Drry vs Beacons
A warmer home for your community, without the cut.
Beacons packs a lot into a link in bio: a store, email, a website builder and AI tools. What it takes for that is a commission on every sale until you reach its upper plans, and what a buyer finds after they pay is a product rather than a place. Drry's bio link sells, books and captures emails at 0% on every plan including free, and the people who tap through land in a community with your courses, events and email around them.
Drry vs Beacons, the full picture
| Drry | Beacons | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card. | A free plan, free forever, with unlimited links and digital products, but a Beacons fee on every sale made on its free and entry plans and only a small number of email sends each month. |
| Fee on your member payments | 0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. | A commission fee on every sale made on its free plan and its entry plan, dropping to zero on its two upper plans. Stripe or PayPal processing is charged on top either way. |
| Courses + community together | Both built in, in one branded space you own. | Courses and recurring memberships sold as store products, with hosted course video on its higher plans. A community space or feed for members inside Beacons is not part of the offer we can find. |
| Step-by-step guides and how-tos | Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too. | Guides sell as downloadable files, and its website builder can hold extra pages. A dedicated way to publish step-by-step how-tos as pages members follow is not part of the offer we can find. |
| Funnels + landing pages | Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans. | A website builder with a few pages per site on paid plans, lead-magnet forms, order bumps and email automations after a sign-up. That covers a simple funnel; a dedicated landing page and funnel builder with per-page results is not part of the offer we can find. |
| Your own brand and domain | Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too. | Your bio page and store can sit on your own domain from its first paid plan, and removing the Beacons logo needs the plan above that. |
| Knowing who is showing up | See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo). | Real-time views, clicks, click-through rate and traffic sources, plus sales and earnings analytics and an AI assistant you can ask about your numbers. |
| Where pricing starts | Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth). | Starts free, with paid plans at a low monthly price and fee-free selling from its middle tier up. |
| Getting paid for 1:1s and packages | Send any client a one-time link on any plan including free, or an installment plan with an agreement they sign before they pay from $29/mo, built in, 0% platform fee on all of it. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool. | Appointments synced to Google Calendar, buy now pay later and its own payment plans on larger purchases on its higher plan, terms buyers agree to at checkout, and invoices. An agreement a client signs is not part of the offer we can find. |
| Email your members | Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, with new-content emails to members counted separately on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own. | Yes: broadcasts, automations, audience groups and sending from your own domain, with a monthly send cap on the lower plans. |
| Selling digital downloads | Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and $500 of sales a month, both unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it at every level, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again. | Yes, unlimited digital products from its store on every plan, with free items, discount codes and reviews, subject to its per-plan fee. |
| Audio and private podcast feeds | An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report. | Music players you embed and audio files sold as products. A private podcast feed for members is not part of the offer we can find. |
| Letting clients book a call with you | Built in and free on every plan (1 session type on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link. | Yes: paid appointments through your store, synced to Google Calendar, with several calendars checked for conflicts on higher plans and Zoom listed as an integration. |
| Members messaging each other, and you | Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities. | Member-to-member messaging is not part of the offer we can find. Its messaging is Instagram DM automation, which replies to keywords on your posts and can collect emails. |
| What each member is worth to you | Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name. | Its Audience Manager lists every purchase an individual fan has made in your store, which comes close; a computed lifetime revenue figure is not part of the offer we can find. |
| Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes | Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past. | Courses are multi-module products. Drip release, prerequisites and quizzes are not part of the offer we can find in its help centre. |
| Selling more than one membership level | Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand. | You can sell as many separate memberships as you like on its higher plan, each billed weekly, monthly or yearly, but a ladder of tiers where one level includes another is not part of the offer we can find, and a membership's price is fixed after its first sale. |
| Captions and transcripts, unmetered | Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass. | Captions or transcripts for course and membership video are not part of the offer we can find in its help centre or on its pricing page. |
| Keeping the space safe | On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts. | Its safety tools cover your page: a sensitive-content warning before visitors enter, community standards and a report form. With no member community inside Beacons, there is nothing to moderate. |
