Stan Store vs Linktree for affiliate creators: both fee tables are answering a question you do not have

For a creator whose income is affiliate commission, the honest answer to Stan Store vs Linktree is that the fee comparison everyone runs does not apply, and once you remove it the two platforms are much closer than the price gap suggests. Stan Store costs $29 a month, or $300 billed yearly, and charges 0% on what you sell. Linktree runs from free to $30 a month, with a 9% seller fee on the middle plans that drops to 0% on Premium. Both of those percentages apply only to products you sell through the platform's own checkout. Affiliate commission is calculated by the merchant on the merchant's checkout and paid straight to you, so it never passes through either platform. A 9% fee cannot take a cut of it, and a 0% fee cannot save you one.

That is not a technicality. It is the entire basis on which nine different comparison articles rank these two products, and if commission is where your money comes from, it decides nothing.

What each platform actually costs

Both sets of figures below were read from the vendors' own pages on 21 September 2026. Stan publishes its prices in a blog post and its help center rather than on a pricing page, which is worth knowing because most round-ups quote each other instead of the source.

Read the last column down and the picture is uncomfortable. Between $0 and $948 a year, exactly one line item in this entire category is built around the money an affiliate creator actually earns, and it sits on Linktree's most expensive plan.

Is Stan Store better than Linktree?

For selling your own products, yes, clearly. Stan hosts the course, the booking calendar, the membership and the checkout natively on its $29 plan, where Linktree is mostly a router that sends people somewhere else. For affiliate creators the question is much less useful than it looks, because the thing Stan is better at is the thing you are not doing. You are sending people to Amazon, to a software vendor, to a gear brand, and those merchants run their own checkouts.

Which is cheaper, Stan Store or Linktree?

Linktree, at every tier, and it is not close on price alone. Stan's cheapest plan is $300 a year. Linktree's cheapest paid plan is $72 a year and its free plan is $0. If all you need is a page that holds commission links and looks reasonable, Linktree Free does it for nothing and Stan does not offer a free plan at all. Stan's help center answers the question directly: not at the moment.

Where Stan becomes the cheaper choice is on self-sold volume. The Creator plan is $300 a year, so it costs the same as Linktree's 9% seller fee once you have sold $3,333 of your own products in a year, about $278 a month. Below that line the percentage is cheaper. Above it the flat fee is, and the gap widens quickly: at $1,000 a month in sales, 9% takes $1,080 a year and Stan takes $300. That is a real $780 saving, for a real business, that has nothing to do with affiliate marketing. Our Stan Store review runs the same break-even against 5% and 12% platforms, and Linktree pricing covers the upgrade arithmetic on the other side.

Can you use Linktree for affiliate marketing?

Yes, on any plan including Free, because an affiliate link is just a link and Linktree's free tier holds unlimited basic links. What Premium adds at $30 a month is the Linktree affiliate shop, described on the plan card as keep 100%. That phrasing is easy to misread. You keep 100% of affiliate commission on every plan and on every competing platform too, because no link page is in the payment path to take a cut. What the upper tier buys is the shop feature and the data export, not a better commission rate.

Is Stan Store worth it if I only post affiliate links?

No, and the arithmetic is short. Stan's headline is 0% transaction fees. That percentage is applied to sales Stan processes. If you sell nothing of your own, Stan processes nothing, and 0% of nothing is nothing. You have paid $300 for the year and the feature you paid for has returned $0, while a free Linktree page would have routed the same links to the same merchants and earned you the same commission. Every other Stan feature you would be buying, the course builder, the booking calendar, the subscription engine, the community, exists to sell things you own.

Should I switch from Linktree to Stan Store?

Split last quarter's income into two piles first, and use the payout screens rather than your memory, because most creators guess this ratio wrong in the direction of whichever pile they talk about more. Pile one is money buyers paid you directly. Pile two is commission a merchant paid you. If pile one is bigger and clears roughly $280 a month, switching to Stan is a straightforward saving. If pile two is bigger, switching platforms is the wrong project entirely: you would be paying $300 a year to change which page holds links that work identically on a free one.

If pile one is where your money is, the thing that moves the needle next is usually not the fee percentage. It is proof. A sales page carrying what past clients actually said converts better than one that does not, which is why creators selling coaching and courses tend to end up bolting on a way to collect and display customer reviews whatever platform hosts the checkout. That is a bigger lever than nine percentage points on a small number of sales.

What neither platform does for commission income

Here is the gap both products leave open, and it is the same gap. Neither one tells you which recommendation earned. On Stan your affiliate link is a link and what comes back is a click count. On Linktree below Premium it is the same, and on Premium you get analytics on clicks and an affiliate shop, still measured in traffic rather than in commission. Meanwhile your actual earnings are sitting in four or five separate merchant dashboards, each with its own attribution window, its own payout threshold and its own reporting delay.

That matters more than the fee argument, because the levers that genuinely move affiliate income are which programs you promote, what they pay, and whether their attribution window survives the gap between someone watching your video and someone buying. A 24 hour window and a 30 day window on the same 5% rate are not the same product. We cover that in how much affiliate links pay, and the thresholds that decide whether a balance ever becomes money in when affiliate programs pay.

The short version

If you sell your own digital products at any real volume, Stan Store is the better buy and the reviews are right about why. If you route people to other people's products for commission, both fee tables are noise, Linktree Free does the job Stan's $300 plan would do, and the money you were about to spend is better aimed at the thing neither platform covers: knowing which of your recommendations actually paid. Best link in bio platforms sets the wider category against each other by what each one is priced for, and affiliate storefronts covers what a commission-first page does that a checkout-first page does not.