Beacons vs Stan Store

These are the closest pair in this corner of the directory: both sell digital products, coaching and courses from a page that doubles as a link in bio, and both are priced for a working creator rather than an experiment.

Commission or subscription

Beacons runs a plan costing nothing, funded by a nine per cent commission on sales, falling to zero only on its Creator Plus tier. So it is free to start and expensive to succeed on, until you buy the commission off.

Stan Store has no unpaid plan — its help centre says so directly — and takes no percentage. You pay monthly from the start and keep the whole sale. Its marketing tooling sits on the dearer of two plans.

Which is cheaper is arithmetic rather than opinion: below a certain monthly turnover the commission is smaller than the subscription, and above it the subscription wins. Work out where your own number sits before choosing.

What you own at the end

Beacons attaches a custom domain, with a caveat that matters: a domain obtained through Beacons remains the property of Beacons AI Inc, and the creator gets a right to use it with no access to the DNS records.

Stan Store connects no domain at all on any plan, and documents a forwarding rule as the alternative.

So one gives you an address you cannot administer and the other gives you none. If owning the address matters, the answer is to register it independently — and at that point Beacons can point at it and Stan Store still cannot.

Which should you choose?

Choose Beacons if you are early, selling little, and want the storefront to cost nothing until it earns — and if you will bring your own domain rather than take theirs.

Pick Stan Store if you are already selling steadily, because a flat monthly fee with no cut is the cheaper shape at volume, and the bookings and course tooling are on the cheapest plan rather than the dearest.