The number on the pricing page is never the number you keep
Every hosted membership platform leads with one number. Patreon says 10%. Substack says 10%. Circle says as low as 0.5% on its top plan. You plan your pricing around that headline figure, then get surprised when the deposit lands short of what the math promised.
The gap is payment processing. Stripe (or the processor a platform routes through) takes its own cut on top of the platform fee, and on recurring subscriptions there is often a second, smaller surcharge for the billing infrastructure that renews the charge every month automatically.
None of the three platforms in this article hide that second layer. Each one documents it on its own help pages, linked below so you can check for yourself. The confusion is not deception. It is that two fees stack where you expect to see one.
This is part of a short fee-math series: one piece on marketplace fees versus owning your store, and one on what course platforms actually take versus owning the platform.
This one does the same exercise for paid community and membership: Patreon, Substack, Circle, and running it yourself. The math changes with every platform, but the questions you should ask stay the same across all three pieces.
Every dollar total below is calculated from the rates each platform publishes on its own pages. Where a number depends on an assumption, such as how much a member pays, the text says so plainly.
This matters because your membership business behaves differently as your revenue changes, whether it runs on percentage fees or on fixed costs. The platform that makes sense on day one, with a handful of paying members, is not automatically the platform that makes sense two years later with a few hundred. Working through both shapes side by side is the point of this article.
Patreon fees: the real math
Patreon changed its fee structure for new creators on 4 August 2025. If your page went up after that date, you are on the standard plan: a flat 10% platform fee on the amount a patron pays, excluding sales tax.
If your page was published on or before 4 August 2025 and has stayed published, you can still be on a legacy plan. Founders is 5%, but it has been closed to new creators since 7 May 2019, so almost nobody is signing up for it today. Pro is 8%. Pro plus Merch is 11%.
On top of whichever platform fee applies to you, Patreon charges payment processing. For USD payouts on the standard plan, card and Apple Pay are 2.9% + $0.30 in any location. PayPal and Venmo are 2.9% + $0.30 for US patrons, and 3.9% + $0.30 for non-US patrons. Other payout currencies have their own rates, and a 2.5% currency conversion fee applies when a member pays in a different currency from your payout currency.
Patreon states that its platform fee applies to successfully processed payments and excludes payment processing, currency conversion, payout fees and taxes. That is exactly the distinction that trips you up when you compare the headline number to your actual deposit.
One detail matters if you are on a legacy plan: unpublishing your page loses that legacy pricing. Republish it and you are moved to the standard 10% plan, not restored to Founders or Pro. Patreon points creators to its pause tool instead. It is a one-way door, and it matters if you ever consider taking your page down rather than leaving it live.
On a standard $10 monthly pledge paid by card, the platform fee plus processing works out to $1.59, leaving you $8.41. Full detail is on Patreon’s own Creator fees overview. Check current rates there before deciding anything, since fee structures do change.
Substack fees: the real math
Substack’s structure is the simplest of the three to describe. Publishing is free, no matter how many subscribers you have. There is no floor, no tier, no point at which your growing free newsletter starts owing Substack money.
Paid subscriptions are where Substack earns. It keeps 10% of each subscription payment, a flat rate that does not change whether you have ten paying subscribers or ten thousand.
Stripe charges its own fees on top of that 10%: 2.9% + $0.30 per payment for US cards, plus a Stripe Billing fee of 0.7% on recurring payments. Local payment methods such as SEPA Direct Debit, iDEAL and Bancontact are priced by Stripe and vary by country. A paid Substack on a US card therefore runs on a 10% + 2.9% + $0.30 + 0.7% stack.
On a $10 monthly subscription, that stack works out to a $1.66 fee, leaving you $8.34. The full breakdown is on Substack’s own page, How much does Substack cost.
Circle fees: the real math
Circle is priced differently from Patreon and Substack in a way that matters a lot for the math later in this article: it charges a real monthly software fee, then a much smaller percentage on top of that for paywalled content.
