Patreon Pricing & Fees (2026): Exact Cut, Math & Break-Even

Short answer: On Patreon's standard plan you pay 10% of everything you earn plus 2.9% + $0.30 per payment, which comes to 14.1% of gross on a $25 tier and 15.9% on a $10 tier — $705 a month on $5,000 of memberships. Patreon stops being the cheaper option at roughly $990 a month in membership revenue, which is 99 members at $10 or 40 members at $25. That's the cost side. The question underneath it, membership or course, decides more than the fee schedule does, and the second half of this page works through it.

What does Patreon actually cost in 2026?

Take a watercolor teacher with 150 members paying $8 a month. Gross revenue is $1,200. Patreon takes $120 as its platform fee, another $79.80 in processing (2.9% of $8 is 23 cents, plus the flat 30 cents, times 150 payments), and 25 cents to move the money to a bank account. Total: $200.05 a month, or 16.7% of everything her members paid. She never sees a bill. It comes out before the payout lands.

Now finish the comparison, because the fee on its own doesn't decide anything. On Ruzuku Core at $99 a month she'd pay that $99 plus the same $79.80 in processing, to Stripe instead of to Patreon, which comes to $178.80, or 14.9% of the same $1,200. She keeps about $21 more a month, $255 a year. Billed yearly at $83.08 a month it's $162.88, and the gap widens to roughly $446 a year. Those aren't numbers I'd move a membership over. If you're near this size, cost isn't your deciding factor, and the rest of this article is about what is.

That's the shape of Patreon's model. You pay nothing to publish and nothing in a month where nobody joins, and in exchange the platform takes a slice of every dollar forever. Here's every slice, read from Patreon's pricing page and Creator fees overview on August 20, 2026.

One correction worth making, because Patreon's own docs disagree with themselves: the 5% one-time purchase rate applies to creators who started selling digital products before late May 2025. Two Patreon help articles say May 22 and two say May 26. If you're near that line, check your own Earnings dashboard rather than trusting either date.

For the 10%, Patreon lists what you get: a hosted creator page, monthly and annual memberships, digital product sales, video hosting, community chats, polls and comments, and audience insights. Hold onto that list. It's the honest answer to what Patreon is for, and it's also the reason the second half of this article exists.

Are you on the standard plan or a legacy one?

If you published your page after August 4, 2025, you're on the standard 10% plan and there is no other option. If you published before that, you may still be on one of the old plans, and the numbers below are the ones Patreon's fee documentation actually names today.

Plenty of articles still describe Patreon's old plans as "Lite, Pro, and Premium" at 5%, 8%, and 12%. Those names aren't in Patreon's current documentation, and neither is a 12% tier. We had that wrong on this page until this update, so I'd rather say so than quietly fix it.

A grandfathered rate is easier to lose than most creators realize. Patreon lists three triggers: you unpublish your page even briefly, Patreon unpublishes it for any reason, or you republish after August 4, 2025. Any of the three moves you to 10% permanently. Patreon's own advice, if you need to step away, is to use the pause tool instead of unpublishing.

What Patreon's fees cost at 50, 200, and 1,000 members

Percentages are hard to feel. Member counts aren't. These two tables show the same six scenarios in dollars, with the arithmetic in the open so you can check it against your own tier price. The Ruzuku column is our Core plan at $99 a month with your own Stripe account, which charges the same 2.9% + $0.30 Patreon does. Processing appears on both sides, so it cancels out and the comparison is Patreon's 10% against a flat $99.

$10 a month tier

$25 a month tier

Patreon total = 10% of gross + (2.9% of the tier price + $0.30) per member + a $0.25 monthly payout fee. Ruzuku Core total = $99 + the same per-member processing, paid to Stripe rather than to us. Both assume US cards, USD payouts, no currency conversion, no sales tax, and no iOS purchases.

Look at the first row of the first table before anything else. At 50 members on a $10 tier, Patreon costs $585 a year less than we do. That's the one cell in six where the percentage model wins, and it isn't a rounding artifact. It's most of the memberships that exist.

