform rides on. That means the platform fee is the only lever Ko-fi controls, and Gold removes it completely: $12 a month, 0% on tips, memberships, commissions and shop alike.

Buy Me a Coffee’s Fees: The Flat 5%

The Buy Me a Coffee FAQ sets the whole pricing story in one sentence: “We do not charge a monthly fee… We charge a 5% transaction fee, and creators keep 95% of the earnings.” Every feature (publishing, memberships, shop, email) is included, and more than two million creators use the page. What the FAQ also makes obvious by omission: there is no premium tier. The 5% cannot be subscribed away.

Payment processing rides on Stripe (and Wise for payouts to banks in 44 supported countries), so Stripe’s standard card rate lands on top of the 5%. Creators who have itemized their payouts report the full stack: 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, an extra 1% when the supporter’s card is international, 0.5% on membership payments, and 0.5% on payout processing; one podcaster’s receipt line on Reddit’s r/podcasting, which BMAC confirmed to them directly, matches the structure a 2026 fee review by BuiltByFoundry documents. On a $5 tip the fixed $0.30 does the visible damage: 5% ($0.25) plus $0.445 of processing keeps about $4.31, an 86% effective rate.

The Patreon vs Ko-fi Fee Difference, Computed

Published percentages only matter once they run through real payment patterns, so the Patreon vs Ko-fi comparison gets computed here line by line, on two shapes of the same $1,000 month: many small tips (200 × $5) or fewer larger memberships (40 × $25), US domestic card, Stripe’s standard 2.9% + $0.30 riding on the direct platforms. Patreon’s own processing applies to its column.

*The legacy row applies only to tips on Ko-fi accounts that predate the 5% Standard switch; memberships on those accounts still pay 5%. This column shows the tips-basis.

Three patterns stand out. First, many-small-versus-few-big costs real money on every platform, and most visibly on Patreon: the same $1,000 gross keeps $48 more each month as 40 memberships than as 200 tips, just because each payment carries one fixed $0.30 processing charge. Second, the Patreon vs Ko-fi gap is structural (10% against 5%) and it repeats at every income level, which is why Ko-fi Standard lands $50 a month ahead at $1,000. Third, Gold’s 0% beats both: $947 kept at 40 × $25, the highest number any configuration on this page produces.

What the same $1,000 in $25 memberships keeps after platform and card-processing fees, computed from each platform’s published rates. Payout fees sit on top and are covered in the next section.

The arithmetic is one formula any creator can run tonight:

kept = payment − (platform% × payment) − (processor% × payment + fixed fee)

Worked example, a $25 membership on Ko-fi Standard: $25 − ($1.25 platform) − ($0.73 processing + $0.30 fixed) = $22.73 kept. The same $25 on Patreon’s 10% plan keeps $21.47.

Payout Fees and the Philippines Leg

Platform and processing fees decide what reaches your balance; payout and currency steps decide what reaches your bank. On the Patreon vs Ko-fi comparison, that second half of the journey is where the two platforms trade places: Patreon pays out on its schedule; Ko-fi streams straight to a connected account. For Philippines-based creators (and Filipinos earning in USD abroad), the three routes differ sharply.

Patreon pays non-US creators through Payoneer bank transfer, and the fee page’s payout table lists the Philippines among supported PHP destinations: $0.25 + a 1.55% currency conversion fee per payout when converting from USD. On the worked $1,000 month, Patreon keeps $859.00 in balance, then hands Payoneer $15.80 (1.55% + $0.25) on the monthly withdrawal, an 84.3% effective keep-rate end to end. Ko-fi’s route is direct: money lands in your PayPal or Stripe immediately with no platform payout charge, though PayPal applies its own cross-border and conversion costs on the way to a PHP account. Buy Me a Coffee banks out through Stripe and Wise in its 44 payout countries. One cadence note that costs nothing to follow: Payoneer’s fee on Patreon is charged per payout, so one monthly withdrawal is cheaper than several small ones.

One-Time Sales: Where the Fees Land in the Shop

Fan-support platforms double as storefronts, and the shop legs mirror each platform’s fee logic. The Patreon vs Ko-fi shop gap tracks the support gap. Patreon charges one-time purchases (digital products, single posts) at the same rate as memberships, so the 10% plan also taxes shop sales; sellers who started before May 22, 2025 may hold a legacy 5% rate on those items. Ko-fi’s shop takes 5% on the free plan and 0% on Gold. Buy Me a Coffee extras carry the same flat 5% as everything else.