| Tracking your own ads | Connect your own Meta, Google and TikTok pixels on Growth ($99/mo): your ad accounts, your audiences, no cut of what the ads earn and nothing routed through us. Meta and TikTok conversions are sent from our servers off the Stripe payment we already verified, so an ad blocker does not cost you the sale and the value reported is the amount actually charged, not a list price on a page. Google fires in the browser with a conversion label you set per goal, because Google Ads has no server endpoint anyone can use without its own API. Refunds and lost chargebacks are reported back as reversals, so you can see which campaigns bring refund-prone buyers and exclude them from the audiences your ads chase. And the pixels load on your PUBLIC pages only, never in the community feed, a lesson, a direct message or your console, which is enforced by a test rather than a promise. The EU/UK consent banner and the record of who agreed to what are built in, not a second tool you buy. | Your own Facebook, TikTok and Pinterest pixels plus Google Analytics, and a cookie banner you can switch on. Server-side conversion tracking is not part of the offer we can find. |
| Live calls, webinars and a calendar | A calendar built in and free on every plan including free: in-person meetups, events elsewhere, and online sessions on a link you paste, with RSVPs, invites, reminders and a feed that syncs to your own calendar. From Creator a class, a group call or a booked session can run in your own branded video room on your own address instead of on a pasted Zoom link, with up to 25 people in a meeting (100 on Growth), recorded when you press record, and 20 participant hours included each month (50 on Growth). Growth adds webinars, a stage of up to 5 presenters broadcasting to a watch-only audience with 150 viewer hours included, and AI meeting notes: a transcript and a written recap after the call, with no bot joining the room. Recording, chat and transcription draw no hours, and nothing bills past an allowance unless you switch extra usage on and set the cap yourself. | One-to-one appointments, and webinars or group sessions sold as capacity-limited products held elsewhere. Live video rooms and a community event calendar of its own are not part of the offer we can find. |
Details reflect each platform's publicly stated model and can change. Check current terms before deciding.
Moving off Beacons is easier than staying.
Keep your margin
On Drry, every member payment stays yours on every plan, including free. 0% platform cut; only Stripe's standard processing fee applies.
One tool, not five
Courses, community, payments, and funnels in one place, your brand on all of it. No bolt-on page builders or separate apps.
You own the rails
Your own Stripe account and member list. Leaving never means starting over, because your customers were always yours.
Why creators pick Drry
- Keep 100% of member payments. Only Stripe's standard processing fee applies, we take nothing on top.
- Payments run through your own Stripe account, so your customers and subscriptions belong to you, not the platform. No payment lock-in.
- Funnels built in: fast landing pages on your domain with views, joins, and revenue attributed per page. Standalone funnel tools charge $49 to $99 a month (as checked June 2026) for less.
- A genuinely free tier: 100 members, 5 GB storage, unlimited courses, and the community feed, with no card required.
- Courses, a community feed, members, and payments in one branded space you own.
- Step-by-step guides built in and free on every plan, with no cap: rich-text steps with images and native video, a what-you-need list members tick off, on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Flip any one of them public and it becomes a shareable, search-indexable how-to page with a QR code, a lead-capture form, and your call to action, so the same guide serves your members and brings you new ones.
- Your own address like grace.drry.com out of the box, with custom domain and site white label on paid tiers, and white-label email from your own domain on Growth.
- Member analytics on the $29 Creator plan: who is showing up, what is landing, and who is quietly drifting away. The kind of insight other platforms save for their priciest plans.
- Get paid for 1:1s and packages: send a client a one-time link on any plan including free, or an installment plan with an agreement they sign before paying from $29/mo. Built in, and no platform fee on any of it. Other platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool, and most never reach 0%.
- Let clients book you without a second subscription: publish your session types and share one link, free on every plan (1 session type on free, unlimited from Creator). A booked time becomes a real session on the same calendar your classes run on, so the invite, the reminders, and cancellation come with it, and anything already on that calendar closes its own slot. From Creator the call can happen in a room of your own instead of on someone else's link, and either way the person who booked becomes a contact you can follow up, by hand or automatically. Standalone schedulers hand you a time and an email address and stop there.
- Bring your list with you, and take it back out whenever you want. Import your contacts from a CSV in the browser (we check every address before it lands, so a bad list never touches your sending reputation), and export the whole audience on any plan including free. Most platforms make leaving quietly difficult; we would rather you stay because it is working.
- Audio your members can actually take with them: the library is free on every plan, with a player that does speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls, and Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member so the same library plays in Apple Podcasts or Overcast, offline and listed in no directory. Most platforms cap audio or send you to a second paid product to do this, and the ones that do have feeds cannot tell you who actually listened. We can, because the web player stays primary and the feed is additive.
