Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover digital products & storefronts and monetization & payments. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
| Buy Me a Coffee | SamCart | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Free | From $79 |
| Pricing model | Free | Paid subscription |
| Free tier | Yes | No |
| Billing | Usage-based | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
| 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 | Monetization & Payments, Digital Products & Storefronts |
| 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.
Only on this side
Checkout pages built for testing offers
SamCart is a checkout designed to be tested: one-page carts, order bumps, upsells taken after the card has cleared, and recovery mail for the ones who left. It sits beside whatever hosts your product rather than replacing it, which is why people run it alongside a course platform. Courses are on the entry plan now, and used to be an upgrade.
Our note
Buy this for the upsell flow rather than for the storefront, because that is where it earns the monthly fee back. If your products are cheap or few, Gumroad or Lemon Squeezy take a percentage and cost nothing while you are quiet.
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.