Stan Store Pricing in 2026: $29, $99 & the Stripe Account You Do Not Own

Creator costs $29 a month and Creator Pro costs $99, which is all of Stan Store pricing. Paid a year at a time they drop to $300 and $948, and there is no free plan, only a 14-day trial. Stan takes 0% of your sales, and the Stripe account collecting them is one Stan creates and controls.

2 subscriptions and no percentage cut is a genuinely simple offer, and most pages ranking for this question describe it accurately. A few still quote a transaction fee Stan retired years ago, which matters because they build upgrade advice on top of it.

Stan also creates and controls the Stripe account that collects your sales. You cannot connect a Stripe account you already have, your country is locked at signup, and the money sits in a Stan balance for several days before you can move it.

Below you get both plans priced monthly and yearly, what each one actually includes, the real cost at 4 different sales volumes, and the payout rules Stan publishes in its help centre but nobody puts in a pricing guide.

Key Takeaways

• Stan Store costs $29 a month for Creator or $99 for Creator Pro, dropping to $300 and $948 when billed yearly.
• Both plans carry a 0% platform fee. A page-1 guide still claims the $29 plan takes 5%, and it does not.
• You cannot connect an existing Stripe account. Stan creates a Stripe Custom account that Stan manages, in 37 supported countries.
• Money is not instant. A sale clears Stripe in 2 to 7 business days, then you cash out manually, then wait another 24 to 48 hours.
• At 2 sales a month of a $47 product, the $300 yearly plan eats 26.6% of your revenue. At 20 sales a month it is 2.7%.
• Stan’s own terms let it suspend your account and freeze funds at its sole discretion, and real complaints show that clause has actually been used.

Stan Store pricing: both plans, monthly and yearly

Stan Store sells 2 subscriptions and no free tier. Creator is the entry plan, Creator Pro is the one that adds selling tools, and paying yearly is the only discount on offer.

Paying for a year upfront saves $48 on Creator and $240 on Creator Pro, which works out at $25 and $79 a month.

There is no permanent free plan. Stan’s help centre says so plainly, and adds that the free-looking accounts people spot are affiliate-only accounts that let someone collect commission without getting store features.

New accounts get a 14-day free trial, and you can sell during it. Stan also runs a separate 30-day Creator Pro trial, offered by email to eligible accounts, one time each. If you do not cancel it, that trial auto-renews at $99 a month on day 31.

Picking the plan is easier once you know what you are charging. Our guide on how to price digital products covers that side, and the free 5-day Online Selling Mistakes Challenge walks through the profit leaks that show up before you ever choose a platform.

What the $29 Creator plan includes

The Creator plan at $29 a month covers building and selling, with no upsell or email tooling. Stan lists 8 things on it: a mobile and desktop storefront, calendar and booking tools, store and product analytics, an unlimited course builder with course analytics, recurring subscription setup, lead magnets and email collection, community features, and Stan AutoDM for automated Instagram replies.

Courses and community both sit on the cheap plan, which is genuinely unusual. Most platforms that host courses charge far more than $29 a month for the privilege.

One thing the $29 plan does not buy is a clean storefront. Stan puts a “Try 14 Days Free” referral banner at the bottom of your store, and removing it needs Creator Pro. Stan’s help centre is direct about it: to remove the Stan branding from the bottom of your store, you need to be on the Creator Pro plan.

So on the entry plan, your customers see an advert for Stan on the page where they buy from you.

What Creator Pro adds for $70 more a month

Creator Pro at $99 a month adds the tools that make you more per customer, none of which exist on Creator. Stan’s own list covers discount codes, limited-quantity offers, upsells and order bumps, funnels covering up to 20 products, Stan Payments with Afterpay and Klarna, affiliate management, email marketing with contact import plus broadcasts and flows, pixel tracking for Meta, Google, Pinterest & TikTok, and removal of that referral banner.

Whether it is worth it comes down to arithmetic rather than the feature list. On yearly billing Creator Pro costs $648 more a year than Creator. On monthly billing the gap is $840 a year, or $70 every month.

To pay for itself at the yearly price, Pro has to lift your revenue by $648. If order bumps and upsells add 10% to what you make, you need $6,480 a year in sales before the upgrade breaks even. At a 20% lift you need $3,240.

Below that you are paying for tools that cost you more than they return.

There is a timing catch worth knowing before you click upgrade. Stan’s help centre states that once you move to Creator Pro, the option to downgrade only appears after 30 days, and inside those first 30 days the downgrade button is not there at all. You have to email support to get it done.

How much does Stan Store take from each sale?

Stan Store takes 0% of every sale, on both plans. That part of the marketing is accurate. Stan’s homepage puts it as “0% Transaction Fees, Always” and the company’s blog says you keep 100% of what you earn.

