For creators who share free content, platforms like Patreon offer a way to monetize through recurring donations from fans. But memberships and donations aren’t the only ways to earn from your audience.
Goldman Sachs Research projects the creator economy will roughly double to $480 billion by 2027 — and fans funding creators directly is a big part of that.
But while Patreon works well for recurring fan revenue, it’s not a full business solution. If you want to grow beyond fan support by selling digital products, running a full community, setting up email marketing, building a website, or expanding your offerings, you need a tool that supports your long-term goals.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- Patreon’s pros and cons: where it shines and where it falls short
- 8 Patreon alternatives and who they’re best for
- How to choose the right platform for your business
We’ll cover each of the 8 alternatives to Patreon in just a minute, but first, let’s look at what Patreon does well and where it has limitations.
Patreon Pros and Cons
Patreon is a solid option for content creators who already have an audience. It’s especially useful for those who create free content (like YouTubers, podcasters, and influencers) and want to give fans a way to support their work.
But if you’re looking to grow beyond recurring donations, Patreon’s limited features might mean you have to rely on additional tools.
Here’s a quick look at Patreon’s pros and cons to help you decide if it’s the right fit for your business.
Patreon pros:
One of the biggest perks of Patreon is that it's pretty well-known in the creator space. They have name recognition and familiarity, so your followers probably already know what "join my Patreon" means.
Within the platform, you can set monthly or annual subscription options and create multiple tiers with custom perks at each tier. On your Patreon page, members won't be bombarded with ads or algorithms to distract them, and you can connect with them through posts, chats, and notifications.
The other nice thing about Patreon is the quick set up. You simply put in your information, add your tiers, and go. There's not a ton to customize so you can be up and running fast.
Patreon cons:
On the flip side, Patreon might not be the best fit if you plan to sell structured learning content like courses, content memberships, and interactive online communities. Patreon has a storefront feature for selling digital files and one-time content, but you'll need a separate tool for events, courses, webinars, and coaching.
Patreon also doesn't have many marketing tools built in, so you'll need to connect (and pay for) other platforms for your blog, website, landing pages, and email marketing. Patreon will automatically email patrons when you share a new post, but there isn't much beyond that. All those extra tools can get expensive fast as your audience grows, and you'll be responsible for making all your tools "talk to each other" correctly.
While Patreon does have a fast setup, the other side of that coin is that there aren't a lot of customizations available. There's no way to turn off Patreon's branding, and you only get to choose one brand color for your buttons, which can be frustrating if you want your page to look and feel more like you.
Perhaps the biggest challenge with Patreon is that there are always platform fees. You'll pay a 10% transaction fee on every sale, and giving away 10% of your earnings each month could really eat into your bottom line over time. If a customer subscribes through the Patreon iOS app, Apple's purchase system adds an additional 30% on top of Patreon's 10% platform fee.
For example, if you made $2,000 per month on Patreon, you'd pay $200 per month in transaction fees. (That’s more expensive than most all-in-one creator platforms that come with way more features.)
Patreon pricing:
It's free to set up a Patreon, but you'll always pay a 10% transaction fee on every sale you make on the platform.
- 10% transaction fee on all sales made on the platform (including subscription memberships and one-time digital product sales)
- An additional 30% fee applies to sales made through the Patreon iOS app, since Apple's purchase system takes its own cut on top of Patreon's platform fee
Transaction fees are one of the reasons YouTubers Jill and Jeffrey from The Whole Food Plant-Based Cooking Show decided against Patreon for their support community.
They said, "Most platforms we looked at charge a percentage. So you're almost penalized as you grow, and it can become outrageous. If you actually grow a large community, you pay a huge percentage to the platform."
Jill and Jeffrey decided to go with Podia instead. If you’d like to see how Podia could work for your fan support community, you can start a 30-day free trial here.
What are the best Patreon alternatives for creators and solopreneurs?
Patreon works well for setting up a support community, but if you’re looking for something different to grow your online business — perhaps something with more product types, customization options, marketing features, and a creator-friendly fee structure — one of these platforms might be a better fit.
