Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee: which should you use?

Ko-fi changed shape recently, which is why older comparisons of these two are wrong. Gold used to be the main event. Now Ko-fi's own pricing page opens by telling you that you no longer need it.

What does each one charge?

Ko-fi runs three ways to be on it, set out on its own pricing page.

Ko-fi Free takes 0% on tips and 5% on memberships, shop sales and commissions, without the advanced tools. Standard, which is the default for new creators, is also $0 a month and takes 5% on every payment type including tips, in exchange for the extra tooling. Gold is $12 a month and takes 0% on everything.

Buy Me a Coffee has one plan. Its help centre puts the platform fee at 5% per transaction with no monthly charge, on supports, memberships and shop sales alike. There is no paid tier that lowers it, and there is no configuration where it is zero.

Card processing is extra on both, at roughly 2.9% + $0.30 through Stripe. Neither figure above includes it.

Is there a way to pay 0% on either?

On Ko-fi, two. On Buy Me a Coffee, none.

The free route on Ko-fi is narrow and worth understanding exactly: 0% applies to one-time tips while you are not opted in to Ko-fi Standard. Shop sales, memberships and commissions are still 5% on Ko-fi Free. So "Ko-fi is free" is true if your page is a tip jar and false the moment you sell a file.

The paid route is Gold at $12 a month for 0% across the board, and it is simple arithmetic whether that is worth it.

What extra fees does Buy Me a Coffee add?

Three that sit underneath the 5%, and this is the part its headline does not tell you.

There is a 0.5% payout processing fee, a further 1% when the supporter is international, and another 0.5% on subscription payments. Stack those with Stripe and a recurring payment from another country is meaningfully more expensive than "5%" suggests.

Ko-fi takes the opposite position in writing. Its pricing page states there are no buyer fees, payout fees or marketing fees, and describes the service fee as no more than 5%. On stacked extras, that is a straightforward win for Ko-fi.

Which one holds your money?

Neither, mostly, and both are unusually good on this compared with the rest of the category.

Ko-fi is the clearer of the two. It says plainly that you get paid directly and that it never holds your money, because it does not process payments at all: you connect your own PayPal or Stripe account and supporters pay into it. Ko-fi has also stated in its own words that you are the merchant of record on Ko-fi.

Buy Me a Coffee is close but less absolute. Its help centre says it uses Stripe Standard Connect to handle some creator payouts, and that word "some" is doing work I cannot resolve from its own documentation. It also states that it does not handle the collection or remittance of sales tax or VAT for creators, which is a useful thing to know and not a criticism, since the same is true of Ko-fi.

Either way you are close to the direct end of the payout spectrum, which is more than can be said for most platforms that sell digital products.

Which is better for selling a digital product?

Ko-fi, on fees, and neither of them brilliantly.

On a $29 template, Ko-fi Free and Buy Me a Coffee both take 5%, so they are level until you add Buy Me a Coffee's extras, at which point Ko-fi is ahead. If you sell enough to justify $12 a month, Gold takes Ko-fi to 0% and the gap becomes permanent.

What neither does is sell the buyer a second thing. Both give you a product list and a payment, and then the transaction ends. There is no order bump on the way through and no offer afterwards, so the person who just proved they will buy from you is shown nothing else. For a tip jar that is the right design. For a store it is the ceiling.

Which is better for tips?

Ko-fi, clearly, because 0% on tips exists and has no monthly cost attached. Stay off Standard and every tip arrives whole apart from what the card network takes.

Buy Me a Coffee's counterweight is not price, it is feel. The coffee metaphor, the supporter wall and the messages do a real job of making a small payment feel like a nice thing to do rather than a transaction, and its own site leans hard on calling them supporters instead of customers. That is worth something, and it is worth more than 0.5% to plenty of people.

When would I send you somewhere else?

If what you want is a tip jar, use Ko-fi Free and stop reading. Stakk does not do tips, has no supporter feed, no membership tiers and no coffee metaphor, and it is the wrong choice for that job. Buy Me a Coffee is the wrong choice too, on fees, but it is a nicer place to receive a small kindness.

If you want the lowest possible rate on products, Systeme.io is free at 0% and Whop takes 2.7% + $0.30 with no monthly fee. Both beat all three of us. And Stakk has no subscriptions, no course hosting, no booking, no prices above $999 and no currency other than US dollars.

Want a checkout instead of a tip jar?

The moment a product becomes the main thing rather than a nice extra, the question changes from which tip jar to which checkout. Stakk is built for that second question: a product page and a payment link, money landing in your own Stripe account, 10% + $0.50 a sale with card processing included, and no monthly fee.

That is more than Ko-fi Gold and more than 5%, and I would rather write it down than have you work it out later. What the $12 and the 5% do not buy is an order bump and a post-purchase upsell, which ship on every Stakk account with nothing behind a tier. The bump rides the same charge as the product so it carries one fee rather than two, and the upsell is one tap against the card already on file. That is the thing a tip jar structurally cannot do, and it came out of funnels that ran for agency clients before Stakk existed.

Whichever you pick, both of these get the important thing right: the money goes into an account you own. Plenty of bigger platforms do not.

Start selling on Stakk, free