I'm Kir, and I built Pennygood: simple monthly support pages, from $3/mo, for people who do useful work but don't think of themselves as "creators". This is how the thing makes money, written up for other indie makers figuring out pricing for a payments product.
When you build anything that touches other people's money, the first question you get is "what's the catch?" So I decided early to make the business model boring and fully visible.
The whole model in one line
Pennygood keeps 8% of every transaction. That's it.
- No monthly fee for creators
- No setup cost
- No premium tier that ranks some pages above others
- If no money moves, we make nothing
Creators keep 92% before Stripe processing. Stripe charges its own fee on each payment, separately from our 8% (2.9% + $0.30 is the standard fee for US cards; international cards and currency conversion cost more).
Who pays the fees: supporters, by default
This was the design decision I went back and forth on the most.
On a $3 payment, fees hurt. Stripe's fixed $0.30 alone is 10% of it. So by default, supporters cover the fees, and the creator receives the full amount the supporter chose.
But it's a default, not a trap: supporters can turn it off. If they do, the 8% platform fee and Stripe's fee come out of the payment. With Stripe's standard US card fee, the creator receives roughly:
- $3 → about $2.37
- $5 → about $4.16
- $10 → about $8.61
Builder lesson: on micro-payments, the fixed part of card processing matters more than your headline percentage. Do the math on your smallest price point, not your average one.
Why 8% and not 0%
Some platforms charge 0% on basic tips (Ko-fi, for example) and make money on premium features. That works if you have a big user base or an adjacent product to monetize. I don't, and I didn't want to invent one.
So the reasoning was:
- Honest beats clever. A clear 8% that covers everything is better than a 0% headline with costs hidden somewhere else.
- Sustainable beats cheap. A support platform that shuts down is worse for everyone than one that charges a fair fee.
- Still competitive. Patreon's pricing page lists 10% for new creators (checked October 2026).
The 8% pays for the stuff nobody sees: servers, email delivery, moderation, fraud prevention, compliance, support, and building the next things.
What we don't do
- We don't sell data.
- We don't run ads.
- Supporters choose their own amount.
- The only revenue is the transaction fee.
If 8% turns out not to be enough to run a sustainable business, I'd rather learn that honestly than paper over it with complexity.
The part I'm least happy about: payouts
Payouts go through Stripe Connect, and right now that means creators can only get paid out in the US, Canada, the UK, the EEA and Switzerland.
That hurts, because a lot of the people I built this for are in Latin America and Africa. Today we can't pay them out, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. People in other countries can join a waitlist, and we'll tell them when payouts open up.
Builder lesson #2: if you build on Stripe Connect, check payout country support for your actual target users before you write the landing page. "Stripe works in lots of countries" and "Stripe can pay out your users in their country" are different statements, and I had to correct my own copy because of it.
What I'd like to hear from you
If you run a payments or marketplace product: how did you decide who absorbs processing fees? And if you've gotten payouts working in LatAm or Africa without a pile of entities, I'd love to hear how.
If you, or someone you know, does useful work that friends would happily back with a few dollars a month, you can make a page here.
Top comments (1)
Thanks for writing the fee math out. The $3 to $2.37 line is the part most pricing pages hide.
On payouts, one thing we watch on Stripe Connect is a refund after the creator was already paid out. On a $3 page that can leave the creator balance below zero.
How do you handle a refund that lands after payout? If a free audit of past refunds would help, DM us.