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 states a 9% seller fee on Starter and carries it into Pro, falling to 0% on Premium at $30 a month billed annually. Beacons states 9% on Free and Creator, falling to 0% from Creator Plus at $25 a month billed annually. Stan Store takes no platform cut at all on either of its $29 and $99 plans. All of those were read from the vendors own plan pages, Linktree and Beacons on 15 September 2026 and Stan Store on 9 September 2026. 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

Here are the published numbers, with the Linktree and Beacons rows re-read from each vendor own plan page on 15 September 2026. Two things had gone stale and are corrected below: Linktree annual prices are $6, $12 and $30 rather than the $5, $12 and $24 still quoted in most comparisons, and the Beacons tiers are now Creator, Creator Plus and Creator Max rather than the Creator Pro and Store Pro names that keep circulating. Linktree also no longer states any percentage for its free plan, so the widely repeated 12% is marked as reported rather than published.

One detail on the Linktree page is worth checking yourself, because it explains why nobody quotes the same number. That single page states its transaction fee three separate times and three different ways: the Starter card says "Sell products (9% seller fees)", the Premium card says "Sell digital products (0% seller fees)", and the FAQ further down answers the question "Does Linktree charge transaction fees?" with the line that it currently only charges 25 cents per payout. A footnote under the comparison block adds that transaction and processing fees may apply. None of those is false. They describe a sales cut, a payout charge and card processing respectively. The page just never reconciles them, and that is the point at which most readers give up and trust whichever figure an article handed them.

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.

There is a second gate on the same tier that gets far less attention, and for affiliate creators it is the more relevant one. Linktree own pricing page lists its affiliate shop, with the note that you keep 100%, under Premium and nowhere below it. So the fee you were worried about does not apply to your affiliate income, but the feature built for that income does sit behind the top plan. Those two facts pull in opposite directions and both are worth knowing before you pick a tier. The wider set of options, and what each one is genuinely better at, is compared in Linktree alternatives, with the full tier by tier numbers in Linktree pricing and Beacons pricing.

Beacons proves the same point from the other direction, and it does it on its own plan page. Affiliate links sit on the free tier, listed one line above the 9% seller fee, with no percentage attached and no upgrade gate. A company does not hand a revenue feature to free users unless there is no revenue in it to hand away. The fee ladder on these pages exists for one kind of money, and it is the kind you generate by selling something you own.

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 Creator Plus costs $25 on annual billing, 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.

A worked example on a 0% platform, using real numbers

Stan Store is the cleanest case to run this on, because it sits at one end of the range: a flat subscription with no platform cut at all. Read from Stan's own pages on 9 September 2026, it is $29 a month on the Creator plan and $99 on Creator Pro, billed annually at $300 and $948, with a 14 day trial and no permanently free tier. Stan states it earns 0% from transactions on the platform.

Run the division. A $29 subscription is the same money as a 10% fee at $290 a month of self sold revenue, so that is the crossover: below it you are paying a fixed cost to avoid a percentage of a small number, above it the subscription wins and keeps winning. At $2,000 a month of your own product sales the difference is $200 against $29, or $2,052 over a year in the subscription's favour.

Then run it on commission and watch it collapse. A creator earning $1,000 a month in affiliate commission and selling nothing of their own saves exactly $0 by moving to a 0% platform, because none of that $1,000 ever passed through the platform for a fee to be charged on. The saving is zero and the annual cost of it is $300. The full breakdown of both plans, including the Stripe fees that survive a 0% platform fee, is in the Stan Store pricing breakdown, and Stan Store alternatives for affiliate creators covers what to compare instead once fees are off the table.

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.