Ko-fi Alternatives

Pensight is a storefront for selling time and knowledge, and the part it takes most seriously is the calendar. Availability is set weekly with configurable slot lengths, both major mail platforms connect, reminders go out by email and text, video calling is attached and calls are transcribed automatically. That is a scheduling product rather than a booking link on a page.

Around it sits a wide commercial layer: eight offer types through one checkout with coupons, instalments, pay-what-you-want and subscriptions, plus email broadcasts, upsell funnels, an affiliate programme with commissions you set, and the three major advertising pixels. Setup is a guided three-step flow with templates for each offer type, and the unpaid plan is real — no monthly charge, a percentage at checkout instead.

The catch is how that percentage is described. The headline says a single three percent transaction fee inclusive of card processing; the comparison grid on the same page splits it into a platform row reading zero and a processing row reading three. Both come to the same number for you, and a reader told zero would be misled. Beyond that, the profile page's controls are an enumerated closed list with no stylesheet anywhere, and a domain you own needs the Pro plan.

Lemon Squeezy takes on the part of selling digital goods that has nothing to do with the product: tax. As merchant of record it registers, collects and remits sales tax in the places you sell, which is the obligation that quietly turns a side project into an accounting problem. Its cut covers that rather than only covering payment processing.

There is no monthly charge and no plan ladder, so a store that sells nothing costs nothing, and a domain you own attaches without any tier to reach. The commercial tooling around it is deeper than the size of the product suggests: email broadcasts, discount and coupon codes, affiliates, lead magnets, pay-what-you-want pricing, recovery for abandoned carts and failed payments, and revenue reporting.

The cost is that this is a settings screen rather than a website. Design control is a store logo, a header image and product imagery — no page editor, no template gallery and no stylesheet, which makes it a 1 for design, the narrowest surface among the stores here. The percentage is unavoidable because it is the business model, and it rises for extra payment methods and cross-border sales. Support is promised as staffed but no channel, tier or response time is published anywhere, and support takes a 2 for it.

Planoly's Creator Store is a shop for people whose traffic comes from social platforms, and it is built where that traffic is planned. The store is reached from inside the scheduling workspace, one subscription can drive several stores from a single login, and comment and message automation on the social side points at the products on the store side.

The product range is wider than a link page: digital products, courses, memberships, consultations over the major video platforms, and print-on-demand merchandise fulfilled by a partner. Around it sit order and sales tracking, automated customer emails, on-page analytics and address capture. Both paid tiers carry no transaction fee at all, which is unusual at this price.

The catch is that there are two products and two bills. The scheduling subscription starts separately, so someone who wants the posts and the shop pays twice rather than once. On the page itself, the ceiling is a curated template set with block-level styling rather than layout control — the editor surfaces the vendor shows are background type and block style, and no stylesheet or code control is documented anywhere, which puts design at 2. The store is described by the vendor as a mobile storefront, and it behaves like one.

Payhip's free plan does something almost nothing else does: it connects a domain the seller already owns, issues the certificate for it, and lets the vendor's own footer mark be switched off in the store builder. On paper that is a complete store for nothing, and the vendor says outright that it does not gate features on the free plan.

The bill arrives as a share of revenue instead. Five per cent of every sale is taken on the free plan, and no payment method avoids it — the only reductions are paid subscriptions at two per cent and zero per cent respectively.

The thing to weigh is that the price is neither free nor cheap, but conditional. A shop selling very little pays almost nothing and gets a complete store. A shop selling steadily pays more in commission than either subscription would have cost, and works out worse than a flat fee somewhere else. The published number is nothing and the real number depends entirely on how well the shop does.

Beacons builds a short, mobile-shaped site that sells. Products, appointments and links all live on the same page, setup takes minutes, and the result is aimed at someone whose audience arrives from social media rather than from search. For a creator who needs to be transacting this week, very little else here is faster.

A custom domain is available from the first paid tier, and removing the vendor mark from the page comes one tier above that.

The catch is two things that need reading carefully. The homepage's offer of a free custom domain is not what it appears: domains start on a paid plan, and branding removal starts higher still, so the plan that publishes an unbranded site on your own address costs considerably more than the entry figure. And a domain bought through the vendor is documented as remaining the vendor's property, with no access to its records and no route to move it elsewhere. A domain bought independently and pointed at the site stays the seller's own.

Sellfy inverts the usual ordering: digital products come first and physical goods second, which suits a creator selling files, subscriptions or memberships rather than a shop packing boxes. It is a genuine site builder as well as a checkout — a contact page ships with it, custom pages carry their own titles and descriptions, and marketing email is part of the subscription rather than an integration.

There is no platform fee on ordinary sales, which reads well against a market where a percentage is common.

The cost is pushed well above the advertised figure by two things. The entry plan carries a custom domain but cannot remove Sellfy's branding, so the plan that actually publishes an unbranded store on your own address costs twice the headline figure. And each plan carries an annual sales ceiling, above which a two per cent overage applies — avoidable by moving up a tier, but another step in the same direction. The plan a real shop needs is not the plan advertised.

Podia is the clearest example here of a selling product that is also a site. Pages, blog posts and an editable header and footer are part of it, so a creator's home on the internet and their checkout are the same thing rather than two systems pointed at each other. Courses, memberships, coaching and downloads all sell from it, and email to the list is included.

For someone whose business is what they know rather than what they stock, that consolidation removes a great deal of assembly.

The price is the argument against. The entry plan is the only plan below the top tier, and it is expensive for a product a single person runs — there is no cheaper way in and no trial tier that publishes properly. On top of that sits a five per cent charge on sales at that tier, the payment processor's own fee, and an email list capped at a hundred subscribers with more sold at a price the vendor does not publish. The cheapest way to use it is not cheap.

Pillar is a creator page with a marketing department attached. Email flows, lead magnets, an affiliate link generator and a media kit that keeps itself current for brand enquiries all sit beside the checkout, and the second tier adds a funnel and landing page builder. What it sells is the apparatus rather than the page.

The page itself is meant to take no skill. The vendor answers its own question about whether you need any with a flat no, describing drag-and-drop, templates and prebuilt funnels, and the design tool saves changes live so there is no publish step to forget. Checkout for downloads, courses, memberships and coaching happens on the page, bookable slots are a product type on the entry tier, and support is a chat channel on any plan.

The cost has to be read as two numbers rather than one. The entry tier charges a percentage on every sale and the second tier removes it, so the cheaper plan is only cheaper below a certain volume — and a domain you own sits on that second tier too, not on the entry one. Design stops at a live theme picker with colour, block shape, font and animation controls: no stylesheet, no code block and no layout canvas appears anywhere in the help centre.