That makes these three platforms an honest staging ground, not the end state, for product-based income. Dedicated storefronts with their own fee menus (the mechanics sit in our pieces on where to sell AI prompts and the Notion template make-and-sell breakdown) and often beat a 10% fan-support fee on high-volume digital goods. The rule of thumb: recurring community income belongs on a support platform; scale product sales where the fee table is flatter.

The Decision: Which Platform Keeps More at Your Level

The Patreon vs Ko-fi decision, and the Buy Me a Coffee placement inside it, resolves cleanly by monthly income:

• Under $240 a month: stay on a free plan. Ko-fi Standard and Buy Me a Coffee tie at an 86% effective rate on tips; BMAC’s one-tap checkout (no supporter sign-ups) is the real differentiator, not the fee. Legacy Ko-fi accounts with 0% tips have no reason to change anything.
• $240 to $500 a month: Ko-fi Gold flips from cost to saving at exactly $240 (the $12 fee finally moves less than the 5% it removes). At $500 in 20 × $25 memberships, Gold keeps $467.50 against $454.50 on the free plan, $13 more each month.
• $1,000+ in memberships: the computed table ranks the field: Ko-fi Gold $947, Buy Me a Coffee $904–$909, Patreon 10% $859. On fees alone the ordering never changes at higher grosses, because every rate is linear.
• Big single payments, tip-heavy audiences: fewer, larger payments beat many small ones everywhere (worth $48 a month on the Patreon column at $1,000 gross). If your audience tips $3 at a time, the fixed-fee drag is the expense to manage, not the percentage.
• When Patreon’s 10% still buys something: discovery tools that surface your page inside Patreon’s network, native hosting for video, podcasts and livestreams, built-in chargeback and fraud handling, and iOS in-app payments. Buy the infrastructure knowingly; 10% is its price, and 5–8% legacy pages should protect it by never unpublishing.

Every keep-rate above assumes domestic US cards and Stripe’s published standard rate; international supporters add roughly a 1% card surcharge in the BMAC stack and equivalent conversion costs elsewhere. The structural takeaway survives every adjustment: the Patreon vs Ko-fi fee difference is a five-point ladder between neighbors, and the plan you activate on Ko-fi decides whether you climb two rungs above it or none at all. Creators weighing another monetization lane alongside memberships can pair this with our breakdown of AI affiliate program commission terms, and the platform-vs-platform logic extends to faceless YouTube monetization checks where ad-share replaces supporter fees entirely.

FAQ

Patreon vs Ko-fi: which one takes less?

Ko-fi, at every income level in this page’s computed Patreon vs Ko-fi table. Patreon’s standard plan takes 10% of creator income for pages published after August 4, 2025; Ko-fi’s Standard plan takes 5% and Gold takes 0%. Only legacy Patreon pages (5–8%) hold the advantage, and those rates survive only while the page stays published.

How much does Buy Me a Coffee take?

A flat 5% per transaction, stated in its FAQ as “creators keep 95% of the earnings.” There is no monthly fee for features and no premium tier that removes the 5%. Stripe’s processing fees ride on top of every payment.

Is the Ko-fi Gold $12 fee worth it?

It pays for itself above $240 of monthly income. The Gold plan removes the 5% service fee from tips, memberships, commissions and shop sales, so at $240 a month the 5% you save ($12) equals the Gold cost, and every dollar above that widens the saving. At $1,000 a month, Gold keeps $45–$47 more than the free plan.

Does Patreon charge fees on one-time purchases and shop sales?

Yes. Patreon’s fee overview applies the same rates to one-time purchases as to memberships: 10% on the standard plan, with a legacy 5% rate for creators who started selling digital products before May 22, 2025. Payment processing applies the same way.

Why was my Buy Me a Coffee payout less than 95% of the tip?

Because the 5% platform fee is only the first layer. Stripe adds 2.9% + $0.30 per payment, an additional 1% on international cards, 0.5% on subscription payments and 0.5% on payout processing. On a $5 tip, the fixed $0.30 alone is 6%, which is why small tips keep closer to 86% than 95%.

Which platform pays out to the Philippines most easily?

Patreon ships PHP payouts through Payoneer at $0.25 + 1.55% per withdrawal. Ko-fi sends money directly to your PayPal or Stripe account the moment a supporter pays. Buy Me a Coffee banks out through Stripe and Wise in 44 countries. For monthly, larger sums the Payoneer percentage is the price to weigh; for tips and small sums, direct-to-PayPal keeps the fee chain shortest.

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