On annual billing, in USD and excluding tax, Circle’s published plans are Professional at $89 a month, Business at $199 a month, Scale at $419 a month, and Circle Plus at custom pricing for larger operations. Circle’s pricing page lists those prices as based on annual billing, so check which billing cycle you are being quoted.
Circle’s paywall transaction fee, charged on top of your monthly plan, is 2% on Professional, 1% on Business, 1% on Scale, and 0.5% on Circle Plus. Stripe processing adds its usual 2.9% + $0.30, plus 0.7% Stripe Billing on subscription pricing.
Circle’s own documentation includes a worked example of the same stack: a Business-plan community running a paywall subscription pays 1% to Circle, 2.9% + $0.30 to Stripe, and 0.7% Stripe Billing. The totals in this article use that same combination.
Circle also sells an Email Hub add-on at $99 a month for 10,000 contacts, which is a separate cost from the paywall fee. It is worth knowing about if outbound email is part of how you plan to reach your members.
On a $10 monthly membership, Professional’s transaction math alone comes to $0.86 in fees, leaving you $9.14 before the monthly plan cost. Business and Scale come to $0.76 in fees, leaving you $9.24 before the monthly plan cost.
The full transaction fee table is on Circle’s help page, Paywall transaction fees, and plan prices are on the Circle pricing page. Bookmark them if you are weighing a plan tier, since transaction rates are the kind of detail that changes between plan updates.
Running it yourself: what a self-hosted setup actually costs
The self-hosted comparison in this article uses WordPress with Reign, the WordPress theme for building a complete community site, as one representative option for running paid community on your own site. Our products are self-hosted: there is no per-member fee and no commission on your sales, and payments go through your own gateway. The theme is a licence per site, and you can see the current numbers on the pricing page.
For the member side, BuddyNext is the community engine in the same family, and its Pro tier adds paid plans and gated spaces with Stripe checkout. You can see how the pieces fit on the BuddyNext page. None of that is required to self-host. It is simply one way to do it.
Payment processing on a self-hosted site typically runs through Stripe directly: 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction for US cards. Whether the additional 0.7% Stripe Billing fee applies depends on whether the membership plugin you choose uses Stripe’s own subscription billing or builds recurring charges a different way. That is a real variable, not a rounding error, so confirm it with whichever plugin you choose before you commit to a number.
Hosting is the other real cost. It is a monthly bill that varies by host and traffic, and it grows as your site does, depending on how much of the stack (caching, CDN, backups) is bundled in. This article does not quote a hosting price. The totals below count processing fees only, and you add your own fixed costs on top.
For a fuller picture of what running paid membership on WordPress involves day to day, there is a dedicated piece on building a WordPress membership site with Reign and Paid Memberships Pro. It covers the setup work this article’s math assumes is already done.
None of the totals below assume a particular membership plugin, since several exist for WordPress and they price and bill differently. What they share is the same underlying processor cost: Stripe’s 2.9% + $0.30, with the 0.7% Billing surcharge applying only when the plugin routes recurring charges through Stripe’s subscription product.
The tables: what each option costs as you grow
With all four rate structures stated plainly, here is where they land in dollars. All figures below are calculated from the published rates above, using a $10 monthly subscription paid by US card as the common unit so every platform is compared on the same transaction.
| Platform | What the headline says | What actually comes out | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| Patreon (standard) | 10% platform fee | $1.59 | $8.41 |
| Substack | 10% platform fee | $1.66 | $8.34 |
| Circle Professional | 2% paywall fee | $0.86 | $9.14 (before plan cost) |
| Circle Business or Scale | 1% paywall fee | $0.76 | $9.24 (before plan cost) |
| Self-hosted (Stripe + Billing) | no platform fee | $0.66 | $9.34 (before fixed costs) |
That table alone makes Circle and self-hosting look like the clear winners on a per-transaction basis. But per-transaction is only half the picture, because Circle and self-hosting both carry a fixed monthly cost that Patreon and Substack do not. The next table shows monthly totals at $10 a member. Circle includes its Professional plan fee of $89 a month. The self-hosted column is processing only, so add your own hosting, licence and tool costs to it.