- Podia: Best all-in-one platform for creators, best for building a community membership with products, courses, and events
- Ko-fi: Good for accepting donations, crowdfunding, and setting up a basic store
- Buy Me a Coffee: Good for accepting donations and setting up a simple store
- Substack: Paid newsletter and blogging tool where fans can support your writing
- Medium: Monetize your writing with a revenue share model based on read time
- Ghost: Paid newsletter and blogging platform with custom website
- Mighty Networks: Community platform with gamification tools, courses, and events
- Memberful: Membership tool that works on its own or with WordPress
Podia — best all-in-one for building a community membership with products
Podia is an all-in-one tool where you can set up recurring subscriptions and build your full website, blog, and online business. You can also sell digital products like courses, downloads, webinars, events, coaching, and community memberships.
Let your fans support your work by adding free or paid membership options, and customize your offers with monthly pricing, annual pricing, free trials, access limits, and seat limits.
All of your donors will have access to a community space where you can keep in touch, and if you’ve bundled products with a particular plan tier, those will be available all in one place. You can also build a storefront that’s visible to signed-in members so they can easily buy more of your work.
You can promote your membership and all your digital products with your own customizable website and landing pages. Podia has an easy point-and-click page builder and dozens of pre-designed section templates that you can customize to make a unique page that feels like you, and you have control over details like the page layouts, fonts, colors, image shapes, padding, header navigation, and footer.
When someone decides to support your work (or buy a product), your members will automatically be added to your email list in Podia, so you can stay in touch with newsletters and email marketing. To grow and nurture your audience, Podia also has built-in lead magnets, blogging, affiliates, and sales funnels.
A lot of donation subscription tools assume you already have a giant audience, but Podia comes with features that actually help you build your audience too. You can reach new people through blogging and your website, create lead magnets to grow your email list, and send regular newsletters to nurture those leads and remind them about your subscription.
You can also offer people more than just a support membership with digital products, courses, coaching, and community, all of which can help you build a bigger fan base and earn more money.
Podia pros:
You can build a support community with recurring payments in the same place as your digital products, website, email marketing, and other business tools. Your membership tiers can include products, event access, and private spaces, and everyone who joins will automatically be added to your email list so you can stay in touch.
Podia cons:
Podia doesn’t support physical products at this time, so you’ll need another tool if you want to offer merch.
Podia pricing:
- Mover: $49/month ($42/month billed annually) with a 5% transaction fee. It includes your website, blog, landing pages, community, digital products, and courses, with up to 50 products, 25 community spaces, and 100 email subscribers.
- Shaker: $99/month ($84/month billed annually) with no transaction fees. It includes everything in Mover, plus affiliate marketing, upsells, one assistant seat, and integrations with PayPal, Zoom, and Zapier, with up to 150 products, 100 community spaces, and 500 email subscribers.
- Earthquaker: $179/month ($150/month billed annually) with no transaction fees. It includes everything in Shaker, with unlimited products, unlimited assistant seats, unlimited video storage, unlimited community spaces, and up to 1,000 email subscribers.
All plans come with a 30-day free trial and include access to Podia’s Email platform. Email subscribers are included on all plans, and you can always upgrade as your list grows, so you have space for more. All plans also include free migrations, so if you’ve already built products on another platform, Podia can help you move for free.
Ko-fi — platform for accepting donations, crowdfunding, and setting up a basic store
Ko-fi is a simple platform where content creators can accept donations, create memberships, and sell products to their followers. Like Patreon, Ko-fi works best for people who already have an audience.
You can let people make one-time donations or set up recurring payments, offer basic digital download files for sale, and allow people to hire you for commissioned work.
When you create a Ko-fi page, you'll use the same template as everyone else and customize it with information about your business. You can add posts on your wall and any downloadable files you want to have in your shop.
Ko-fi is simple to set up, but there are almost no customization options available to make your site look unique. If you want to make your own website, blog, or storefront, you'll need additional tools.