At what member count does a flat fee get cheaper?

Set Patreon's fees equal to Ruzuku Core's flat rate and solve. Processing drops out because it's the same on both sides:

0.10 × G + 0.25 = 99
0.10 × G        = 98.75
G               = $987.50 gross per month

About $990 a month in membership revenue. Below it, Patreon's cut is smaller than $99. Above it, the flat fee is. Translated into members:

Your tier price probably isn't one of those. Divide $987.50 by it and round up. At $8 a month that's 124 members. On annual billing, where the line sits closer to $830, it's 104.

Two things move that line, and both matter enough that leaving them out would make the number dishonest.

Certificates move it up. Completion certificates, a custom domain, white-label branding, multiple instructor accounts, and the public storefront are on our Pro plan at $199 a month, not Core. If you need any of those, the comparison is against $199 and the break-even doubles to about $1,990 a month, which is 199 members at $10 or 80 at $25. A certification program that has to issue certificates should use the higher number.

Annual billing moves it down. Core billed yearly is $997, which works out to $83.08 a month and pulls the break-even to about $830 a month gross. Worth knowing, though I wouldn't build a decision on it until you're past the monthly line anyway.

If your tier prices are messier than $10 and $25, run your own numbers in the course platform cost calculator. It takes revenue and platform fees and shows the annual difference across the platforms creators usually shortlist.

Why do small pledges lose so much to fees?

A $1 pledge sounds like it costs you a dime. It costs you 43 cents. The 30-cent flat charge on every payment doesn't shrink when the payment does, and on the standard plan there's no longer a discounted rate for small amounts.

Almost every article about Patreon fees still quotes 5% + $0.10 on pledges of $3 or less, including the version of this page that ran until today. That rate is real, but it belongs to the legacy plans. Patreon's fee documentation says the standard 10% plan applies the same processing rate to every payment regardless of amount. If you started after August 4, 2025, the discounted micropledge rate was never available to you.

The practical read: a $3 tier with 400 members and a $12 tier with 100 members can produce similar gross revenue and wildly different take-home. Raising the tier price is the cheapest fee reduction available to you, and it costs Patreon nothing to let you do it.

What happens when a member joins through the iPhone app?

Apple takes 30% of any purchase made inside the Patreon iOS app, dropping to 15% after a year of continuous billing. Since Apple's March 2026 change, purchases in China run at 25% and 12%, which Patreon began applying to new memberships there in April 2026. Patreon doesn't stack its own processing fee on top of Apple's cut, but the 10% platform fee still applies.

By default, Patreon raises your iOS list price by about 43% so your take stays level. That's not an arbitrary markup: recovering a 30% cut requires dividing by 0.70, which is a 42.86% increase. A $10 tier shows up as $14.30 in the app. What changed this year is that it's now a setting. You can choose to keep prices the same everywhere and absorb Apple's fee yourself, which means Apple takes $3 of a $10 tier before Patreon's 10% comes out of it.

US fans have an escape hatch. Following the Epic v. Apple ruling, they can complete the purchase in Patreon's mobile web checkout instead of the app and skip Apple's fee entirely. Fans elsewhere can't. And iOS funds pend for up to 75 days while Apple confirms them, against up to 7 days for web and Android one-time purchases. If a meaningful share of your signups come through the app, that's a cash-flow fact, not a footnote.

What's changing on Patreon before November 1, 2026?

Two dated changes are worth putting on your calendar, because both can interrupt money moving into your account and neither shows up on the comparison pages that rank for Patreon fees.

• November 1, 2026: legacy billing ends. Every creator still on legacy billing has to switch to subscription billing by that date. Miss it and Patreon switches you automatically, pausing your billing and migrating you on a recommended multiplier, and your billing stays paused until you log in to consent to that multiplier or set the prices yourself. The cost of ignoring those notifications is a month with no charges going out.
• July 6, 2026: creator and fan profiles merged. Patreon now requires a single identity instead of separate creator and fan profiles. If you haven't combined yours, your access to Patreon stays temporarily restricted until you do.