| Members (at $10) | Gross | Substack | Patreon | Circle Professional (with plan fee) | Self-hosted (processing only) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | $250 | $41.50 | $39.75 | $110.50 | $16.50 |
| 50 | $500 | $83.00 | $79.50 | $132.00 | $33.00 |
| 100 | $1,000 | $166.00 | $159.00 | $175.00 | $66.00 |
| 250 | $2,500 | $415.00 | $397.50 | $304.00 | $165.00 |
| 500 | $5,000 | $830.00 | $795.00 | $519.00 | $330.00 |
The pattern is visible immediately. Substack and Patreon’s total dollar cost grows in a straight line with your membership, because they are pure percentages. Circle’s fixed plan cost dominates at low member counts and fades in relative weight as you grow. Self-hosting has no platform fee at all, so the only thing standing between you and the lowest total is your own fixed cost.
Looking at cost as a share of gross revenue, rather than in dollars, makes the shape even clearer:
| Members (at $10) | Substack | Patreon | Circle Professional | Self-hosted (processing only) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | 16.6% | 15.9% | 44.2% | 6.6% |
| 50 | 16.6% | 15.9% | 26.4% | 6.6% |
| 100 | 16.6% | 15.9% | 17.5% | 6.6% |
| 250 | 16.6% | 15.9% | 12.2% | 6.6% |
| 500 | 16.6% | 15.9% | 10.4% | 6.6% |
Substack and Patreon sit dead flat, 16.6% and 15.9% of gross respectively, no matter your community’s size. Circle falls as you grow, because a fixed monthly cost gets divided across more paying members. Self-hosted processing stays flat at 6.6%, and your fixed costs sit on top and fall as a share of revenue the same way Circle’s plan fee does. That flat-versus-falling shape is the actual decision, more than any single number in isolation.
Two different cost shapes, and why the shape matters more than the headline rate
Patreon and Substack are percentage pricing. The platform earns nothing when you earn nothing, and it earns proportionally more only as you earn more. There is no month where the fee is a burden relative to your revenue, because it is always the same fraction of whatever came in.
Circle and self-hosting are fixed-cost pricing, with a small percentage layered on. The monthly plan fee, or the hosting and licence cost, is owed whether you have five paying members or five hundred. That is a real liability in a slow month, and it is the honest tradeoff for a lower percentage rate once you have the volume to absorb it.
Neither shape is objectively better. A percentage model protects you in a bad month at the cost of taking a larger constant share in a good one. A fixed-cost model rewards scale and punishes a slow start. Which one wins depends on where you sit on the membership curve, not on which platform has better values.
The crossover points, from the calculations above, are concrete. Circle Professional costs less than Substack above roughly 111 members at $10 each, about $1,113 a month in gross revenue. Circle Business overtakes Substack at roughly 221 members, about $2,211 a month gross. Self-hosting’s crossover arrives much earlier, because it has no plan fee, and the next sections work through where.
There is also a predictability angle that a break-even table does not capture. A percentage fee is easy to forecast because it moves in lockstep with revenue you can already see coming. A fixed monthly cost is easy to forecast in a different sense: it is the same number in January and July, which some of you will find easier to budget around than a fee that rises and falls with a subscriber count you cannot fully control.
- Percentage platforms (Patreon, Substack): cost scales with revenue, flat share at any size, no fixed liability in a slow month.
- Fixed-cost platforms (Circle, self-hosted): a real monthly cost owed regardless of revenue, offset by a much lower transaction rate once volume arrives.
- Circle sits between the two extremes: someone else’s platform, but priced closer to the fixed-cost shape than the pure-percentage one.
The honest case for staying exactly where you are
This is the section that matters most, so it gets said directly: for many of you, the right answer is to stay on Patreon, Substack or Circle, not to move.
Under roughly 25 to 50 paying members, the dollar difference between platforms is small. In the tables above, self-hosting saves about $25 a month against Substack at 25 members and about $50 at 50 members, and that is before your hosting and tool costs come out of it. That is not a number worth a migration project over, even before you count the time a migration takes.
