Beacons pricing 2026: what every Beacons AI plan costs, the seller fees on each tier, and who should actually pay for a Beacons subscription

Beacons has four public plans. Free is $0 forever. Creator is $100 billed annually, which works out at $8.33 a month, or $10 a month if you pay monthly. Creator Plus is $300 billed annually, so $25 a month, or $30 monthly. Creator Max is $900 billed annually, so $75 a month, or $90 monthly. Annual billing is advertised as two months free and the arithmetic checks out exactly: ten monthly payments equals the annual price on every tier. Those figures were read from Beacons own plan page on 15 September 2026.

The number that decides whether any of it is worth paying sits lower on the card. Beacons charges a 9% seller fee on Free and keeps charging it on Creator. It drops to 0% only on Creator Plus at $300 a year. And directly above that 9% line on the free plan card, Beacons lists another feature: create affiliate links. Free. No percentage attached, no upgrade gate, nothing.

Beacons pricing, plan by plan

Read from the Beacons plan page on 15 September 2026. Vendor pricing in this category moves, so check the page before you enter a card.

Why the 9% cannot touch affiliate income, and why Beacons own page shows it

A seller fee is a slice taken out of a payment while it passes through a system. That means a platform can only charge one on money that actually passes through it. When you sell a $45 preset pack on your Beacons page, the buyer pays Beacons checkout, Beacons holds the money, Beacons takes its cut, and you get the rest. The 9% is real and on a $45 sale it is $4.05.

Affiliate commission does not work like that and cannot be made to. A reader clicks your link, leaves your page completely, and buys from the merchant. The payment goes from that person straight to that merchant. Your page handed over a click and then stopped being involved. The merchant records the referral in its own system, applies its own rate card, holds the money through its own return window, and pays you on its own schedule, weeks or months later. Beacons never holds a cent of it, so there is nothing for it to take 9% of.

This is not a theory you have to take on trust, because Beacons prices it that way itself. Affiliate links are on the free tier. Not gated behind Creator, not metered by credits, just there, on the same card that says 9% seller fees. A company does not give away a revenue feature on its free plan unless there is no revenue in it to give away. The fee ladder on that page exists for one kind of money only, and it is the kind you generate by selling something you own.

Is Beacons Creator Plus worth it?

Only if you sell your own products, and there is a specific number where it starts making sense. Creator Plus costs $25 a month on annual billing against $8.33 for Creator, a gap of $16.67. A 9% fee costs $16.67 on roughly $185 of sales. So below about $185 a month of self-sold product revenue you are paying more in subscription than you save in fees, and above it the upgrade pays for itself. Coming straight from the free plan the line sits higher: $25 a month against a 9% fee breaks even at about $278 a month in sales.

Put real numbers through it. At $1,000 a month of your own product sales, the 9% is $90 and the upgrade from Creator costs $16.67, so Creator Plus saves you about $73 a month. That is a decisive win and nothing here argues otherwise. At $150 a month of product sales, the same upgrade costs you money. And at $0 of product sales with $1,200 a month coming in as affiliate commission, the upgrade saves exactly nothing, because there was never a fee on that income for anyone to remove.

How much does Beacons cost compared to Linktree?

Closer than the marketing on either side suggests, and structurally almost identical. Both keep a genuinely usable free tier. Both charge 9% on sales at the bottom of the ladder. Both drop it to 0% only at an upper tier priced around $300 a year: Beacons Creator Plus at $300, and Linktree Premium at $360. Entry prices differ a little, with Linktree Starter at $6 a month billed annually against Beacons Creator at $8.33, though the features on those two tiers are not the same thing.

Where they genuinely diverge is what the middle tiers sell you. Beacons meters AI credits, 30 a day free, 300 on Creator, unlimited on Creator Plus, and builds its pitch around generated content and a media kit that updates itself. Linktree sells design control, branding removal and analytics instead. Our full breakdown of Linktree pricing plan by plan covers where that page states its own fee three different ways, which is worth reading before you compare the two on percentages. For the wider field, the best link in bio platforms compared puts the whole category side by side.

Does Beacons take a cut of affiliate commission?

No, and it could not if it wanted to. Commission is calculated and paid by the merchant whose product was bought, and the payment never routes through your link page, so there is no transaction for Beacons to take a percentage of. This is true of Linktree, Stan Store, Fourthwall, Gumroad and every link page ever built. If you are choosing between these tools on the fee column and your income is commission, you are comparing zero to zero and then paying a subscription based on the result.

Does Beacons have a free plan?

Yes, and Beacons labels it free forever rather than a trial. It includes a customizable link in bio, 30 AI credits a day, a media kit that updates itself daily, unlimited digital products for sale at the 9% fee, affiliate links, 50 email sends a month, Instagram auto-replies and real-time analytics. That is a lot for nothing, and for a creator whose income is commission it covers most of what the paid tiers add on top, because the headline upgrade is a fee change that cannot reach their income.

What the AI credits actually buy, and what they do not

Credits are the spine of the Beacons ladder: 30 a day free, 300 on Creator, unlimited on Creator Plus. They power caption writing, media kit generation and the marketing copy around your page. Judged as what they are, they are reasonable value, and paying $100 a year to stop counting them is a defensible purchase if you use them daily.

What they do not do is tell you whether a recommendation earned. Beacons real-time analytics report on your page: views, clicks, which link got tapped. That is everything a link page can see, because the transaction happens somewhere else. Your actual income is sitting in a dozen merchant dashboards, one for every program you joined, each with a different rate, a different return window and a different payout date. No tier of any link in bio tool closes that gap, and no amount of AI credits does either.

The same split shows up on the tier Beacons markets as driving sales and partnerships. A daily-updating media kit is a pitch document, and a good one. Turning a pitch into signed, tracked, repeatable brand deals is a separate job with its own partner relationship management software, which is a different category from a page that hosts your links. Knowing which tool is doing which job is most of what stops creators paying twice for neither.

How to decide, in three steps

First, split last month into two numbers: what you earned selling things you own, and what merchants paid you in commission. Do not add them. Every percentage on the Beacons plan page applies to the first number only.

Second, if the self-sold number is the bigger one, test it against $185 a month if you are on Creator or $278 if you are on Free. Above the line, Creator Plus pays for itself. Below it, stay where you are.

Third, if commission is the bigger number, delete the fee column from every comparison you are running, because for you it is zeroes all the way across, and judge these tools on what is left. That usually comes down to one question: can you see which recommendation earned, or only which link was clicked. How an affiliate storefront works covers what changes when the page is built around commission rather than checkout, and SaaS affiliate programs covers the side of this where a single recommendation can keep paying every month a customer stays subscribed.

None of this makes Beacons a bad product. The free tier is unusually generous, the annual discount is real and exactly as advertised, and for a creator selling courses and digital products at volume the jump to Creator Plus is straightforward arithmetic that comes out in your favor. The narrower point is that its pricing is organized around a fee that only ever touches money you make selling your own things, and plenty of creators reading a Beacons pricing page do not make their money that way at all.