Payout mechanics are worth knowing in the same breath. Automatic payouts run on the 5th of each month, but they're opt-in rather than the default. A 5-day hold lands on your balance when you first add a payout method and every time you edit your banking details, and Patreon warns that some transfers take up to 10 business days when volume checks run. Annual memberships are gated too: $200 or more in monthly earnings across the previous three months, a page launched at least three months ago, and charge-upfront or subscription billing already enabled.

Does a membership or a course fit what you're teaching?

Here's the question I ask when a creator emails us about moving off Patreon: does your material have an end?

A membership is an open-ended feed. New thing on Tuesday, new thing next Tuesday, and the value proposition is that it keeps coming. A course has a start, a sequence, and a finish line someone can cross. Those are different products, and the second one is hard to run on software built for the first.

"Not listed" is doing precise work in that table. Patreon publishes what the 10% fee includes, and none of those rows appear on it. That's an absence of evidence rather than a denial, but if a platform charged you 10% and shipped progress tracking, it would say so.

The last two rows cut the other way. Patreon has a native app your members already have on their phones, and we don't — Ruzuku students use mobile web or install it as a PWA. If your audience lives in an app, that's a real cost of moving.

What our completion data says about memberships and cohorts

We can measure one side of this argument directly. In August 2026 we pulled completion rates across 26,632 courses and 1.3 million enrollments on Ruzuku, using the platform's own binary completion record rather than anything self-reported. Every rate below is measured per enrollment, not per course.

These are observational associations across creators who chose their own formats, not a controlled trial. Creators who run scheduled cohorts are probably more hands-on to begin with, and that shows up in the numbers alongside the format itself. I'd still take the cohort-size finding seriously, because it points the opposite way from how most memberships grow: a 1,000-member Patreon is the worst possible shape for getting anyone to finish anything.

You can see it in a single teacher's catalog. Susan Nunn of Mountain Aura Publishing has taught memoir writing on Ruzuku since 2014. She runs her flagship class as a scheduled cohort with a start date, and two of those runs logged more than 40 discussion topics each. Her open-access courses, same teacher, same catalog, run between 5 and 13 topics. The material didn't change. The container did.

The counterweight, and it's a fair one: plenty of subscription courses on Ruzuku are priced in the same range as a Patreon tier. Moving to a course platform doesn't automatically let you charge more. What it changes is what you can build for the people already paying.

Who should stay on Patreon?

Most articles in this category conclude "switch." The math above says that's wrong for a specific and fairly large group of people, so here's the group, with numbers attached rather than vibes.

Stay on Patreon if all of these are true:

• You're under about $990 a month in membership revenue — under 99 members at $10, under 40 at $25 — and you don't expect to cross that in the next two quarters. Below that line Patreon costs less than $99 a month and any flat fee is worse.
• What you publish has no fixed sequence and no finish line, and nobody has asked you when the next round starts. A monthly tutorial feed is a membership, not a course wearing the wrong software.
• A meaningful share of new members find you through Patreon itself rather than your own list or channel, and you can name roughly what that share is. Discovery is a service you're paying 10% for. If it isn't delivering, you're paying for nothing.
• Your members use the Patreon app regularly, and you've asked at least a few of them whether they'd follow you to a browser. We don't have a native mobile app, so this one is a cost of moving, not a talking point.
• Nobody needs a certificate, a transcript of completion, or CE documentation. The moment somebody does, you're comparing against $199 a month and the break-even doubles.

If you're a podcaster with 90 patrons at $8, sharing bonus episodes on no particular schedule, you're the person that list describes, and I'd leave you exactly where you are. Patreon takes about $120 a month from you. We'd take $147 for the same $720 of revenue, and hand you curriculum tools you don't need yet. Come back when the next round has a start date.

Tier price on its own won't tell you which side of the line you're on. Keep that same $8 and take 150 patrons instead of 90: gross is $1,200, Patreon's cut is $200.05, and Core costs $178.80. Nothing about the price changed. The member count moved you across the line. And a $21 monthly gap still isn't the reason to switch. The list above is.

