Ko-fi Earnings Calculator

Understanding Ko-fi's Fees: Free, Standard and Gold

Ko-fi's distinctive claim in the creator economy is narrower than the marketing suggests, and more interesting: it is the only major platform that charges 0% on its core product — the one-off tip — if you stay on its free state. That is a real advantage over Patreon's mandatory 10% or Buy Me a Coffee's flat 5%. What it is not is a zero-fee platform. Memberships, commissions and shop sales all carry a 5% service fee, and every payment carries your own PayPal or Stripe processing rate on top.

The platform supports three primary revenue streams. One-off tips (called "coffees") let supporters send money without any ongoing commitment. Memberships provide recurring monthly income similar to Patreon tiers. And the Ko-fi Shop lets creators sell digital downloads, commissions and physical products. Each stream has different fee implications, and on Ko-fi the difference between them is the whole decision.

How Ko-fi's Fee Structure Works

Ko-fi has three fee states, not two:

• Ko-fi Free — $0/month. A 0% service fee on one-off tips and crowdfunding goals; 5% on memberships, monthly tips, commissions and shop sales. Some features are locked, including supporter-only content, scheduled posts and the shorter page name.
• Standard — $0/month, 5% on every payment type including one-off tips, with everything unlocked. This is what a creator joining Ko-fi today starts on, and it can be switched off again at any time under Settings → Payment.
• Ko-fi Gold — $12/month for a 0% service fee on all payment options.

Ko-fi does not process payments itself. Supporters pay into your own PayPal or Stripe account, and you pay that processor's normal rate — Ko-fi's own guidance is that it is usually around 3% + $0.30 per transaction, and it varies by account type, location and currency. The upside of that arrangement is that Ko-fi never holds your money: there is no payout fee and no payout minimum, which is not true of Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee or Gumroad.

This calculator models all four revenue streams against all three fee states, applies the service fee only to the products that actually carry it, subtracts the Gold subscription from take-home rather than ignoring it, and lets you set your own processing rate. The Gold comparison shows the arithmetic difference at your revenue, not a recommendation.

How to Use the Ko-fi Earnings Calculator

Start with the Ko-fi Plan dropdown, because it changes the answer more than anything else on the page. It defaults to Standard, which is what a creator signing up today gets. Then enter the number of one-off tips you receive in a month and how many recurring members you have. The calculator applies Ko-fi's 5% service fee only to the products that actually carry it on the plan you selected, adds your own PayPal or Stripe processing on every transaction, and shows what lands in your account.

Switch to Advanced mode to set your average tip size and membership price, add shop orders and commissions, and set your real processing rate instead of the 2.9% placeholder. Shop sales and commissions are charged the 5% service fee on both Free and Standard, so adding them raises your effective fee rate rather than lowering it.

The plan choice is worth testing both ways. Take a creator with 20 tips of $5 and 10 members at $5, which is $150/month gross. On Standard the fees come to $20.85 and the take-home is $129.15. On Ko-fi Free the same creator pays $15.85 and takes home $134.15, because the $100 of tips is charged 0%. On Ko-fi Gold, the $12 subscription outweighs the $7.50 of service fee it removes, and the take-home falls to $124.65. Standard is not free; it buys features with a 5% cut of your tips.

Gold's arithmetic break-even is $240/month of fee-charging revenue — $12 divided by 5%. Note the qualifier: fee-charging. A creator whose income is entirely one-off tips on Ko-fi Free pays no service fee at all, so Gold has nothing to save them no matter how large they get. A creator whose income is memberships, commissions and shop sales hits the break-even at exactly $240. Before planning around Gold, check Ko-fi's current pricing page — Ko-fi's own Gold page is now headed "You no longer need Ko-fi Gold", and its Help Centre fee breakdown lists only Free and Standard.

For accurate projections, remember that tip income is variable month-to-month while memberships are predictable, and that the flat $0.30 per transaction hurts most when your average payment is small. Twenty $5 tips cost you $6.00 in fixed processing charges; one $100 payment costs $0.30.

The Same $500, Two Different Answers

Because Ko-fi charges by product type rather than by a single headline rate, the plan that is cheapest for you depends entirely on where your money comes from. These figures are this calculator's own output at a 2.9% + $0.30 processing rate.

$500/month arriving as…	Ko-fi Free	Standard	Ko-fi Gold ($12/mo)
100 one-off tips of $5	$455.50 (8.9% fees)	$430.50 (13.9%)	$443.50 (11.3%)
100 memberships of $5	$430.50 (13.9%)	$430.50 (13.9%)	$443.50 (11.3%)

Identical gross revenue, identical transaction count, a $25/month spread in take-home. For the tips-only creator, Ko-fi Free wins and Gold is a pure loss. For the membership creator, Free and Standard are identical — the 5% applies either way — and Gold is ahead by $13/month because $500 is above the $240 break-even.

Ko-fi vs Other Creator Platforms: Fee Structures

The headline percentages are not comparable to each other, because the platforms charge on different bases. This table compares the structures as each platform publishes them. Take-home depends on your transaction sizes, so use the calculator above for Ko-fi rather than reading a rate off this table.

