Stan Store vs Linktree (2026): Fees, Pricing, and Which to Pay For

If you sell anything, Stan Store is the cheaper and better-built option of the two. Stan costs $29 a month with a 0% platform fee, while Linktree only reaches 0% on its $35 Premium plan and takes 9% to 12% on every tier below it. If you sell nothing and just need a tidy list of links, Linktree's free plan wins and Stan has no free tier at all. That single question, do you sell, decides it.

The rest of this piece is the arithmetic behind that answer, the fee table for both platforms as of September 2026, and the one thing neither of them will give you no matter which plan you buy.

Stan Store vs Linktree at a glance

The two products get compared constantly, but they were built to do different jobs. Linktree is an aggregator: it collects links and sends people somewhere else. Stan Store is a storefront: the checkout, the course, and the booking all happen on the page. Here is how they line up.

How much does Stan Store cost compared to Linktree?

Stan Store is $29 a month on Creator and $99 on Creator Pro, billed annually at $300 and $948. Linktree runs $0 free, $8 Starter, $15 Pro, and $35 Premium on monthly billing, dropping to about $6, $12, and $30 on annual. Stan looks far more expensive until you add the fee each one takes on your sales, at which point the ranking flips for anyone actually selling.

Two things that are easy to miss. First, Stripe's 2.9% plus 30 cents applies on top of everything in that table, on both platforms, on every tier. Nobody escapes the processor. Second, Stan charges a payout fee of 0.25% plus 25 cents with a $1 minimum each time you cash out, so batch your payouts rather than withdrawing daily. Verified against both companies' published pricing in September 2026; these numbers move, so check before you commit.

The breakeven math: where Stan gets cheaper

Stan's $29 flat fee overtakes Linktree's free plan the moment your monthly digital sales pass roughly $242, because 12% of $242 is about $29. Below that, free is genuinely cheaper. Above it, the percentage compounds and the flat fee does not.

The column worth staring at is Linktree Pro. It is the plan most creators land on because it is the one with the good analytics and the badge removal, and it still takes 9%. At $5,000 a month in sales that is $465 gone, against $29 on Stan. We ran the same comparison across the whole Linktree lineup on the Linktree pricing breakdown, and the pattern holds at every volume: the percentage is the expensive part, not the subscription.

Note also that Stan Creator at $29 is cheaper than Linktree Premium at $35, and both charge 0%. On pure cost, for a seller, Stan wins outright. We are not going to pretend otherwise.

Is Stan Store better than Linktree?

For selling, yes. Stan hosts the checkout, the course, the booking calendar, and the digital delivery natively, and takes 0% on both plans. Linktree can take payments through commerce blocks but is fundamentally a link list, and it charges 9% to 12% unless you are on Premium. For a creator with nothing to sell, Linktree's free plan is better because Stan has no free tier.

Does Linktree take a percentage of sales?

Yes. Linktree takes 12% on the Free plan, 9% on Starter and 9% on Pro, and 0% only on the $35 Premium plan. That is on top of Stripe's processing fee, which applies on every tier. Many creators assume paying for Pro removes the commission; it does not, and that surprise is the single most common complaint we see about Linktree's commerce features.

Is Stan Store worth $29 a month?

If you clear more than about $250 a month in digital sales, yes, because the 0% fee saves more than the subscription costs. If you are pre-revenue or selling occasionally, the $29 is a real fixed cost with no free fallback, and the 14-day trial will not be long enough to prove the case. Start free elsewhere and move once sales are steady.

Can you sell digital products on Linktree?

You can. Linktree supports digital product sales, tips, and payment requests through its commerce blocks, and buyers pay without leaving the page. The limitation is not capability, it is the cut: on anything below Premium you hand over 9% to 12% of each sale, and the product delivery and course features are thinner than a purpose-built storefront's.

The thing neither one gives you

Neither platform will let you own the address. Stan Store's own help center confirms it does not support custom domains at any plan level; the only workaround is a forwarding rule that redirects your domain to a stan.store URL, so the page still lives on their domain. Linktree has no native custom domain either, and creators who want one end up proxying it through a third-party service.

That matters more than it sounds. Every link you have ever posted, every QR code on a business card, every backlink pointing at your storefront accrues to someone else's domain. Change platforms and the URL breaks and the search equity stays behind. It is the same reason people eventually stop building their whole business on a rented profile.

This is the gap ExclusiveLink was built for. Pro is $49 a month, which is more than Stan's $29, and we are not going to argue the price. What it buys is a page on a domain you own with no platform branding anywhere, gated and paid links where you can put a price or an email in front of any file, per-link analytics, and 0% platform fee. If your priority is the lowest possible monthly cost, Stan is the better buy. If your priority is that the address, the audience, and the data stay yours when you switch tools, that is the trade we make. The Stan Store alternative page walks through that comparison feature by feature, and custom domain link in bio covers the setup itself.

Which should you pick?

Three honest answers, depending on where you are.

• You do not sell anything yet. Take Linktree Free. It costs nothing, the 12% fee never triggers if there are no sales, and you can move later. Paying $29 for a storefront with no products in it is the most common money-wasting mistake in this category.
• You sell courses, coaching, or bookings and want the cheapest good tool. Stan Store Creator at $29. Native checkout, native course hosting, 0% fee, and it beats every Linktree tier on cost past roughly $242 a month in sales.
• You are building a brand you intend to keep. Pick the tool that runs on your own domain, whether that is us or anything else with real custom domain support, because that is the one decision here that is expensive to reverse later.

One more thing worth saying plainly: no bio tool creates demand. Both of these platforms assume you already have people watching, and a storefront with no traffic converts exactly as well as a link list with no traffic. If the missing piece is attention rather than checkout, spend the $29 on getting the work in front of more people first and revisit the platform question once there is something to convert.

If you want the three-way version of this comparison with Beacons included, we broke that down in Linktree vs Beacons vs Stan Store, and the plan-by-plan Stan numbers live on the Stan Store pricing page.

Pricing and fee figures verified September 2026 against both platforms' published pricing and help documentation. Both companies change plans regularly, so confirm current numbers before you buy.