- Email your whole community, built in on every plan, even free (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth), no add-on and no second tool to wire up. Creator adds email automations: welcome journeys, lead-magnet delivery, and win-backs that run on their own.
- Give a journey a goal, and it stops chasing people who already did the thing. Set the goal to paying, or active in the community, or holds a tag, and every enrolled person is re-checked against it each time the journey comes back to them, instead of marching to the end of a script written weeks ago. It also applies to people who are already partway through: the goal is read fresh every time, not frozen into their journey the day they entered, so one you add today reaches them at their next step rather than only catching people who start after you.
- Members can message each other and you, 1:1 or in a group you or an admin starts, on every plan including free. Images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, blocking. Your side is a real inbox rather than a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your private notes. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge.
- Lifetime revenue per member, free on every plan, so you can see what each person is actually worth: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your inbox, and in your CSV export. Not a report you go and run, and not a feature saved for a top tier: just a number next to their name, so you know who to look after.
- Run ads to your own funnels and see what they actually bring in. On Growth you connect your OWN Meta, Google and TikTok pixels, in your own ad accounts, and the sales come back attributed: leads, bookings and purchases, with Meta and TikTok reported from our server off the signed Stripe payment rather than from a browser an ad blocker can switch off. It fires on your public pages only, never inside the community, never in your console, and never on a form you have embedded on somebody else's site. Visitors in the EU and UK are asked first, and nothing loads until they agree. We take 0% of what those ads earn you.
- Drip, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, free on every plan and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it; gate whole modules and whole courses the same way; set the pass mark on a quiz yourself. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are refused by the routes that serve them, so there is no URL to guess your way past. Most platforms put course release controls on a paid tier, if they have them at all.
- Captions and transcripts written for you, free on every plan including the free one, and never metered. Publish a lesson video, an audio lesson or an audio track and we transcribe it: captions on the video player's CC button, and for audio a panel members can search where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. Correct the machine's wording once in the editor and we never overwrite it. Where the bigger suites have this, it tends to arrive on an upper plan or against a monthly allowance of AI credits you top up.
- Sell more than one membership level out of ONE community, on Growth: a Basic, a Pro and a VIP, with per-course, per-room, per-session and per-collection control over who each is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still sees what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, so your own library does the upselling; a genuinely private room can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so "VIP and up" is a rule rather than a list you maintain by hand. The usual alternative is running a second community, with its own members, its own posts and its own bill.
- Run your webinars where your members already are, on Growth: a stage of up to 5 presenters broadcasting to a watch-only audience that can run into the thousands, on your own address and in your own brand, with the registration page, the reminder emails, the live chat, the recording and the replay all part of the same event. Somebody watching can raise a hand and be brought up to speak. The people watching draw a viewer allowance of their own, so the part that grows with a good turnout is metered separately from everything else you run; your presenters draw the same participant hours any Drry room draws. Recording, chat and transcription count against neither, and nothing bills past either allowance unless you switch metered hours on yourself and set the ceiling. Sell seats through your own Stripe and we take 0% of the ticket. Below Growth the option is shown locked with what it would give you rather than hidden, so you are never guessing what you are buying.
- Live sessions are native, not a Zoom link to paste. The calendar is free on every plan, and from Creator every class, group call and booked session can run in your own branded room on your own address, with 20 participant hours included each month and a recording when you press record. The booking page, the invite, the reminders and the room are one flow, so a client who picks a time can land straight in your own room. On Growth you get webinars with 150 viewer hours of their own, and AI meeting notes that leave a transcript and a written recap after any call you switch them on for, with no bot in the room.
Drry vs Beacons, questions
Is there a Beacons alternative with no transaction fees?
Yes. Drry takes 0% of what you sell on every plan, free included: up to 10 products on free and unlimited from Creator, and only Stripe's standard processing fee applies. Beacons takes a commission on its free and entry plans and drops it on its upper ones.
Can I build a paid community with my bio link?
On Drry, yes: the bio link sits in front of a community feed, courses, events and email, with paid memberships and membership tiers on Growth through your own Stripe. A community space for members inside Beacons is not part of the offer we can find.
Does Drry have email marketing like Beacons?
Yes, on every plan: broadcasts to your community or to anyone your forms captured, 700 sends a month on free, and automations from Creator.
Compare Drry to other platforms
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