Ko-fi pros:
Ko-fi gives you more ways to earn beyond recurring donations and also supports crowdfunding and custom commission work. It's easy to share a link to your simple Ko-fi setup on social media and in your link in bio. Ko-fi’s free plan charges a 5% transaction fee compared to Patreon’s 10% fee.
Ko-fi cons:
Ko-fi doesn't have many customization options, and your homepage uses a basic template just like everyone else's. Ko-fi also doesn’t give you tools for building an email list or growing your audience, so you’ll need to use other tools to get more features which could mean extra costs.
Ko-fi pricing:
- Standard: $0/month, plus a 5% service fee on donations, memberships, shop sales, and commissions
- Gold: $12/month, 0% service fee
Buy Me a Coffee — platform for accepting donations and setting up a simple store
Buy Me a Coffee is another tool where you can accept support from your audience. You can bring in recurring income through monthly or yearly subscriptions, share subscriber-only content, and give fans the option to send a one-off donation.
You can also sell simple products like ebooks, Zoom sessions, video files, and other file types to your audience using the Buy Me a Coffee store feature. You can enable an option that lets fans email you too, and you can reply to them from your inbox.
To set it up, you’ll create a page and add your personal information, your brand info, a profile image, and a cover image. You can also choose what links you want to display on your page, like your shop, membership, or gallery of work. But beyond that, there aren’t a ton of customization options. All pages are pretty templated just like Patreon and Ko-fi, so it’s nice for getting started quickly, but not the best for making a unique online presence that looks and feels like you. (But on the plus side, you can change the “coffee” phrase to something that matches your business!)
If you have an existing audience on social media or another channel, Buy Me a Coffee gives you a quick and easy way to accept support from them on a one-time basis or with recurring income.
Buy Me a Coffee pros:
Buy Me a Coffee doesn't charge a monthly fee, and you have lots of options for monetizing your followers, like accepting donations, setting up recurring membership tiers, selling basic digital products, and accepting custom commissions. You can also add posts and content that's public or subscriber-only, and you get paid instantly rather than waiting on a payout schedule.
Buy Me a Coffee cons:
There's no option to upgrade and get rid of transaction fees as your business grows. While paying 5% might be fine at the beginning, eventually you'll pay way more than you would with a flat rate tool.
There are also limited customization options, so you'll likely need another tool for building your website and landing pages if you want to go beyond the templated layout provided.
Buy Me a Coffee pricing:
- Free: no monthly fee, 5% transaction fee on all earnings
Up next, we're going in a slightly different direction with Substack, Medium, and Ghost. These are all tools for earning recurring income for your writing and are best suited for content creators who enjoy blogging and creating written content.
Substack — paid newsletter and blogging tool where fans can support your writing
Substack is a blogging platform where writers can earn recurring income from their work. You can publish as many posts as you want, and each post can be available for free or exclusive for subscribers. You can also choose to share posts via email to different subsets of your audience.
A key difference between Substack and some other audience support tools is that Substack isn’t a platform for accepting recurring donations. People are subscribing to get exclusive written content from you, and you’re expected to regularly share new posts.
Here’s how it works: A member finds one of your public posts and enjoys it, so they sign up for your free or paid subscription. Moving forward, you’ll continually publish more content that’s either public, free for subscribers, or gated for paid subscribers. When you publish, you can automatically email content to the people on the correct tier, or they can find it on your Substack site.
While Substack is good for blogging, there isn’t an option for selling digital products or accepting one-off payments. It also lacks a website feature, but you do get a nice page for sharing your posts. That said, you can’t customize the layout of your Substack page or your posts, which could be frustrating if you have a specific vision for how your work should look.
Substack pros:
If you enjoy writing, Substack gives you a simple way to publish blog posts and get discovered, then get paid for creating exclusive content. You can earn recurring income from your writing without trying to monetize a blog through ads. Plus, Substack automatically adds pop ups to your public posts encouraging people to subscribe so you get more members.
Substack cons:
Substack is not a great fit if you want to make a passive support community. If you just want people to give you donations because they like your work, this isn't quite the right use case. Most Substack subscribers will expect exclusive content at least once a month in exchange for their paid membership, so make sure this is something you're willing to commit to.
