Stan Store pricing explained: Creator vs Creator Pro

We make Drry, a competitor to Stan Store, so read this with that in mind. Stan Store costs $29 a month on the Creator plan or $99 a month on Creator Pro, with a genuine 0% platform fee on both, which means the real decision is not whether Stan takes a cut (it does not) but what the $70-a-month gap between the two plans actually buys. The short answer is email marketing, and this guide walks through why that matters more than the price difference suggests.

Everything below is our honest read of those numbers as they stand in September 2026, and we will tell you plainly where our own product enters the picture (one section, clearly labeled, near the end). One note before we start: if you find older articles quoting a transaction fee on the Creator plan, they are out of date. Stan's own documentation now shows 0% on both tiers.

How much does Stan Store cost?

Stan Store has exactly two paid tiers and no free plan, so there is no $0 way to run a store on it. The grid is small, which is a mercy:

• Creator, $29 a month or $300 a year billed annually, an effective $25 a month, saving $48 over the year. Unlimited products, unlimited customers, 0% platform fee, plus bookings, the course builder, recurring subscriptions, lead magnets and a community.
• Creator Pro, $99 a month or $948 a year billed annually, an effective $79 a month, saving $240 over the year. Same unlimited products and customers, same 0% platform fee, plus the entire marketing toolkit.

There is no free plan. Stan offers a 14-day free trial to explore the platform before committing, which is a trial and not a tier: when it ends, the store needs a subscription to keep selling. Pricing has held at $29 and $99 through 2025 and into 2026 with no increase we can find, which is worth saying out loud, because a lot of creator tools in this category have not been that stable.

Notice what is not in the gap between the plans: capacity. Unlimited products and unlimited customers come with both. You do not upgrade to Pro because you outgrew Creator in volume. You upgrade because you hit a feature wall, and we will get to exactly where that wall sits.

Does Stan Store really take 0%?

Yes, and you still pay the payment processor, and you still pay the subscription whether you sell anything or not. Credit where it is due: the 0% platform fee is real. It is not a Pro-only perk, it is not a promotional rate, and Stan's own documentation confirms it applies to both plans. That is a genuinely good deal and it is the strongest thing on Stan's pricing page. Plenty of platforms in this space take a percentage of every sale on their cheaper tier and charge you a bigger subscription to escape it. Stan does not.

The one place the messaging outruns the facts is the phrase "you keep 100% of every sale". You do not, because payment processing is not free anywhere. On a $100 US card sale, standard Stripe takes 2.9% plus $0.30, which is $3.20, so about $96.80 lands with you. None of that $3.20 goes to Stan. This is not a gotcha and it is not unique to Stan: every platform's customers pay processing. But "100% of every sale" and "96.8% of every sale" are different numbers, and if you are budgeting off the first one you will be short.

Stan discloses the full fee schedule, and it is worth reading before you pick a checkout method, because the spread is wide. These are the US rates charged by Stripe and PayPal:

• Standard Stripe: 2.9% plus $0.30. The baseline for a domestic card.
• Recurring payments: add 0.5%. If your product is a subscription, your effective rate is 3.4% plus $0.30, not 2.9%.
• International cards: add 1.5%. Currency conversion adds another 1%. A converted international sale can therefore run 5.4% plus $0.30.
• Buy-now-pay-later is expensive. Afterpay is 6.0% plus $0.30 and Klarna is 5.99% plus $0.30, roughly double a standard card.
• Payouts: 0.25% plus $0.25, $1 minimum. Charged when the money moves to your bank, so it applies to everything you earn.
• PayPal: 3.49% plus a fixed fee that varies by currency.

The payout fee and the extra 0.5% on recurring payments are the two almost nobody writes about. Both are real, both are disclosed by Stan, and both quietly widen the gap between the sticker rate and what reaches your bank. The point is not that Stan is hiding anything. It is that "0% platform fee" answers one question (what does Stan take?) and people hear it as the answer to a different question (what do I keep?).

Is Stan Store Pro worth the upgrade?

For anybody running this as a business rather than a side hustle, yes, and it is not close. This is the real decision on the page. The headline is simple: email marketing is entirely a Creator Pro feature. Both Email Broadcasts and Email Flows sit behind the $99 tier. Stan is upfront about why, saying it pays a fee for every email sent, which is a reasonable explanation and more candor than most vendors offer about a gate. On Pro, contacts and sends are unlimited.

Sit with what that means at $29. You have a store, unlimited products, unlimited customers, and no way to email any of them. For a creator business, the list is the asset. It is the thing you own when an algorithm changes, the thing that makes a launch work, the thing that turns a one-time buyer into a repeat one. A plan that collects customers and cannot contact them is a checkout page, not a marketing system. That is a perfectly fine thing to be, but you should choose it knowingly.

