Nothing else. No per-member fees. No tiers. No feature gates. No sales call. If you earn nothing, you pay $49. If you earn $2,000 a month, you pay $149 and keep the rest.
Move the two sliders. Everything below them is arithmetic on published rates, done in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.
That is $2,000 a month from your readers, before anybody's fees.
| You pay | You keep | |
|---|---|---|
| Textual Chef$49 plus 5% | $149 | $1,851 |
| Member Kitchens, Launch$99 plus $0.99 per member | $594 | $1,406 |
| Substack10% of what readers pay | $200 | $1,800 |
| Patreon10% for creators who started after August 2025 | $200 | $1,800 |
Payment processing is on top for every row and goes to Stripe, not to any of these companies. Member Kitchens rates checked 5 August 2026 against coverage of their pricing page; Substack and Patreon the same day against their own published fee pages. Sources are listed on the Member Kitchens comparison.
The percentage has a crossover, and it is worth knowing before you pick us. Charge a high price to a large membership and 5% becomes the expensive option: somewhere around $15 to $20 a member, a per-seat plan starts costing less than a share of revenue. The slider above will show you exactly where it happens on your own numbers, which is why the table names the winner out loud rather than leaving you to read four figures and guess.
Most food bloggers charge $3 to $6 a month, which is well under that line, and that is who this is designed for. If you are charging $20 to a thousand people, do the sum yourself and do not take a comparison page's word for it.
There is a second case, at the other end, and the sliders will show you that one too. The $49 is owed whether or not anybody pays you, so at a small audience it is most of the bill: at 200 readers paying $4 we cost $89 a month against Substack's $80, and below that the gap widens. A platform that takes only a percentage is cheaper until your readers cover the fixed fee. If you are starting from nothing and want to owe nothing until somebody pays, that is a real argument and we are not going to talk you out of it.
| Payment processing | Stripe's standard fees, taken by Stripe. It is the one cost in this that is not ours, and it applies wherever you sell. |
|---|---|
| Setup | None. |
| Per member | None, at any audience size. |
| If you change your mind | 14 days, money back. |
| Cancelling | Any time, from a button, without asking anybody. |
| Your reader list | Yours. Exportable whenever you want it, including on the way out. |
The price is easier to judge against the thing itself. Paste your blog and it reads the recipe markup your site already publishes for Google, then shows you what your own ad-free app would look like. No account, nothing saved, nothing changed on your site.
