Ko-fi vs Buy Me a Coffee 2026: which keeps more of your tips and sales?

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.

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The tip jar test

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.

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Tips, sales, and Gold side by side

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.

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Where they tie, and where Ko-fi pulls ahead

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 Buy Me a Coffee still appeals

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.

The verdict

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.

If you run both — or plan to switch

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.