Ko-fi

Ko-fi is built around a single decision: it never holds your money. Payments go straight into your own processor account, which means there is nothing to withdraw, no payout fee and no delay. Its own cut is capped at five percent and is nothing at all on one-off tips for a creator who never subscribes, with the processor's charge stated openly beside it.

There is no build step. You create an account, connect the payment account you already have, and share the link. What sits behind it is wider than the setup suggests: a catalogue shop for digital and physical items with shipping calculation, order tracking and discount codes, memberships, a post feed with media, pinning, polls and scheduling, stream overlays and chat bots, and embeddable buttons for a site you own already.

The cost is that this is a payment page rather than a website. It publishes only inside the vendor's own address — there is no domain of your own on any plan — and the appearance controls are a cover image, one colour, a social preview and the word used for a tip, which puts design at 1. Support is a ticket form with no published response time and no live channel, and there is no way to edit search settings anywhere in the product.