Percentage pricing has a real virtue that a pure cost table can undersell: it costs you nothing when you earn nothing. If your paid tier is new, seasonal, or simply slow some months, Patreon and Substack’s fee shrinks right along with your revenue. A fixed monthly plan or hosting bill does not shrink. It is owed in the bad month exactly as much as the good one.
Patreon and Substack also bring you something a fee table cannot price: discovery. Both platforms have existing audience networks, recommendation systems, and a public directory where you can be found. A brand-new WordPress site brings you none of that on day one. Leaving a platform means trading a built-in audience channel for full control, and that trade has a real cost that does not show up in any of the tables above.
Self-hosting also carries costs that never appear on an invoice: keeping your site updated, backing it up, watching for security issues, and being the person who fixes checkout when it breaks at 2am on a Saturday because a payment plugin conflicted with an update. Running a site is a job, even a small one, and it takes real time.
If your time is worth more spent making the thing people are paying for, rather than administering a server, the platform fee can be the better deal at any size, not just below some threshold. That is a legitimate, business-minded reason to stay put, and it has nothing to do with the fee percentage being unreasonable.
Circle occupies a different middle position worth naming on its own. It charges a real monthly fee, so it is not free at zero revenue the way Patreon and Substack are. But its transaction rate is much lower than either, so it scales better as your community grows, while still being someone else’s platform with someone else’s uptime, support queue and terms of service.
Put plainly, stay put if most of the following are true for you:
- Your paid membership is under roughly 25 to 50 members, or your revenue is still inconsistent month to month.
- Discovery from the platform’s existing audience is still bringing in a meaningful share of your new paying members.
- Nobody on your team has the time, or the interest, to own updates, backups, security and support.
- Your current platform’s support team is doing real work resolving billing and access issues today.
What owning it actually costs beyond money
If you do cross the threshold where self-hosting is worth the money, be precise about what “owning it” requires, because none of the following show up in a monthly fee comparison.
- Choosing and configuring a membership plugin that handles recurring billing, access restriction and member management, and keeping it updated.
- Choosing a theme and design system for your community, which is where a product like Reign fits, since it provides the community-specific templates, layouts and member-facing pages a generic WordPress theme does not.
- Setting up and monitoring backups, so a bad update or a hosting incident does not mean losing your members’ data.
- Handling security: keeping core, plugins and themes patched, and having a plan for what happens if something is compromised.
- Being the support desk when a payment fails, a login breaks, or a member cannot access content they paid for, since there is no platform support team to escalate to.
- Building, from scratch, whatever discovery you previously got from being listed on someone else’s platform.
None of this is a reason to avoid self-hosting. It is a reason to go in knowing what the licence and hosting bill do not include. If you underestimate this list, you will find the savings from lower fees eaten by hours spent on admin you did not budget time for.
Paid community membership is also not only a creator-and-fans shape. Associations, alumni networks and membership organizations run a structurally similar model: dues in exchange for access, but with an organization running it rather than one person.
That version of the decision is covered separately in building an association or alumni network on Reign, since the ownership tradeoffs are the same even though the audience and goals differ.
If you are running an alumni association weighing dues software against a self-hosted directory, you are working through almost exactly this same fee-versus-fixed-cost calculation, just with a board instead of a single decision-maker.
What you are assembling if you self-host
If you decide to move, you are not just picking a fee structure. You are assembling a stack: a membership plugin for billing and access, a design layer for the community itself, hosting, and a plan for support. Reign is one option for that design layer, not a requirement for self-hosting in general.
What Reign provides is the member-facing layer: profiles, activity, spaces, courses and a member directory, styled across our own plugins with no add-on, so you are not assembling that experience from generic page-builder blocks yourself. The private community build guide walks through a paid, members-only setup step by step.
The licence is a small line item next to hosting and payment processing in every table above, and the pricing page has the current terms. The bigger decision is not which theme. It is whether the fixed-cost shape of self-hosting suits your membership size and your appetite for running infrastructure at all.
