Our pricing is a bit backwards on purpose: pay us more to keep more. Does that make sense to you?
Sharing how we priced DukieX before launch, partly for transparency and partly because I want a gut check from people who'd actually use it.
Most platforms take a flat cut of everything you earn, forever. Patreon is 8 to 12%, Gumroad 10%. The more you grow, the more they take, and there's no way out of it.
We did it the other way around. The fee goes down as you commit:
Free: £0/mo, 5% platform fee. One Space, up to 1,000 members.
Creator: £49.99/mo, 2% fee. Custom domain, more Spaces, more members.
Studio: £99.99/mo, 0% fee. Unlimited, white-label, API and MCP access. White-label mobile app coming soon.
Enterprise: custom, priced on request. Multiple brands, higher limits, dedicated support.
One thing to be upfront about: those are our platform fees. On top of them you pay standard Stripe card processing, which is Stripe's cut for moving the money, not ours. That's the same whether you sell on us, Patreon, or Gumroad, so the honest comparison is platform fee vs platform fee, and that's where the ladder does the work.
So instead of a growing tax on every sale forever, you can pay a flat subscription and keep basically everything you earn. A creator doing real revenue pays us less on Studio than they'd hand Patreon on a fraction of it.
Early-join offer: 50% off the first 3 months.
The thing I keep going back and forth on: is "pay more to keep more" intuitive, or does a 5% fee on the free plan feel high next to a £0 tier elsewhere? Honest takes welcome. That's the whole reason I'm posting this before launch instead of after.
Replies
@adrian_witaszak Your pricing model is very clever and the math works, and the "pay more to keep more" solves for the Creator already doing revenue.
I think the real tension isn't the 5% - it's that you're optimizing for two different customers:
The person on free is testing the platform; they're not comparing the Studio pricing, they're comparing you to "should I just stick with my current stack?" And yeah, 5% stings in that frame.
But the person who'd move to Studio isn't graduating from free - they're already paying Patreon or Gumroad a fortune and they're ready to consolidate. Those are different buying conversations.
So the question might not be "does 5% feel fair?" but "which customer are we actually trying to acquire on free?" If it's the test-drive person, maybe 5% is the price of the test drive and that's fine.
If it's "we're trying to grow into Studio customers," that's a different strategy and free becomes about activation and proof of concept, not about being price-competitive with other free tiers.
Either way is defensible. You just have to know which one you're playing.
@anna_ludwinowski You've put your finger on something I glossed over in the post, it really is two conversations. The bit I should have said louder: the Space itself is free. We only take a cut of what the owner actually earns through it, so we don't make anything until they do. If someone isn't selling yet, we're not a cost, we're just there, and as they grow the rate drops. We only win when they win, that's the whole design. That reframes your question for me. Free isn't us trying to be price-competitive with other free tiers, it's proof of concept with no downside until money is actually moving. And the Studio buyer you described, already bleeding fees across Patreon, Gumroad and a separate checkout, isn't comparing free tiers at all, they're ready to consolidate. Different conversation, exactly as you said. You sharpened how I should be talking about this, thank you.
@adrian_witaszak "We only win when you win" - yes!! It completely reframes free from a pricing problem to a trust problem, and that's actually your real differentiator :)