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How We Compare

We don’t publish a table of other platforms’ rates. Their pricing is theirs to change, a table here would go stale the week someone edits a pricing page, and a comparison we control is a comparison we can rig. Instead: our own model in full, and a calculator you point at whatever you’re comparing against.

Run the numbers

The pricing calculator takes four things: your item price, your monthly sales, the tier you’d be on here, and what the other platform takes (its cut and its per-sale fee). It shows what you keep on each side, the effective fee rate on each side, and the sales volume where the two cross over.

It will tell you when the other platform is the better deal. That happens often enough to be worth saying plainly, and the section below explains when.

Fill in the other platform’s total deduction, its own cut plus any payment processing it layers on. That is the number you can read off a payout, and it is the only one that makes the two sides comparable. Some platforms quote their cut before processing and some after.

Our model

Makenotwork
ModelFlat monthly subscription ($8-$24)
Platform cut0%
Processing~2.9% + $0.30 per sale, charged by Stripe, not by us
Who fans payYou, into your own Stripe account

The subscription is the whole of what we charge. We take nothing from a sale, so the only variable cost on a payment here is the processor’s, and it is the same processor rate you’d pay taking card payments anywhere.

That structure has a shape worth understanding before you sign up. A percentage cut costs nothing when you sell nothing and scales up forever. A flat fee costs the same every month and stops mattering as you grow. Neither is universally cheaper. Which one wins depends on your volume, and the crossover is arithmetic, not opinion:

crossover sales per month = subscription / (what they take per sale - what processing costs per sale)

Below that volume, a percentage platform costs you less. Above it, we do, and the gap widens with every sale. On a $25 item against a platform taking around 12%, the crossover on our Basic tier lands in the single-digit sales per month. On a $3 item it lands much higher, because a fixed processing fee is a bigger share of a small sale. The calculator does this for your actual numbers.

What we don’t do

Things other platforms offer that we deliberately exclude:

  • Algorithmic feed: content shown by fan choices, not engagement metrics
  • Promoted listings: no paid placement in search or discover
  • DRM: purchased files are yours, unencrypted, forever
  • Advertising: no ads on your pages or your fans’ experience
  • Behavioral tracking: no profiles, no fingerprinting, no cross-site tracking

These are design decisions, not missing features. See What We Guarantee for binding commitments.

Discovery here is driven entirely by fan intent: search, filters, tags, feeds, sorting. There is no algorithmic recommendation layer and no editorial curation. If you’re used to being surfaced by an algorithm, that absence is the thing to weigh.

When we’re not the right fit

Be honest about what you need:

  • You need algorithmic amplification. If you have no existing audience and need a platform to surface your work through recommendations or editorial picks, somewhere with that machinery will serve you better today.
  • You earn less than the crossover. Below it, a percentage cut costs less than our subscription. Run the calculator at your real numbers; if it says the other platform wins, it means it.
  • You sell at very low prices. Fixed per-sale processing fees hit hardest on $1-5 items. That constraint applies wherever you sell, but a platform that absorbs processing into its own cut can hide it better than we can.
  • You need community features we don’t have. If comments, polls, and direct messages with fans are core to how you work, we have forums and not much else.
  • You sell physical products. We don’t handle shipping, inventory, or physical fulfillment.
  • You want a payments button, not a platform. If you already have your own site, mailing list, file hosting, and audience, a checkout widget you embed is a smaller and cheaper thing than what we sell. We’re for creators who’d rather not assemble that stack.

We’d rather you pick the right platform than sign up and be disappointed.

See Also