If you want to see the full landscape of hosted alternatives before deciding on either direction, there is a broader roundup at the best Patreon alternatives, which compares platform options rather than the fee math this article focuses on. If you are leaving Patreon, the Patreon migration guide covers the move itself, and the Circle alternative page compares the two side by side.
The break-even point, and what you should do next
Bringing the self-hosted numbers back to a single, practical question: at what membership size does self-hosting start costing you less than staying on a percentage platform? The answer depends on your own fixed costs, so here is the formula and a few examples.
At $10 a member, self-hosting saves $1.00 a member against Substack ($1.66 minus $0.66) and $0.93 a member against Patreon ($1.59 minus $0.66). Divide your total fixed monthly cost, hosting plus licence plus tools, by that saving and you have your break-even member count.
| Your total fixed monthly cost | Break-even against Substack | Break-even against Patreon |
|---|---|---|
| $25 | 25 members ($250 a month gross) | 27 members ($270 a month gross) |
| $50 | 50 members ($500 a month gross) | 54 members ($540 a month gross) |
| $100 | 100 members ($1,000 a month gross) | 108 members ($1,080 a month gross) |
Those fixed-cost rows are round numbers for illustration, not quotes from any host. Plug in your real total. If you want the math done for your own numbers, the community cost calculator does it for you.
Here is what follows from the table and from the honest-case section above. If your paid membership is below roughly 25 to 50 members, the fee difference is small money, discovery still matters more than margin, and staying on Patreon, Substack or Circle is very likely the right call for you. Below that line, the platform is doing real work for the fee it charges.
Above that line, once your gross revenue clears a few hundred dollars a month and well beyond your fixed costs, the math starts to favor ownership, provided you are willing to take on the non-money costs of running a site: updates, backups, security, and being your own support desk. That willingness matters as much as the dollar figure.
Before you act on any of this, ask yourself three questions in order:
- Where does your current gross revenue sit against the break-even row that matches your realistic fixed costs?
- How much of your current growth still comes from the platform’s own discovery, rather than your own channels?
- Who, specifically, will own updates, backups, security and support if you move the site in-house?
Rates change. Every platform figure in this article comes from the official Patreon, Substack, Circle and Stripe pages linked above, and you should read those same pages directly before making a decision, since pricing on any of these platforms can and does move.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Patreon take from creators?
On the standard plan Patreon takes a 10% platform fee, plus payment processing and any currency conversion or payout fees. Creators who published before 4 August 2025 may still be on a legacy plan at 5%, 8% or 11%, depending on the plan.
How much does Substack take from paid subscriptions?
Substack keeps 10% of each paid subscription payment. Stripe then charges 2.9% + $0.30 per payment for US cards and 0.7% for Stripe Billing on recurring payments, so a $10 monthly subscription leaves you about $8.34.
Does Circle charge a percentage as well as a monthly fee?
Yes. Circle charges a monthly plan fee and then a transaction fee on paywalled payments, which is 2% on Professional, 1% on Business and Scale, and 0.5% on Circle Plus. Stripe processing is charged on top.
Is it cheaper to self-host a paid community on WordPress?
Per transaction, yes, because there is no platform fee and you pay only the payment processor. Overall it depends on your fixed costs and member count, which is what the break-even table above is for.
Do your products charge per member or take a share of sales?
No. Our products are self-hosted, with no per-member fee and no commission on your sales. You pay your own payment gateway and your own host, and the theme is a licence per site.
When should I stay on Patreon, Substack or Circle?
Stay if you have fewer than roughly 25 to 50 paying members, if platform discovery still brings in a good share of new members, or if nobody on your team wants to run updates, backups and support. In those cases the platform fee buys real work.
Can I move my members off a hosted platform later?
Yes, and many people start hosted and move once the numbers justify it. The Circle migration guide and the Patreon guide linked above cover what moves and what you rebuild.
Next step
Open the live demos to see what a self-hosted community looks like, then follow the private community build guide for the setup. If you want a paid-plans route, the BuddyNext page shows how the community engine fits.