Which Keeps More of Your Tips: Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee?

Quick answer

Ko-fi keeps more on tips (0% vs Buy Me a Coffee's 5%) and offers Ko-fi Gold ($12/month) to zero out all fees. Buy Me a Coffee's 5% is flat with no way to reduce it. For a pure tip jar, Ko-fi free wins.

Ko-fi and Buy Me a Coffee do the same job — let fans tip you, join a membership, or buy a small product — and both leave card processing to Stripe or PayPal. The difference is the platform fee, and it's bigger than it looks.

Buy Me a Coffee charges a flat 5% on everything: tips, memberships, shop sales. Ko-fi charges 0% on tips on its free plan, 5% on sales, and offers a Gold plan that drops all of it to 0% for a flat $12/month. There's no equivalent escape hatch on Buy Me a Coffee. For most creators, that makes Ko-fi the structurally cheaper home.

Which Platform Keeps More of Your Tips?

Ko-fi keeps more on every tip because its free plan charges 0% platform fee — you only pay card processing. Buy Me a Coffee takes 5% off the top before processing fees even apply, so a $5 tip nets you $0.25 less every single time someone supports you.

Most fan-funding money is tips, so start there. On a $5 tip, Ko-fi's free plan takes nothing as a platform fee; Buy Me a Coffee takes its 5% no matter what.

How Do Tips, Sales, and Gold Compare Side by Side?

Tips are cheapest on Ko-fi free (0%), shop sales are tied at 5% on both free plans, and Ko-fi Gold ($12/month) eliminates all platform fees entirely. Buy Me a Coffee has no equivalent tier, so Gold wins on every transaction type once you cross $240/month in non-tip revenue.

Switch modes to compare. Note the third option: on Ko-fi Gold, even shop sales drop to a 0% platform fee — something Buy Me a Coffee can't match at any price.

Where Do Ko-fi and Buy Me a Coffee Tie, and Where Does Ko-fi Win?

They tie on shop sales at the free tier — both charge 5% plus processing. Ko-fi pulls ahead everywhere else: 0% on tips for free, and Ko-fi Gold removes all platform fees for $12/month flat. Buy Me a Coffee offers no path to a lower rate at any volume.

On shop sales, the free plans are a dead heat: both charge 5% plus processing, so a $25 product nets about $22.73 either way. The difference shows up at the edges:

Tips: Ko-fi free is already cheaper, because it takes 0% where Buy Me a Coffee takes 5%. If tips are most of your income, Ko-fi wins before you spend a cent.

Volume sellers: Ko-fi Gold removes the 5% on sales for $12/month, which pays for itself once your non-tip sales cross $240/month (5% of $240 = $12). Above that, Ko-fi Gold beats Buy Me a Coffee on every sale. Buy Me a Coffee has no flat-fee tier to switch to. See the exact break-even in our Ko-fi fees 2026 breakdown.

Where Does Buy Me a Coffee Still Appeal?

Buy Me a Coffee wins on simplicity and speed of setup. There is no plan to choose, no upsell, and the single-page supporter experience is cleaner than Ko-fi's more feature-dense interface. Creators who value a zero-decision product over fee optimization find that trade-off worthwhile.

Price isn't everything. Buy Me a Coffee is famously simple and fast to set up, with a clean, single-page supporter experience that some creators and their fans just prefer. There's no plan to think about and no upsell — what you see is the whole product. If you value that simplicity over squeezing out the last few percent, it's a fair trade.

Which Platform Should You Choose for Tips and Sales?

Ko-fi wins on tips with its 0% platform fee and wins on volume with Gold's flat $12/month eliminating all fees above $240/month in sales. Buy Me a Coffee wins on simplicity with zero decisions required. Choose Ko-fi for cost optimization or Buy Me a Coffee for the fastest possible setup with no plan choices.

For a pure tip jar, Ko-fi's free plan keeps more, full stop. For a seller doing real shop or membership volume, Ko-fi Gold's flat $12/month and 0% platform fee pull further ahead the more you earn. Buy Me a Coffee's flat 5% is perfectly reasonable and dead simple — but it has no path to a lower rate, so Ko-fi tends to win on cost at both the low and high ends. For the full breakdown on each platform, see Ko-fi fees 2026 and Buy Me a Coffee fees 2026. If you're also considering memberships, Patreon vs Ko-fi covers that angle.

What If You Run Both Platforms or Plan to Switch?

Many creators run Ko-fi for tips and Buy Me a Coffee for memberships simultaneously while deciding which to consolidate on. The problem is two dashboards showing two different fee structures with no combined view of what you actually kept across both after all fees are subtracted.

When we built Owelet's Ko-fi integration, we discovered that Ko-fi's API reports tip transactions and shop transactions with different fee structures in the same response — meaning any tool that applies a single Ko-fi fee rate across all transaction types is mathematically wrong.

Plenty of creators have tips coming in on one and a shop on the other, mid-migration. Two dashboards, two fee structures, and no single view of what you actually kept or owe in tax.

That's what Owelet does. Connect Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, and everything else, and see your true take-home, fee drain per platform, and tax set-aside in one place. Free to start at owelet.app — the dashboard that shows your combined net income across all platforms.

For the full ranked breakdown across all nine platforms — including where Ko-fi and Buy Me a Coffee land — see creator platform fee comparison →

See also: the hidden fees most tip-platform creators never calculate →

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