How Much Does Patreon Take? What Creators Keep in 2026
Summary
How much does Patreon take? New creators pay a 10% platform fee, plus payment processing of 2.9% plus $0.30 on card payments and a small payout fee. On a $10 pledge you keep about $8.41, a 15.9% cut, and cheaper tiers lose more. Pages published before August 4, 2025 can keep legacy rates of 5% to 11%. iPhone signups can cost up to 40% because of Apple's fee.
How much does Patreon take? On the standard plan, 10% of every pledge and digital sale as a platform fee, then payment processing of 2.9% plus $0.30 on most card payments, then a small fee each time you cash out. On a $10 pledge paid by card, you keep $8.41. That is a 15.9% cut, and it climbs fast on cheaper tiers.
The 10% is only the first line of the bill
Patreon's creator fees overview splits what you pay into three layers. The platform fee pays for the hosted page, memberships, community tools and video hosting. Payment processing pays for card handling, fraud checks and retries on failed payments. Payout fees apply when money leaves your Patreon balance.
The platform fee is the one everybody quotes, because it is the only one that is a clean round number. The other two are what turn "10%" into something closer to 14% or 19%, depending on what you charge.
Here is the part your dashboard makes easy to miss. Patreon shows processing fees in the earnings view, but the payout fee is not listed in that breakdown. You only see it when the transfer lands.
What you keep on a $3, $5, $10 and $25 tier
Fixed fees punish low prices. The $0.30 per payment does not care whether the tier costs $3 or $30. Here is the card-payment math on the standard plan, for a US creator paid in USD:
On a $3 tier, Patreon and its processor take $0.69 and you keep $2.31, so the cut is 22.9%. On a $5 tier you keep $4.06 and the cut is 18.9%. On a $10 tier you keep $8.41, a 15.9% cut. On a $25 tier you keep $21.48, and the cut falls to 14.1%.
You can run the same math on your own prices. Take the tier price, add 10% for the platform, add 2.9% for processing, then add $0.30. Divide the total by the price and you have your real rate. A spreadsheet row per tier takes five minutes and tells you which tier is quietly your worst one.
The pattern is blunt. Every dollar you add to a tier price shrinks the share that goes to fixed fees. If you are choosing between a $3 supporter tier and a $5 one, the $5 tier does more than add $2. It cuts your effective rate by four points.
Two creators, same income, different fees
Plan details decide more than most creators realize. Patreon moved every page published after August 4, 2025 onto one standard 10% plan. Pages published on or before that date keep their legacy plan, as long as they stay continuously published: Founders at 5%, Pro at 8%, Pro plus Merch at 11%.
Run the numbers on 200 patrons paying $10 a month, so $2,000 gross. On the standard plan, the platform fee is $200 and card processing is about $118, so you keep roughly $1,682. On the legacy Pro plan, the platform fee is $160, and you keep roughly $1,722. That is $40 a month, or $480 a year, for being early.
The catch is easy to trigger. If you unpublish your page, even briefly, or if Patreon unpublishes it for any reason, you move to the standard plan when you republish. Patreon's guidance is to use the pause tool for billing instead of unpublishing. If you are on a legacy plan, treat your published page like a lease you do not want to break.
Legacy plans also carry a micropayment rate for tiers at $3 or less, 5% plus $0.10 in USD. The standard plan applies one processing rate to every payment, whatever its size.
The extras that quietly move your number
Three charges sit outside the headline math, and they decide whether your real cut is 15% or 20%.
First, payment method and location. A fan paying with PayPal from outside the US costs 3.9% plus $0.30 in processing instead of 2.9% plus $0.30. On a $10 pledge that is ten cents more, and it adds up across a fan base spread over several countries.
Second, currency. If you take payouts in euros, standard processing is 3.4% plus €0.35, so a €10 pledge costs €1.69 in total fees, a 16.9% cut. And if a fan pays in a currency different from your payout currency, Patreon adds a 2.5% conversion fee on the full amount, tax included. Pushed onto a $10 pledge, that is another $0.25.
