Link in bio fees: do link in bio tools take a cut of your sales?

Yes, most of them do, but only on money you collect through the platform. Linktree takes 12% of your sales on its free plan and 9% on Starter and Pro, falling to 0% on the $35 Premium tier. Beacons takes 9% on Free and Creator Pro, and 0% from the $30 Store Pro plan up. Stan Store takes no platform cut at all on either of its $29 and $99 plans. Crucially, none of these fees touch affiliate commission, because that money is paid to you by the merchant and never passes through your link page.

That last sentence is the one worth rereading. It is the most misunderstood thing in link in bio pricing, and it causes a steady stream of creators to pay for an upgrade specifically to remove a fee they were never being charged in the first place.

What link in bio platforms actually charge, as of August 2026

Here are the published numbers, taken from each vendor's own pricing page and checked on 10 August 2026. Prices move, so confirm before you commit.

Underneath every row on that table sits Stripe, charging roughly 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction. That applies on all of these platforms, including the ones advertising 0% fees. A 0% platform fee means the platform takes nothing. It does not mean the transaction is free.

Do link in bio tools take a cut of affiliate commissions?

No. Affiliate commission is calculated and paid by the merchant or the affiliate network using their own tracking, and it is sent to you directly. The link in bio platform hosted the link that sent the click, but the money never routes through it, so there is nothing for it to take a percentage of. If your entire income is affiliate commission, every seller fee in the table above costs you exactly nothing.

This matters because the upgrade path on these platforms is built almost entirely around the fee. The marketing copy is about keeping more of what you earn, and the comparison tables put the percentage in bold. If you sell courses or presets, that is a fair pitch. If you earn by recommending other people's products, you are being sold a solution to a problem you do not have.

When is it worth upgrading to a 0% plan?

Only when the fee you would save exceeds the subscription you would pay, which is a single division. Here are the crossover points at each vendor's published rates.

Below those figures, the cheaper plan really is cheaper and upgrading loses you money every month. Above them, the percentage compounds against you and the flat fee wins by a widening margin. At $3,000 a month in sales, a 9% fee costs $270 while Beacons Store Pro costs $30, and the decision stops being close.

Worth noticing how low those thresholds are. A creator selling $400 a month of digital products is already past the point where the free plan is the expensive option, which is the opposite of how free tiers are usually assumed to work. Free plans are not a discount, they are a different pricing model, and they are priced to be cheapest at low volume and worst at high volume.

What does a link in bio fee actually cost on a small sale?

Percentages hide what the fixed processing charge does to low-priced products. Take a $9 digital download on Linktree's free plan. Stripe takes about $0.56, the 12% seller fee takes $1.08, and you keep roughly $7.36. That is an 18% total cut. The same $9 product on a 0% platform still loses about $0.56 to processing, which is 6.2% on its own.

Now run a $99 product. Stripe takes about $3.17, a 12% fee takes $11.88, and the total cut falls to about 15%. The percentage improves purely because the fixed 30 cents matters less. If you sell cheap products in volume, your effective fee rate is meaningfully worse than the advertised one, and that is the case where a flat-fee plan pays for itself soonest.

Which link in bio tool has the lowest fees?

On platform cut alone, Stan Store, since it charges 0% on both its plans. But it has no free tier, so the honest comparison depends on volume: below roughly $322 a month in sales, Beacons Free at 9% costs you less overall despite the percentage. Beacons has the more generous free plan of the two free options, at 9% against Linktree's 12%, and it includes digital product selling, a media kit, basic email tools and Instagram DM automation without payment.

Linktree's advantage is not price. It is familiarity and speed, and for a page of links that audiences recognise instantly it remains the easiest thing to publish. We go through each of these individually in the Linktree alternative, Beacons alternative and Stan Store alternative comparisons, and the full pricing picture sits on the best link in bio platforms comparison.

Should you sell your own products or promote other people's?

This is the decision the fee question is really standing in for. Selling your own product means you keep most of the price but you have to build the thing, price it, support it and answer the same handful of buyer questions forever, which is enough repeat work that plenty of creators end up using a chatbot trained on their own content to answer the routine ones rather than doing it by hand. The margin is excellent and the workload is real.

Affiliate commission inverts both. There is no product to build and no support queue, but you keep a percentage rather than the whole price: usually 1% to 10% on physical goods, and 20% to 50% on software, where a good number of programs pay every month the customer stays subscribed. That recurring detail is where the arithmetic gets interesting. One software referral at $50 a month paying 25% recurring returns $150 across a year, and it renews. A 9% seller fee on $150 of your own product sales costs $13.50. For most creators the fee tier is a rounding error next to the question of what they are recommending at all.

Do you pay tax on link in bio income?

Yes, in the US both product sales and affiliate commission are self-employment income, taxed at your ordinary rate plus 15.3% self-employment tax. Platforms issue a 1099-K once you pass $20,000 and 200 transactions for 2025 and 2026 under the current threshold, and affiliate networks issue a 1099-NEC at $600. You owe the tax whether or not a form arrives, and platform fees and subscriptions are deductible business expenses, so keep the receipts.

The short version

Link in bio platforms take between 0% and 12% of what you sell through them, plus Stripe's roughly 2.9% and 30 cents on every transaction regardless of plan. They take nothing from affiliate commission, ever. Work out your monthly product sales, check it against the crossover figures above, and upgrade only when the division says so. Then spend the time you did not waste on the pricing page working out whether the things you recommend pay you once or every month, because that is the number with real leverage in it.

If the affiliate side is the half you want to grow, an affiliate storefront keeps every recommendation on one browsable page with disclosure attached, and SaaS affiliate programs covers the software rates that pay monthly instead of once.