Can you run both, and does Patreon's policy allow it?

The choice isn't binary, and the most common pattern among people who email us is a membership for ongoing reach plus one paid program off-platform for the thing people finish.

Dr. Ken Long runs a version of that ladder on Ruzuku: free artifacts, then mini courses, then self-paced foundations, then cohort coaching, then one-to-one advising. More than 100 published courses across three teaching streams, 17,000-plus lesson completions, 620-plus students who average about three courses each. The free and cheap layers do the reach; the cohort and advising layers carry the price. A membership fits the first job. It doesn't fit the last one.

Now the policy question, because it's the one that makes people nervous. Patreon's off-Patreon activity guidance says that "attempts to direct, coerce, lure, or otherwise lead people from Patreon to third-party websites or experiences are strictly prohibited, unless otherwise stated." That last clause matters, and most articles quoting this sentence drop it. The same page lists permitted off-platform activity, including public social pages, Discord integrations, and hosting video on outside services.

What I'd take from it: running a course business alongside a Patreon is normal and Patreon documents ways to connect the two. Building a funnel whose whole job is to move paying members off Patreon is a different thing, and the policy is written to catch it. Read the permitted list yourself before you design around it.

What does a course platform charge instead?

Flat-fee platforms all work the same way: a monthly price, no cut of your revenue, and payment processing you pay to Stripe or PayPal directly. Prices below are from our own pricing guides, each checked against the platform's live pricing page.

Platform cost only. Payment processing of 2.9% + $0.30 applies on every row, including Patreon's, and at 200 members paying $25 that's another $205 a month wherever you are. Patreon and Substack figures are 10% of $5,000 for twelve months, plus Patreon's $0.25 monthly payout fee. Teachable's Starter plan adds a 7.5% transaction fee, so Builder is the fair comparison.

Full breakdowns live in our course platform pricing comparison, and if fee structures are what you're auditing, the fees that don't appear on pricing pages is the companion piece.

So which one should you pick?

Under about $990 a month in membership revenue, Patreon is the cheaper place to be and I'd stop reading here. Above it, the 10% keeps scaling and a flat fee doesn't: at 1,000 members on a $25 tier, the gap is $28,815 a year, which is a part-time employee.

Cost isn't usually what decides it, though. The question underneath is whether you're publishing or teaching. If people are asking when the next round starts, if you want to know who finished lesson four, if somebody needs a certificate at the end, you've outgrown a feed and no fee schedule changes that. If you're sharing work you'd make anyway and members pay to stay close to it, Patreon is built for exactly that, and the 10% buys you discovery and an app you'd otherwise have to replace.

Pricing your program is its own problem once you're off a monthly tier. Our course pricing guide works through it with the same platform data behind it.

If you want to see what scheduled delivery feels like before deciding anything, you can set up a free Ruzuku account and build a first course in an afternoon. The free plan caps you at 5 students at a time, which is the wrong size for a membership and the right size for a test: pick five of your most engaged members, run one short course with an actual start date, and see how many finish. Your Patreon keeps running the whole time. No credit card, and a person answers the support email.

Common questions about Patreon's fees

How much does Patreon take from creators in 2026?

On Patreon's standard plan, 10% of everything you earn, plus payment processing of 2.9% + $0.30 per payment for a US card in USD. That works out to 14.1% of gross on a $25 tier and 15.9% on a $10 tier, because the flat 30¢ hurts more at lower prices. Add a $0.25 direct-deposit payout fee each month, a 2.5% currency conversion fee when a member pays in a currency other than your payout currency, and 3.9% + $0.30 for non-US PayPal or Venmo. Checked against Patreon's Creator fees overview on August 20, 2026.

At how many members does a flat-fee course platform cost less than Patreon?

At about $990 a month in membership revenue — 99 members on a $10 tier, or 40 on a $25 tier. That is where Patreon's 10% cut plus the $0.25 payout fee equals Ruzuku Core's flat $99 a month. Processing is the same 2.9% + $0.30 on both sides, so it cancels out of the comparison. If you need completion certificates, a custom domain, or white-label branding, you are comparing against Ruzuku Pro at $199 a month, and the line moves to about $1,990 a month: 199 members at $10, or 80 at $25.