Substack pricing:
- Free to use, but Substack charges a 10% transaction fee on all income you earn through the platform
Medium — monetize your writing with a revenue share model based on read time
Medium is similar to Substack because you can monetize your blog and writing. The difference is that, instead of building your own list of subscribers, you write for Medium. You get paid based on how much other members engage with your work, and your pay is calculated based on factors like reading time, listening time, claps, highlights, and replies.
To use the tool and earn money, you need to sign up for a Medium membership and join the Medium Partner Program. Then you have the option to publish free or paywalled content. Free content can be read by anyone on the internet. Paywall content can only be read by other people with Medium memberships. At the end of the month, you’ll get a payout based on how many people read and reacted to your work.
Medium does give you an author page and a template for sharing your content, but it doesn’t include a full website or landing pages. It also doesn’t have built-in email marketing so if you want to build an email list for your work you’ll need another tool.
On the revenue side, it can be hit or miss. There aren’t features for selling digital products, nor are you able to set a price for your work specifically (you’ll just get royalty payments from Medium). But you can also tap into Medium’s existing audience, which is helpful if you don’t have one of your own.
Medium pros:
Medium has a large readership so you can publish your work and earn using their revenue share structure. This works well if you’re just starting out and primarily want to monetize your writing and don’t sell any digital products, but you may need to add on more tools as you grow.
Medium cons:
You don’t get to set the price for your subscription, and you don’t come away with an audience you can contact off-platform. You only earn based on reading times, and there are no features for fans to send a one-off donation or subscribe to you specifically. Plus, you don’t have tools for selling digital products or building your email list.
Medium pricing:
In order to join the Medium Partner Program, you must have a Medium membership. There are two pricing options.
- Medium Member ($5/month or $50/year): This plan allows you to read paywalled articles on Medium and earn money for your own writing. You earn based on their royalty/revenue share model.
- Friend of Medium ($15/month or $150/year): Same benefits as Medium Member plus you give more earnings to the people you read, and you can share member-only stories with anyone.
Ghost — paid newsletter and blogging platform with custom website
Ghost is a blogging and newsletter platform where you can let your fans subscribe to receive exclusive content. While it's mainly used to share your writing, you can also upload other types of files (videos, audio, etc.) to your posts, within the file size allowance of your plan.
You can set up a full website for your subscription and publish as many blog posts as you want, and there are nice themes available to give your page a unique look. Compared to Substack or Medium, Ghost has a lot more customization for your blog posts, and you can even add your own branding, so your site looks like yours (custom themes require the Publisher plan or higher).
Each post can be publicly available or subscriber-only, and you can create free and paid subscription tiers on the Publisher plan and up. You can gate articles behind specific tiers to incentivize higher sign-ups, and anything you publish can be automatically sent out to the correct recipients via email.
Ghost pros:
You can build a full website for your business and share your blog posts and email newsletter in one place. New content can automatically be sent out to members via email, and the themes are nice, with a mix of free and paid options.
Ghost cons:
The entry-level Starter plan doesn't include paid subscriptions, so you'll need to upgrade to Publisher just to start monetizing. Ghost also doesn't have digital products built in, so you'll need another tool to sell anything beyond paid posts and newsletters. Tips and donations are also only available on the Publisher plan and above, and once people subscribe, there's an expectation you'll consistently publish new content for those tier members.
Ghost pricing:
- Starter: $18/month ($15/month paid annually) for up to 1,000 members — website, custom domain, email newsletter, no paid subscriptions
- Publisher: $35/month ($29/month paid annually) for up to 1,000 members — adds paid subscriptions, custom themes, 3 premium tiers, advanced analytics
- Business: $239/month ($199/month paid annually) for up to 10,000 members — 15 staff users, 10 premium tiers, priority support
- Custom: custom pricing for unlimited members and staff users
The Starter and Publisher plans are priced for up to 1,000 members, and the price goes up if you scale beyond that. Business is priced for 10,000 members and pricing goes up if you exceed that.
