Patreon now charges new creators a flat 10% of subscription revenue, Substack takes 10% of every paid-subscription transaction, Ghost's hosting plans charge 0% on top of Stripe processing, and YouTube pays creators 70% of channel-membership revenue it collects. Four platforms, four different fee structures — compared using each company's own published terms.
Every one of these numbers comes from the platform's own fee documentation, not from a creator's screenshot or a forum thread. That matters because the gap between a platform's headline number and a creator's actual take-home — after payment processing, currency conversion, and payout fees stack on top — is where most of the confusion in these comparisons lives.
What does Patreon actually charge in 2026?
The answer depends on when a creator signed up. Anyone who published a Patreon page after August 4, 2025 pays a standard 10% platform fee, according to Patreon's creator fees FAQ. Creators who joined before that cutoff keep their older, legacy pricing, which Patreon's own help documentation lists as 5%, 8%, or 11% depending on which plan tier they originally selected — those creators saw no change.
The 10% platform fee — the cut a platform keeps before any payment processing cost is applied — is only part of the bill. On top of it, Patreon charges standard card-processing fees that run roughly 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, a 2.5% currency-conversion fee when a payout currency differs from the payment currency, and separate payout fees depending on withdrawal method. One-time digital-product sales carry their own fee range, from 5% to 12% depending on plan tier. None of this is disclosed as a single all-in number; it has to be assembled from several help-center articles.
What does Substack take, and what else gets deducted?
Substack's structure is simpler to state but not simpler to pay. Substack charges 10% of each subscription transaction, full stop — there is no legacy-versus-new-creator split like Patreon's. That figure comes directly from Substack's own pricing page.
Substack routes all payments through Stripe, and Stripe's fees are layered on top of that 10%: roughly 2.9% plus $0.30 per card transaction, plus a 0.7% recurring-billing fee that Stripe began charging in July 2024 on subscription renewals. International and alternative payment methods — iDEAL, Bancontact, Sofort — carry their own, smaller, country-specific charges. A creator collecting a $10 monthly subscription is, in practice, losing roughly 13-14 cents of every dollar to combined Substack-plus-Stripe fees before any payout or tax handling.
Why doesn't Ghost's 0% platform fee mean free?
Ghost inverts the model. Instead of taking a cut of subscription revenue, Ghost's pricing page states plainly that its hosted plans process premium subscriptions "without any additional transaction fees from Ghost." That 0% cut applies to the Publisher plan ($29/month billed yearly), the Business plan ($199/month billed yearly), and Custom plans — the entry-level Starter plan, at $18/month, does not support paid subscriptions at all.
The trade is a fixed monthly hosting bill instead of a percentage of revenue. For a creator earning a few hundred dollars a month, a flat $29 fee can cost more than 10% would on Patreon or Substack; for a creator earning several thousand dollars a month, the math flips, and a flat monthly bill becomes the cheaper option by a wide margin. Standard Stripe card-processing fees still apply on top of any Ghost plan — the 0% figure covers only Ghost's own cut, not the payment processor's.
What does YouTube keep from channel memberships?
YouTube's revenue split is the most creator-favorable of the four on paper. Per YouTube's own partner earnings overview, creators keep 70% of net revenue from channel memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers, and Super Thanks, with YouTube retaining 30%. That is a notably better split than the 55% creators keep on standard watch-page ad revenue, where YouTube keeps 45%. Shorts operates on a separate model: creators receive 45% of revenue allocated to them from a shared Creator Pool based on their share of Shorts views.
YouTube's own documentation is explicit that none of this is contractually guaranteed: "There are no guarantees under the YouTube partner agreement about how much or whether you'll be paid." Membership revenue, unlike Patreon or Substack pledges, is also bound up with YouTube Premium's separate revenue-sharing pool, and payouts flow through Google's existing AdSense-style payment infrastructure rather than Stripe.
How do the four platforms compare side by side?
| Platform | Platform's own cut | Additional processing costs | Model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Patreon (new creators, post-Aug 2025) | 10% of subscription revenue | ~2.9% + $0.30 card processing; 2.5% currency conversion; separate payout fees | Percentage of revenue |
| Patreon (legacy creators) | 5%, 8%, or 11% depending on original plan | Same as above | Percentage of revenue |
| Substack | 10% of each transaction | ~2.9% + $0.30 plus 0.7% recurring-billing fee via Stripe | Percentage of revenue |
| Ghost (Publisher/Business/Custom) | 0% | Standard Stripe card-processing fees only | Flat monthly hosting fee ($29-$199+/month) |
| YouTube memberships | 30% | None disclosed beyond the revenue split itself | Percentage of revenue, paid via AdSense infrastructure |
What generalizes for creators choosing a platform — and what doesn't?
What generalizes: every platform here discloses its own fee structure, and every structure has a hidden second layer — payment processing — that the headline percentage doesn't include. A creator comparing "10% vs. 0%" without adding processing costs is comparing incomplete numbers. It also generalizes that flat-fee models like Ghost's reward scale: the more a creator earns, the smaller a fixed monthly bill looks as a percentage of revenue, while percentage-of-revenue models like Patreon's and Substack's stay proportionally constant regardless of size.
What doesn't generalize: which platform is "cheapest" depends entirely on a creator's actual revenue, audience size, and whether they need built-in discovery (which Patreon and YouTube offer and Ghost does not). A creator earning $500 a month and a creator earning $15,000 a month will reach opposite conclusions about the same four numbers. None of this compares the platforms' discovery mechanics, community tools, or churn behavior — only their disclosed take rates, which is the one piece of the decision every operator can verify before signing up.