I'm just past the break-even. Is it worth leaving Patreon?

Probably not for the money. At 150 members on an $8 tier you gross $1,200 a month. Patreon takes $200.05 of that: $120 in platform fee, $79.80 in processing, and a $0.25 payout fee. Ruzuku Core at $99 a month plus the same $79.80 in processing comes to $178.80. You would keep about $21 more a month, or $255 a year, which is not enough to justify moving a membership. Just past the break-even the cost argument goes quiet in both directions, and the decision turns on whether your material has a start date, a sequence, and a finish line. If it does not, stay where you are.

Am I on Patreon's legacy plan or the standard 10% plan?

If you published your Patreon page after August 4, 2025, you are on the standard 10% plan. Pages published before that date may still be on a legacy plan: Founders at 5% (closed to new creators since May 7, 2019), Pro at 8%, or Pro + Merch at 11%. Patreon's help center lists three ways to lose a legacy rate permanently: you unpublish your page even briefly, Patreon unpublishes it for any reason, or you republish after August 4, 2025. Patreon's own workaround is to use the pause tool instead of unpublishing.

Does Patreon still charge a lower fee on pledges of $3 or less?

Not on the standard plan. The 5% + $0.10 micropayment rate is a legacy-plan rate, and Patreon's fee documentation says the standard 10% plan applies the same processing rate to every payment regardless of amount. So a $1 pledge pays $0.10 in platform fee plus $0.33 in processing: 43% gone. A $3 pledge loses 23%. Most articles that still quote 5% + $0.10 for small pledges are describing a plan new creators cannot join.

How much extra does an iPhone signup cost me on Patreon?

A membership bought inside the Patreon iOS app goes through Apple's in-app purchase system, which takes 30%, dropping to 15% after a year of continuous billing, and 25%/12% in China since Apple's March 2026 change. Patreon does not add its own processing fee on those transactions, but the 10% platform fee still applies. By default Patreon raises your iOS list price by about 43% (1 ÷ (1 − 30%) = 42.86%) so your take stays level, and you can switch that off and absorb the fee yourself. US fans can also complete the purchase in Patreon's mobile web checkout and skip Apple entirely. iOS funds pend up to 75 days before payout; web and Android one-time purchases pend up to 7 days.

Can you actually teach a structured course on Patreon?

You can post lessons and group them into Collections, but Patreon does not list any course infrastructure in what its 10% fee includes. No modules with prerequisites, no per-student progress tracking, no quizzes or assignments, no completion certificates, and no cohort start dates. Patreon's own inclusion list covers a hosted creator page, memberships, digital product sales, video hosting, community chats, polls and comments, and audience insights. A membership is an open-ended feed; a course has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Is it against Patreon's rules to send members to my own course platform?

Patreon's off-Patreon activity guidance says that "attempts to direct, coerce, lure, or otherwise lead people from Patreon to third-party websites or experiences are strictly prohibited, unless otherwise stated", and the same page then states what is permitted, including public social pages, Discord integrations, and hosting video on external services. In practice creators run a Patreon membership and a separate course business side by side. Read the permitted-activities list yourself before you build a funnel that depends on it, because the qualifier is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Related resources

• How Ruzuku works — what scheduled course delivery looks like in practice
• Course platform cost calculator — put your own revenue and member count against the break-even
• Course platform pricing comparison — side-by-side pricing for 14 platforms
• Substack for course creators — the same 10% model, different product shape
• Whop's fees, and the 30% affiliate rate it turns on by default — a percentage platform where the flat fee mostly loses
• Stan Store fees for creators who teach — a flat $29 or $99 with 0% on sales, and what the course product leaves out
• How to price your online course — what the platform data says about pricing a program
• Interactive Course Pricing Calculator — model your revenue, monthly student enrollments, and transaction fee drag
• Course Idea Validator — score your course or membership concept against student demand benchmarks