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 July 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 One note before we start: if you find older articles quoting a transaction fee on the Creator plan, they are out of date.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.

The two plans

Stan keeps the plan grid small, which is a mercy. There are exactly two paid tiers and no free plan:

• 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.
• 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.

What 0% really means, and what still costs you

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 $96.80lands 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?).

What the $70 gap actually buys

This is the real decision, and it is not close for most people who are running a business rather than a side hustle. 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.

Your address is stan.store/username, permanently

This one deserves its own section because it applies to both plans and 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 Stan Store genuinely suits

Stan 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 can take that money, but a link-in-bio storefront is not designed to be somewhere people come back and live.

Where Drry fits, and where it does not (our pitch, disclosed)

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 are not the same kind of product. Stan is a link-in-bio storefront. Drry is a community and course platform. Pretending they are interchangeable 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, a storefront is the right shape of tool and Stan is closer to purpose-built for it 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, then a platform built around recurring access fits better, and that is what we build.

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.
• 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: free covers 100 sends a month and the paid plans are unlimited. That is the sharpest difference with Stan, where email needs 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.