How we score creator platforms
Every platform gets the same fee math and the same five-part score. Here is exactly how both work.
Where the facts come from
Prices, fees, plan limits, and payout terms come from each platform's own pricing page, terms of service, and help center. Third-party articles are used only to confirm something the platform has also published. Each review lists every page we used and the date we checked it.
We read published terms and documentation. We do not claim to have run paid accounts on every platform, and the reviews never say "in our testing." When a platform does not publish a number, we say so instead of guessing.
Research for each edition is gathered with the help of AI research tools. The tools find and read the official pages. Every figure on the site was taken from those pages, and the source links let you check any of them yourself.
The score
Each platform is rated from 0 to 10 on five criteria. The overall score is a weighted average, rounded to one decimal.
| Criterion | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Fees and take-home | 30% | How much money reaches you at $1,000 and $10,000 a month, from the fee math below. |
| Features for the job | 25% | How well the platform does the one job its category needs, such as course hosting or paid email. |
| Audience ownership | 20% | Whether you can export your customers and their emails, use your own domain, and leave without losing paying members. |
| Ease of use | 15% | Setup time and day-to-day work for one person without a developer. |
| Payouts | 10% | Payout speed, methods, minimums, and supported countries. |
Fees carry the most weight because they are the one cost you pay on every sale. Audience ownership is next because it decides whether you can ever leave.
How we calculate take-home pay
For each platform we model two months: $1,000 and $10,000 of gross revenue. Payments come from US cards, in one typical payment size per category.
- Memberships: $10 per payment
- Newsletters: $8 per payment
- Courses: $150 per payment
- Digital products: $25 per payment
- Communities: $30 per payment
Fees for a plan are its monthly price, plus the platform's percentage and the card processing percentage on all revenue, plus any fixed charge per payment. We run that for every plan that can take payments and keep the one that leaves you the most. That is why a review can name a different plan at $1,000 than at $10,000.
Stripe charges 0.7% on recurring subscriptions billed through Stripe Billing. We add it only where the platform's own help pages say it applies to you, as Substack's and Circle's do. Where a platform is silent, the math leaves it out, so a few subscription platforms may cost up to $7 more per $1,000 than shown.
The model leaves out sales tax, VAT, currency conversion, refunds, chargebacks, and payout transfer fees. Those depend on where you and your buyers live, and including a guess would make every number less accurate.
Keeping it current
The date at the top of each review is the day its facts were last checked. We recheck a platform when it announces a pricing change, and the date moves when we do. If you find a number that has changed, tell us.
What we will not do
- Accept payment for a ranking, a score, or coverage.
- Publish user counts, earnings figures, or quotes we cannot source.
- Backdate a page or change a checked date without rechecking the facts.