Third, payouts. US creators paid by direct deposit pay $0.25 per payout. PayPal payouts cost 1% with a $0.25 minimum, capped at $20. Cash out once a month, not every week, and the fixed part barely registers.
Why iPhone signups can cost you up to 40%
Here is what your algorithm does not tell you about mobile. When a fan joins through the Patreon iOS app, Apple's in-app purchase system applies a 30% App Store fee. Patreon does not add its own processing fee on those payments, but the 10% platform fee still applies. On a $10 pledge, that is $4.00 gone, so you keep $6.00.
Fans in the US may be offered Patreon's mobile web checkout instead, and purchases completed there are not subject to Apple's fee. So the practical move is to send fans to your page link in their browser rather than letting them find you inside the app.
Tell your fans plainly. A short note in your welcome post, "join from your browser, it costs me less", is a normal ask for a creator who lives on subscriptions. It is also a cheap fix compared with a 30% hit on every new supporter.
What other platforms take on the same $2,000
The honest comparison is on a fixed example, 200 fans at $10 a month. Processing is similar everywhere because it is mostly Stripe or PayPal underneath, about $118 on this example. The difference is the platform layer.
Patreon's standard plan takes $200 on top. Substack also takes 10% on paid subscriptions, plus Stripe fees, so it lands in the same range. Buy Me a Coffee takes 5%, about $100 here, plus processing. Ko-fi charges 0% on tips and 5% on memberships and shop sales on the free plan, or 0% with its optional Gold plan. beehiiv and Ghost take no revenue share on paid subscriptions, with Stripe fees only.
Skip the idea that 0% means free. beehiiv's monetization tools sit behind paid plans, and Ghost asks you to run more of the setup yourself. A flat monthly bill wins once your revenue is steady, and it loses while you are still finding your first 30 paying fans.
If you sell one-off products rather than memberships, the math changes again. Our Gumroad review covers a flat 10% plus $0.50 per sale, and our Substack review shows what a newsletter-first cut looks like in practice.
How to lower your effective cut without leaving
Most creators ask whether to switch platforms before they have checked the settings they already control. Four changes cost nothing and move the number.
Raise your lowest tier to at least $5, since the fixed $0.30 hurts most there. Push annual plans, because one annual payment carries $0.30 of fixed fees where twelve monthly payments carry $3.60. Send fans to your page link in a browser, to dodge Apple's 30%. Take payouts in the currency most of your fans pay in, so the 2.5% conversion fee does not apply.
On 200 fans at $10 a month, moving 50 of them to annual billing saves about $165 a year in fixed fees alone, and you get the cash upfront. That is not life-changing, but it costs you one announcement post.
Patreon also explains the legacy rules in its standard platform fee guide. Read it before you touch your page status.
Is Patreon still worth the cut?
It depends on what the 10% buys you. Patreon's pitch is a hosted page, tiers, native video, podcasts, community tools and an audience that already knows how to pledge there. If your fans arrive from YouTube or a podcast and want one familiar place to pay, that is a real service.
Worth it if you are under roughly $1,000 a month, your tiers sit at $5 or more, and you do not want to maintain checkout, tax collection and member management yourself.
Skip it if you earn steadily above $2,000 a month and already own your email list. At that size, 5 points of platform fee is $100 a month, and a cheaper platform or a flat-fee tool pays for itself. Our comparison of Patreon alternatives goes through five of them side by side.
Before you decide, price your own tiers in a spreadsheet and compare two columns: what you keep today, and what you would keep on a flat-fee tool at the same revenue. Count the monthly software bill on the second one, and count the time you would spend on tax and migration. If the gap is under $50 a month, stay put and spend the effort on your content.
Whatever you pick, export your supporter emails regularly and set your own price floor above $5. The percentage you pay matters less than whether you can walk away with your fans when you decide the math no longer works.