SubscribeStar is a relatively under-the-radar monetization platform for artists, musicians, and creators of all ilks. It has gained a lot of momentum over the past few months, absorbing creators from established platforms like Patreon, given the uncertainties surrounding the latter’s NSFW content policies.
As the name suggests, it allows users to subscribe to their favorite creators, influencers, or ‘stars’ by paying a fee and receiving access to exclusive content. It also offers other benefits such as messaging their favorite creators directly, engaging with the community, and more.
While its features, interface, and functionality pale in comparison to Whop, Passes, or even Ko-Fi for that matter, there are a few areas where it could benefit it's users.
In this article, we look unbiasedly at SubscribeStar and its value to fans, creators, and the broader ecosystem.
What is SubscribeStar?
Based out of Sheridan, Wyoming, SubscribeStar was started in 2017 by its Russian founder Mikhail Zadvornyy.
It is a fairly straightforward alternative to Patreon, that allows creators to offer exclusive content to paying subscribers, across different membership or pricing tiers. It comes with a simple design, and a limited set of functionalities, but largely does what it promises.
Beyond the usual set of features, the platform offers creators anti-skimming and anti-scraping protections, ensuring that their premium content does not get stolen, or distributed across the dark web, which in turn helps in retaining value for paying members.
One thing that truly differentiates SubscribeStar from its larger, and significantly better competitors, is its commitment to free speech. This is what led to its sudden rise to prominence, while also fueling its notoriety, given the rise in policing and de-platforming efforts on mainstream platforms.
However, over the years, SubscribeStar has constantly found itself in hot water, with accusations of platforming and profiting from hate, given that it hosts everything from election deniers to far-right extremists.
The platform has had to pay dearly for its stance on these issues and has made a lot of concessions as a result, many of which continue to weigh heavily on fans and creators.
We’re going to cover all of these drawbacks in length in this article to help you make an informed choice.
Who can use SubscribeStar?
SubscribeStar is made for creators across platforms, niches, and types of content. If you have a popular account on online media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Substack, or YouTube, among others, you can monetize your audience with a page on SubscribeStar.
A quick glimpse of its ‘Stars’ page shows a wide range of artists, musicians, educators, bloggers, vloggers, and more running a lucrative business on the platform. A deeper dive, however, will quickly uncover the fact that most of the prominent stars here, are those who’ve been deplatformed from other sites.
This includes the likes of conservative influencer Andy Ngo, Libertarian Yaron Brook, and YouTuber Matt Christiansen, among others. So if you’re content requires a commitment to freedom of speech, or is something that others would find offensive, SubscribeStar could be the right platform for you.
Beyond this, the platform rolls out the red carpet for adult content creators, with little to no restrictions on the type of content. It currently hosts everyone from NSFW video creators to visual artists, and erotic comic books, among others.
This makes it a prominent alternative to OnlyFans.
How do you make money with SubscribeStar?
The platform allows creators a number of different options to monetize their audiences, and while limited compared to its competitors, it broadly does its job, without any fuss or frills. Here are some options available for creators to make money with SubscribeStar.
Subscription tiers
Creators can create multiple subscription tiers with different levels of access, features, and content available for each.
Most popular accounts on the platform start with their basic tiers at just $2 per month, with access to limited content, going all the way up to $150 to $250 per month, in return for 1-on-1 coaching, direct messaging, and more.
This is a great way to monetize while also making your lower-income fans and audiences feel like they are being included.
Micropayments
Beyond recurring subscriptions and community memberships, fans have the option of making small, one-time micropayments to their favorite stars or creators. Often used as a means of tipping, or giving a donation, this can be a great source of income, especially for those creators who genuinely add value.
Payments are collected via the Dropp app, which can be integrated with your SubscribeStar account. This app is known for facilitating micropayments, but it takes a big haircut right off the top, with processing fees ranging from 7% to 10%.
Custom goals
In line with traditional crowdfunding, creators have the option of setting up custom goals, highlighting how much they are aiming to raise from fans, and for what purpose.
This can be anything from ‘Upgrading Studio Equipment’ to ‘Producing New Content.’
You can have as many goals as you like, and as new subscribers and micropayments start to trickle in, the goal meters start filling up. This makes the community feel involved in whatever your broader mission is, while also making them more likely to contribute to your causes.
Discord integration
One of the platform’s most powerful features is its seamless integration with Discord, which allows creators to better engage with and manage their communities. Discord is significantly more powerful than SubscribeStar, and with the right customization, it should help you unlock a lot more value.
To start with, access to the Discord community can only be provided to a certain membership tier, but apart from this, there are additional paywalls, premium content, and more that you can use in your Discord group to generate additional revenue.
Getting started with SubscribeStar
So, if you’ve decided to go ahead with SubscribeStar, getting started is very simple, as we've highlighted below.
1. Sign up
First things first, click on the highlighted ‘Get Started’ button in the home page, which should lead you to the sign-up form. This is rather straightforward, starting with your email address and password, followed by choosing ‘Star’ when it asks you whether you’re a star or a subscriber.
It should then ask you for your Page Name and Page URL. Make sure it matches your social media profiles, and is easily identifiable.
Finally, you’ll be asked to set the basic subscription fee. You can set the lowest price here, which you can then edit, while also adding more membership tiers later.
2. Fill in personal details
Once you hit the forward arrows, you’ll be asked to upload your avatar which will be displayed on your profile page.
Along with this, you’ll also be asked to provide a brief overview of the type of content you will be publishing within your community. You can answer this in about 3 to 4 sentences.
After this, make sure to select your country of residence, and if you will be posting content for 18+ or mature audiences, click the checkbox that indicates the same. If not, make sure to leave it unticked, before clicking the tick mark that indicates ‘Finish.’