Pro also gates most of the selling toolkit:

• Funnels, capped at up to 20 products.
• Upsells and order bumps, the two levers that most directly raise average order value.
• Discount codes and limited-quantity offers, so no coupon and no scarcity mechanics on Creator.
• Payment plans, Stan Payments, Afterpay, and Klarna, which matters if your price point needs splitting.
• Affiliate management.
• Ad pixel tracking for Meta, Google, TikTok, and Pinterest, so paid traffic on Creator runs without conversion data.

Read that list next to the $70 gap, which is $840 a year, and the picture clarifies. Creator is for someone selling a small number of digital products to an audience that already exists somewhere else, usually a social following. Pro is the actual business plan. If you intend to build a list, run ads, or raise order value, you are on Pro from the start, and the honest way to think about Stan's price is $99 a month with a cheaper starter option, not $29 a month with an optional upgrade.

Can you use a custom domain with Stan Store?

No, on either plan, and no amount of money fixes it: your address is stan.store/username permanently. This deserves its own section because money cannot solve it. Stan Store does not support custom domains at all. Stan's own help documentation states that you cannot create or embed a custom domain into your Stan Store. Not on Creator, not on Creator Pro, not for a fee. Every store lives at stan.store/username.

The only available workaround is forwarding at the registrar level: you point a domain you own at your Stan URL, and visitors get bounced to the stan.store address, which is what they then see, bookmark, and share. That is a redirect, not your domain serving your store.

Whether this matters depends entirely on what you are building. For a creator whose whole business runs through a social bio link, the address is a detail nobody looks at, and stan.store is a recognizable, trusted-looking URL. For someone building a brand meant to outlive any one platform, it is a structural cost: the address your customers learn is not yours, your SEO equity accrues to someone else's domain, and if you ever move, you cannot take the link with you. Both of those readers are real. Just know which one you are.

Who is Stan Store for?

Stan Store is for a creator selling a few simple things from a link in a bio, who wants to be live this afternoon and does not need their own domain. It is good at what it set out to do, and that is worth stating without hedging: it is fast to set up, the storefront is clean, the plan grid is refreshingly short, unlimited products and customers come on the cheap tier, and the 0% platform fee is exactly as good as it sounds. If you have an audience on Instagram or TikTok and you want a tidy page to sell a template pack, a preset, an ebook, or a coaching session, Stan is close to purpose-built for that and you will be selling within an afternoon.

The buyer it fits least well is the one whose product is not really a product: the person selling ongoing access, a membership, a cohort, a library that grows. Stan does include a community on both plans now, and it is a real one in the sense that members post, comment and react. But it is one community per store, sold as one product among the others on your storefront, and the email that keeps a membership alive is still behind the $99 tier. It is a storefront with a room attached, not a room with a storefront at the door.

Is there a better alternative to Stan Store?

This is the section where we sell you something, so weigh it accordingly, and let us start with the part that is against our interest to say: Stan Store and Drry now overlap more than they differ. Stan's storefront now includes a community, and Drry now puts a bio link and store in front of its community. What differs is which half each one was built around, and pretending otherwise would be an easy way to win a comparison and a bad way to help you choose.

So here is the honest split. If what you are selling is a set of one-off digital products off a social bio link, and the community is a bonus, Stan is closer to purpose-built for that than we are. If what you are actually selling is a membership, a course library, or an ongoing community that people pay to stay in, and the bio link is the front door to it, then a platform built around recurring access fits better, and that is what we build. We compare the whole field, us included, in our Stan Store alternatives guide.

For that second buyer, here is what we charge:

• A genuinely free plan: 100 members, 5 GB of storage, unlimited courses, and a community feed, with no card required. Not a 14-day trial, a tier you can stay on.
• Then flat $29 or $99 a month, the same two numbers as Stan, so the comparison is unusually clean.
• A bio link and store on every plan: links, downloads, bookings and forms on one page, with checkout that opens on the page. Free covers up to 30 items and $500 of earnings a month, and both are unlimited from Creator. See how the bio link works.
• 0% platform fee on member payments on every plan, free included, with only Stripe's standard processing applying. Payments run through your own Stripe account, so the customer relationship and the billing history are yours.
• Courses, community, funnels, and email in one place. Email is on every plan: 700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator and 200,000 on Growth. That count includes every email your community sends, receipts, booking confirmations and reply notifications included; sign-in codes, mail to your own team and the emails we send you about your own account do not count. That is the sharpest difference with Stan, where email requires the $99 tier.
• A custom domain on the paid plans, which Stan does not offer at any price.

That is the whole argument, and it is about product shape more than price, because on price the two are close. If you want the side-by-side, see Drry vs Stan Store.