Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover tips & donations and monetization & payments. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
| Buy Me a Coffee | Donorbox | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Free | From $150 |
| Pricing model | Free | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Usage-based | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | None |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | 5% of what you earn | Not stated |
| Runs on | Not stated | Web |
| Covers | Tips & Donations, Digital Products & Storefronts, Memberships & Subscriptions, Monetization & Payments | Tips & Donations, Crowdfunding, Monetization & Payments |
| Works with | Nothing in particular | Nothing in particular |
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
| Live deals | None right now | None right now |
One page for tips, memberships and sales
Buy Me a Coffee is the shortest path between a reader wanting to pay you and money arriving in your bank account. A page, a button, and no plan to choose. Memberships and a shop for one-off things sit on the same page, and the 5 percent it takes is cheap until you are earning enough that a percentage stops being cheap.
Our note
The right first step and rarely the last one. Once memberships pass a few hundred a month, run the 5 percent against what a fixed monthly plan elsewhere would cost, because that is when the simplicity starts having a price.
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Donation pages and recurring giving
Donorbox is built for nonprofits and reads that way, which is exactly right for a creator running a fundraiser or a cause and wrong for one collecting tips. Recurring donations, an embeddable form and donor records are the substance. Its free plan charges a higher percentage on each gift than the paid one.
Our note
Pro costs $150 a month and saves roughly 1.5 percent per donation, so it pays for itself somewhere around $10,000 a month in giving. Below that the free plan is the cheaper one, whatever the fee percentage looks like.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.
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