Mighty Networks — community platform with engagement tools and courses
Mighty Networks is a community platform where you can set up a paid membership for your fans and followers. There are lots of community features like polls, online events, in-person events, DMs, and chat spaces, and you can have unlimited members and unlimited spaces on all plans. You can also share blog-style articles and posts within your community, include courses inside your community, and host livestreams for members.
You can charge a one-time fee for community access or charge recurring subscriptions, and you can also offer product bundles, discounts, and free trials.
That said, this tool really only works if you want to build an interactive community. If you just want a casual place where people can support you, this is probably more than you need since you're paying extra for lots of community engagement features.
On top of that, Launch and Scale each come with just one landing page, so you're limited if you a place to promote your community. Mighty Networks doesn't have a full website tool or built-in email marketing, so you'll need to add those extra features if you want them.
Mighty Networks pros:
Mighty Networks has lots of good community features and you can create free or paid tiers for your audience to join. You can also host live streams and events in your community to attract new members.
Mighty Networks cons:
Mighty Networks has storage limits and transaction fees on all plans. Plus, Mighty Networks is geared toward people who want to manage a community with lots of engagement as opposed to a passive support community, which might be more work than you’re looking for. You'll need separate tools for your website, digital products, email marketing, and blog, and you only get one landing page on Launch and Scale.
Mighty Networks pricing:
- Launch: $95/month ($79/month billed annually), 2% transaction fee — unlimited members and spaces, courses, events, basic automations, 200GB storage, 20 streaming hours/month
- Scale: $215/month ($179/month billed annually), 1% transaction fee — everything in Launch, plus more integrations, intermediate automations, ability to charge for events, 500GB storage, 30 streaming hours/month
- Mighty Pro: custom pricing, 0.5% transaction fee — branded iOS and Android apps, white-labeling, SSO, dedicated strategy and support, 4TB storage, 50 streaming hours/month
Memberful — membership tool owned by Patreon with website builder
Memberful is a tool that specializes in memberships, and it's owned by the same company that owns Patreon. You can use it as a standalone platform with its own website and landing page builder, or connect it to an existing WordPress site, and it also integrates with Discord, Mailchimp, and Kit.
Memberful makes it easy to share all kinds of content, from podcasts to newsletters to courses and downloads, and set up paywalls and member-only access on parts of your site.
On the subscription side, you can create free or paid trials, free registration, group plans, one-time payments, recurring payments, or "choose what you pay" options. You can also let people gift subscriptions to others and set up a referral program.
If you already have a WordPress site or a Discord community, this is an easy way to add subscription payments and recurring support to your existing setup. You can also use Memberful's own website and landing page builder if you're starting from scratch. You can create recurring or one-time memberships and sell digital downloads.
Memberful pros:
Memberful has lots of tools for running your membership and there are different ways you can structure payments from your audience. You can build your site with their own website builder, connect it to an existing WordPress site, or run your membership through Discord.
Memberful cons:
There's a flat monthly fee as well as a 4.9% transaction fee on all payments. Memberful also lacks full-fledged email marketing (automations, tagging, sales funnels, etc.), so you'll need to connect another tool.
Memberful pricing:
- Standard: $49/month plus a 4.9% transaction fee. Includes unlimited members, unlimited staff accounts, the website and landing page builder, and all core features.
- Enterprise: custom pricing, with volume-based rates, premium support, and custom migration and implementation help.
What’s the best Patreon alternative for my creator business?
While having a way to accept donations from your fans is a nice option, there’s a lot more that goes into building a successful business around your work.
You should also look for a tool that lets you diversify your income streams with digital products, create community for your members, set up a website and blog to reach new people, build an email list to nurture leads, and access more tools to grow.
If you’re ready to go beyond recurring subscriptions and build an entire business around your creative work, give Podia a try. Podia has your community, digital products, memberships, website, blog, landing pages, and email all in one place.
You can easily stay in touch with fans and attract new ones, all while earning a living making great content for your followers. Give Podia a try today. It’s free for 30 days. We can’t wait to see what you make.