3. Verify your email
Once this is done, you’ll have to verify your email address by clicking on the link sent to your inbox.
You can then start modifying and customizing your profile, but it has to be manually approved by SubscribeStar before it can go live. While the platform claims to make approval decisions within 24 to 72 hours, the reality is a lot murkier, which we will be covering in the next part of this article.
Prominent issues with SubscribeStar
Aside from what we have already mentioned, there are some other aspects to consider before you make your decision.
The platform gets de-platformed
Ever since the platform’s commitment to free speech brought in a flood of right-wing activists from both sides of the Atlantic, it soon found itself taking heat from activists on the other side of the political spectrum.
With accusations of platforming and profiting from hate, SubscribeStar was itself deplatformed in early 2019, with its payment processors, PayPal and Stripe stopping their support of the platform, with both pointing fingers at Visa and Mastercard.
A few years down the line, Dropp, a new microtransaction platform announced that it would be supporting payments on the platform, along with two other sites that had been similarly deplatformed.
While SubscribeStar now has a fully functioning payment processing system, the loss of PayPal and Stripe means that fans don’t have access to two of the most popular payment options out there, leaving creators on the platform at a significant disadvantage.
Apart from this, Dropp charges a pretty penny for its services, with processing fees ranging from between 7% to 10%, making it one of the highest in this business. In their defense, however, they are assuming certain risks by supporting and transacting in such niches and segments.
A non-responsive ghost town
If you dig beyond the surface, you’ll see that a vast majority of stars on the platform have ‘ZERO’ subscribers and even the most popular creators and artists have so far managed just a few 100 paying fans, which is a far cry from Whop's tens of thousands.
This makes for a rather sad spectacle, leading many fans and the creator community to call it a virtual ‘Ghost Town.’ When you hear the term community or marketplace, you expect something bustling with activity, and SubscribeStar in its current state is anything but that.
Things are made worse by the platform’s lack of support and non-responsiveness. Users have complained that support queries often go unanswered, and some have gone so far as to say that the platform has been effectively abandoned by its creators.
This brings us to the main issue as of now, which is account approval. Based on what we hear from creators, new ‘Star’ accounts fail to hear back on their approval status for months at time, let alone the 2 to 3 days advertised by the site.
There have been multiple complaints regarding this on SubscribeStar’s subreddit, all with no responses from the platform and its management. Creators now believe that it only cares about and responds to influencers with a large following, deeming it not worth the risk to platform smaller stars and creators.
If this is the case, then applicants must be made aware of it right away, instead of stringing people along for months on an end.
Is SubscribeStar right for you?
With so many issues surrounding the platform, we believe that SubscribeStar is not worth it unless you create content that other platforms might deem offensive or objectionable, necessitating that you work with one that will not deplatform you (unless SubscribeStar itself becomes deplatformed, again).
The adult version of the site looks to be chugging along, so it could still be a viable option for adult content creators, but even here, the platform pales in comparison to OnlyFans.
It seems that as of now, SubscribeStar is mainly focused on retaining its existing user base and sizable recurring revenue, without assuming any additional risks by trying to scale up with more fans and creators.
As such, it has cut back on staff, development of new features, and support systems to a great extent. This means that it would not be wise to build a business on this platform, no matter what type of content you plan on creating, especially since there are better alternatives out there.
3 other ways to make money with your content
Here are three other platforms creators can use to make money with memberships and communities: #1 Might Be Oddly Familiar!
Whop
Probably seems a bit self-aggrandizing - but it's true - Whop as a platform for content creators knocks pretty much every other contender out of the park. It does everything that SubscribeStar, Patreon, OnlyFans, and Passes do, along with so much more.
Beyond the usual paywall, membership tiers, DMs, and more, your community is further enriched by Whop’s extensive range of apps, that cover everything from forums and job boards, to score predictors and spin-the-wheel apps. With Whop members can communicate with you in chat channels, video calls, forums, DMs, and more.
Whop’s most attractive feature, however, is that the platform itself attracts millions of visitors each month. This means that even sellers who lack an earned audience on social media platforms can make it big on Whop, provided they add value and consistently earn positive feedback.
The platform provides all this at one of the lowest price points in this business, at just 3% of revenue generated from direct sales.
Considering the remarkable value it provides, Whop is an absolute no-brainer for up-and-coming and established creators alike.
Patreon
The reigning giant in this space, used by the top creators and influencers across the globe with millions in monthly billing, Patreon offers everything you’ll ever need to start making money from your social media or online following.
With extensive customization options, a wide range of content types, and powerful in-built analytics, it’s easy to see why the pros stick with this platform.
Patreon takes 8% to 12% of creator earnings, but some say it could go as high as 20% in certain cases and types of content.
Passes
Previously known as Fanhouse, Passes is essentially a concession stand for online artists and creators, that follows a model quite similar to Patreon and OnlyFans.
It has a strict preference for ‘Safe For Work’ content but wears its ‘creator-first’ ethos on its sleeve, something which saw it go on a war path against tech giant Apple, and its notoriously exploitative app store fees.
Passes offers pretty much everything that Patreon does but with a better user interface and experience. It works on a flat 10% plus $0.30 fee on all payments on the platform.
Honest thoughts? Whop is the best place for content creators
SubscribeStar might be a ghost town, but Whop gives you everything you need to monetize your content and grow your brand. With Whop, you can create a custom hub for your audience - think videos, courses, premium communities, and exclusive Q&As - all tailored to your vision.
Start selling digital products, connecting directly with your audience, and even building your own online presence that attracts new fans every day. The best part? It’s free to start.
Don't wait, it's time to make your next big move with Whop.
