What is Buy Me a Coffee and how does it work?
·Founder, Stakk
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10 October 2026
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7 min read
Buy Me a Coffee is a page where people can send a creator one-time support, join a membership or buy something from a shop. It is built for creators whose audience wants to back them in small amounts, and one-time support needs no account from the person paying. There is one plan and no monthly fee: Buy Me a Coffee takes 5% of every payment, and Stripe's card fee, a 0.5% payout fee and small extras on international and subscription payments sit on top. Checked 30 September 2026.
That is the short version. Below is what a creator actually does on Buy Me a Coffee, how the money reaches them, and the few things it is not built to do.
What is Buy Me a Coffee used for?
Buy Me a Coffee is used to let an audience pay a creator directly, for support, for a membership or for something from a shop. The name is the pitch. Paying you should feel as small and friendly as buying you a coffee, and the default price of one coffee is $5.
The people paying are supporters rather than customers, and most of the platform is built around them. A supporter can send one-time support without making an account. Memberships can lock posts so only paying supporters see them. The shop sits alongside both.
That makes it a good fit for a creator with an audience that wants to chip in, and a weaker fit when the page has become a store. The rest of this page shows where that line falls.
How does Buy Me a Coffee work?
You set up a page, connect a payout method, and supporters pay you through it. Buy Me a Coffee processes payments through Stripe. Supporters can pay by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay or Cash App in supported regions, and one-time support needs no account.
Each payment loses Buy Me a Coffee's 5% and Stripe's card fee. You choose whether to absorb the card fee yourself or pass it to your supporters, so the person paying covers it. Buy Me a Coffee's own overview article describes that as your choice to make, and on small payments it makes a real difference to what reaches you.
Its payouts article says your page does not go live until a payout method is connected. After that, the money moves from the supporter to Stripe, and from Stripe to your bank. How that last step works is less settled than it should be, and it has its own section below.
What can you sell on Buy Me a Coffee?
Three things: one-time support, memberships and items from a shop. One-time support is the coffee itself, a payment that buys nothing but goodwill. Memberships come with monthly or yearly billing, unlimited tiers, free trials and supporter-only posts. The shop sells products, digital ones included.
All three carry the same 5% platform fee. Memberships also carry an extra 0.5%, because they are subscription payments, and any payment from outside the US carries an extra 1%.
What the shop does not do is build an order. A buyer picks an item and pays, and the transaction ends there. That is the right design for a support page, and it is the main limit if products have become most of what you sell.
How much does Buy Me a Coffee cost?
Nothing a month, and 5% of every payment. Buy Me a Coffee's fee article puts the platform fee at 5% per transaction and adds a 0.5% payout processing fee, 1% more on payments from outside the US and 0.5% more on subscription payments, with Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30 card fee on top. There is one plan, and nothing lowers the 5%. Our breakdown of Buy Me a Coffee's fees adds every line up on a real payment.
How do you get paid on Buy Me a Coffee?
Through Stripe, into an account connected to you, though Buy Me a Coffee's own help center disagrees with itself on the details. Its payouts article, updated in August 2026, says it uses Stripe Standard Connect to handle some creator payouts, and later in the same article says it has moved all creators to Stripe Standard Connect. On that setup your balance appears in your own Stripe dashboard, and you change the payout schedule there. That is the good version of a Stripe connection: an account you log into and keep.
An older overview article, from March 2026, describes a different route. Once an account reaches $10, Buy Me a Coffee reviews it, and after approval payouts go to your Stripe account every Wednesday. Stripe then takes around 2 to 7 business days to reach your bank. If you sign up now, the Payouts tab shows which arrangement your account is on.
Our own arithmetic on Buy Me a Coffee's published rates. A supporter outside the US costs another $0.20, and a membership payment another $0.10.
There is one more rule worth knowing if you check your page rarely. After 18 months with no login, the dormancy policy pays the remaining balance out to your payout method, or refunds it to the original supporters if no payout method is connected. Logging in at any point resets the clock.
What does Buy Me a Coffee not do?
It does not give you an order bump or a post-purchase upsell. The shop sells an item and the transaction ends, with no add-on offered before payment and no second offer after it. There is no higher plan that adds them, because there is no paid plan at all. Our look at order bumps on Buy Me a Coffee covers the nearest workaround.
It does not let you lower the 5% as you grow. There is one rate for every creator, with no subscription that buys it down.
It does not handle sales tax. Its help center says Buy Me a Coffee does not handle the collection and remittance of sales tax or VAT on behalf of creators. That sits with the creator, not the platform.
Is Buy Me a Coffee the same as Ko-fi?
They are close. Both are support pages with memberships and a shop attached, both pay out through an account you connect, both headline 5%, and neither has an order bump or an upsell.
The differences are in the fee lines. Ko-fi offers two routes to 0%: Ko-fi Free takes nothing on tips, and Gold is $12 a month for 0% on every payment. Ko-fi also says it charges no payout fees. Buy Me a Coffee has no 0% route, and adds its payout, international and subscription extras under the 5%. Our Ko-fi and Buy Me a Coffee comparison puts the two side by side.
When would I send you somewhere else?
If your page runs on support and memberships, stay on Buy Me a Coffee, because Stakk is the wrong choice for it. Stakk has no link-in-bio page builder, no tips, no memberships, no subscriptions, no course hosting and no booking, prices are in US dollars only, and nothing can be priced above $999. Buy Me a Coffee is also cheaper than Stakk on a plain $20 payment, and if you want a way to cut the 5% as you grow, Ko-fi's Gold plan does that. If the lowest cost per sale is the whole decision, Whop takes 2.7% + $0.30 with no monthly costs and Systeme.io charges 0% on its free plan, and both beat Buy Me a Coffee and Stakk.
Want a checkout built for selling products?
You can keep Buy Me a Coffee for support and send product buyers to a Stakk checkout instead. Stakk costs nothing a month and takes from 10% + $0.50 a sale, card processing included, and the charge is created on your own Stripe account. That is more than Buy Me a Coffee takes, and what the difference buys is the checkout: the order bump rides the same charge as the product, so it carries one fee rather than two, and the upsell after payment is one tap against the card already on file.