Platform	Platform fee	Payment processing	Payout
Ko-fi Free	0% on one-off tips and goals; 5% on memberships, commissions and shop	Your own PayPal/Stripe, ~3% + $0.30	No fee, no minimum
Ko-fi Standard	5% on every payment type	Your own PayPal/Stripe, ~3% + $0.30	No fee, no minimum
Ko-fi Gold	0%, for $12/month	Your own PayPal/Stripe, ~3% + $0.30	No fee, no minimum
Patreon (standard)	10% — mandatory for anyone who published after 4 Aug 2025	2.9% + $0.30 US card, with no micropayment rate	$0.25–$1.00+; PayPal 1%, capped at $20
Patreon (legacy, closed)	5% Founders / 8% Pro / 11% Pro + Merch	5% + $0.10 on pledges of $3 or less	As above
Buy Me a Coffee	5% flat, no tiers	2.9% + $0.30, +1% international, +0.5% recurring — and it can be shifted onto the supporter	$10 minimum
Gumroad	10% + $0.50 per transaction; 30% via Discover	Bundled — Gumroad is merchant of record	$100 minimum
Substack	10%	2.9% + $0.30, plus Stripe's 0.7% Billing fee on recurring payments	Your own Stripe terms

Two structural facts do more work here than any percentage. Ko-fi is the only one of the five that charges 0% on its core product in its free state. It is also the only one that never holds your money — supporters pay your own PayPal or Stripe account directly, so there is no payout fee, no payout minimum and no waiting period. Gumroad's $100 payout floor and Patreon's per-payout charge are real costs that no fee percentage shows.

Worked Example: Building a $1,000/Month Ko-fi Income

Consider a digital artist reaching about $1,000/month on Ko-fi across all four revenue streams. Every figure below is this calculator's output for those inputs.

One-off tips: with 500 followers engaging with their work, roughly 3% tip each month at an average of $5 — about 15 tips totalling $75/month.

Memberships: two tiers, a $3/month "Supporter" tier with early access and an $8/month "Patron" tier with wallpaper packs and process videos. Forty supporters on the $3 tier ($120) and 25 on the $8 tier ($200) generate $320/month across 65 recurring charges.

Shop and commissions: 35 digital art packs at $12 ($420/month) plus four commission slots at $50 ($200/month). Contrary to what Ko-fi's marketing implies, this is not the highest-margin stream — shop sales and commissions both carry the 5% service fee on Free and on Standard.

Total gross: $1,015/month across 119 transactions. On Standard, the 5% service fee is $50.75 and processing is $64.53, leaving $899.72 — an 88.6% take-home rate. On Ko-fi Free, only the $75 of tips escapes the service fee, so the bill falls by $3.75 to give $903.47 (89.0%). On Ko-fi Gold, the service fee is $0 and the $12 subscription applies, leaving $938.47 (92.5%) — $38.75/month better than Standard, because this creator's revenue is far above the $240 break-even.

Note how little separates Free from Standard here: $3.75/month, because only 7% of this creator's income is one-off tips. The plan choice matters enormously for a tip jar and barely at all for a shop.

Strategies to Maximize Ko-fi Earnings

Know which stream is actually your cheapest. On Ko-fi Free, one-off tips are the only stream with a 0% service fee. Every dollar you move from a membership or a shop sale into a straightforward tip saves you five cents — the opposite of the advice most Ko-fi guides give.

Treat Standard as a purchase, not a default. Standard unlocks supporter-only content, scheduled posts, a shorter page name and more shop storage, and it costs 5% of your tip income to do it. If you do not use those features, Ko-fi Free is genuinely cheaper for a tips-led creator. It is a toggle under Settings → Payment, reversible at any time.

Use $240 as the Gold milestone, not $12. Gold pays for itself at $240/month of fee-charging revenue. Check what Ko-fi is currently selling before relying on it — Ko-fi has begun steering creators to Standard instead, and a Gold subscriber who also leaves "Get all of Ko-fi" switched on keeps paying the 5% until they opt out separately.

Push your average transaction up. The $0.30 flat processing charge is regressive: it is 10% of a $3 coffee and 0.6% of a $50 commission. Suggested tip amounts, bundles and multi-coffee options move this number more reliably than chasing a lower percentage.

Enable both Stripe and PayPal. Supporters can pay by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay or Cash App regardless, but PayPal and Venmo only appear if you have connected a PayPal account — and international supporters disproportionately prefer them. Accessibility beats shaving 0.1% off a rate.

Do not forget you are the merchant. Because the money lands in your own processor account rather than a Ko-fi balance, there is nothing to wait for and nothing to withdraw — but the tax reporting is yours, and Ko-fi does not publish whether its 5% is charged before or after tax.

Sources

Every Ko-fi fee figure on this page and in the calculator above comes from Ko-fi's own published pages, last verified on August 25, 2026. Fee schedules change without notice — check the source before relying on a figure that is more than a few months old.

• Ko-fi — Pricing — the three fee states, the $12/month Gold price, and the absence of buyer, payout and marketing fees
• Ko-fi Help Centre — Does Ko-fi take a fee? — the per-product fee breakdown, the "around 3% + $0.30" processing guidance, and the Settings → Payment toggle
• Ko-fi Gold — Gold availability and what happens when a Gold subscription is cancelled
• Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, Gumroad and Substack figures in the comparison table come from those platforms' own pricing and help pages, verified on the same date.

This calculator provides estimates only and is not financial or tax advice. Your actual payment processing rate is set by your own PayPal or Stripe agreement. Read our full financial disclaimer.