Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover memberships & subscriptions and monetization & payments. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
| Buy Me a Coffee | LaunchPass | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Free | From $29 |
| Pricing model | Free | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Usage-based | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | 14 days |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | 5% of what you earn | 3.5% of what you earn |
| Runs on | Not stated | Not stated |
| Covers | Tips & Donations, Digital Products & Storefronts, Memberships & Subscriptions, Monetization & Payments | Community Platforms, Memberships & Subscriptions, Monetization & Payments |
| Works with | Nothing in particular | Discord |
| 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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Charge for access to a Discord or Slack group
LaunchPass puts a paywall in front of a chat community you already run, and hands out and removes the roles as people pay and lapse. It connects to Discord, Slack and Telegram, and the money arrives through your own Stripe account. It manages access rather than hosting anything, so the community stays where your members already are.
Our note
Sensible if your community is already somewhere and already wanted. Compare it against DoorFee if the community is on Discord, since DoorFee sells the membership as well as gating it, and against Circle or Skool if you were half thinking of moving anyway.
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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