This is worth stating clearly because the search results for this question are not reliable. A guide sitting on page 1 for “stan store pricing” lists the Creator plan with a 5% transaction fee and Creator Pro with 0%, in its main pricing table. It then builds a whole recommendation on that number, telling readers to upgrade to the $99 plan at around $1,400 a month in revenue because the 5% fee gets expensive.

There is no 5% fee on either plan. Stan charged that fee years ago and dropped it, so the advice built on top of it points people at a $99 plan for a reason that no longer exists. The same page also credits Creator Pro with custom domain support, and Stan’s help centre says your store URL will always stay stan.store/yourusername, on every plan, with no way to change it.

Your payment processor still takes its cut, and those published rates are not small on a low-priced product.

Stripe takes $1.66 of a $47 sale and PayPal takes $2.13, so the same product nets you $45.34 through one and $44.87 through the other.

Those are the domestic rates from Stripe’s pricing page and PayPal’s merchant fee schedule. Both charge more for international cards: Stripe adds 1.5% plus another 1% where currency conversion is needed, and PayPal adds 1.5%.

The gap between those 2 processors matters more than it looks, because plenty of Stan sellers do not get to pick between them.

How does Stan Store pay you?

Stan pays you through a Stripe account that Stan creates and controls, not one you already have. This is the biggest thing missing from the page-1 guides for this keyword, and it is stated openly in Stan’s own documentation.

The wording in that help article is that you will be prompted to create a new Custom Stripe account managed by Stan, and that you cannot connect an existing Stripe account. 4 consequences follow from it.

Your country is locked at signup. You choose it when the account is created, and Stan’s help centre says you will not be able to edit it later from your settings. Changing it means emailing support.

Stripe Custom accounts work in 37 countries. The list covers the US, Canada, the UK, most of the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and the UAE within a free zone. US territories other than Puerto Rico are excluded.

Everywhere else falls back to PayPal, which costs $0.47 more on that $47 sale. Across 240 sales a year that is $112.80 you pay purely for living in the wrong country.

The money is not instant. A sale sits in an “Available Soon” balance while Stripe settles it, which Stan puts at 2 to 7 business days for US sellers and up to 7 for everyone else. Affiliate payments take 7 to 12, and a first sale on a new account can take 3 to 7 days on its own. Stan is upfront that nothing can speed this up.

Cashing out is manual and all or nothing. You click a Cash Out button, the minimum balance is $10, and you cannot withdraw part of it. Only the full available balance goes, and after that it takes another 24 to 48 hours to reach your bank.

So the realistic wait from sale to spendable money is 3 to 9 days.

There is a faster route and most people will not qualify. Stripe Instant Payouts on Stan is US-only, needs your account to be 30 days old, needs an eligible bank account, and needs you to have already cashed out at least $2,000 the normal way. Stan also notes that meeting all 3 conditions still does not guarantee it, because Stripe can refuse.

One more thing to plan for before you ever cancel. Stan’s help centre tells you to manually cancel your customers’ membership subscriptions first, or they keep getting charged. Your recurring revenue does not travel with you, which is the same trap we covered in the membership platform cost breakdown.

Stan’s control over payouts also gives it the power to end your account. Section 12 of Stan’s own terms of service states that Stan, “in its sole discretion, may suspend or terminate your account (or any part thereof including restricting your access to funds)… for any reason… may be effected without prior notice.”

3 sellers reported Stan suspending or restricting their account on Trustpilot and Reddit, including a $1,191 balance stuck for weeks, and Stan replied to every one of them without disputing what happened.

Read the full complaints on Trustpilot or the currency-conversion thread on Reddit.

A search for the exact phrase “Stan Store account closed” returns nothing widely reported, so this looks like occasional enforcement rather than a common complaint. The clause is written into Stan’s terms, though, and these 3 cases confirm it has actually been used.

What Stan Store costs at your sales volume

Stan Store costs the same $29 a month whether you sell 2 things or 200, so the real number is what that flat fee works out to per sale. Below is the yearly platform cost of selling a $47 digital product at 4 volumes, counting the subscription and any platform cut. Card processing is left out of every row, because each of these platforms charges it separately on top.

At 2 sales a month Stan’s $300 yearly plan swallows 26.6% of your $1,128 revenue, while Gumroad takes $125 and Payhip takes $56. At 20 sales a month the picture flips completely: Stan still costs $300 while Gumroad’s cut climbs to $1,248.

The crossover against a pay-per-sale platform is worth knowing before you commit to a year. On a $47 product, Stan’s $300 yearly plan beats Gumroad’s cut above roughly 58 sales a year, which is 5 a month. On a $97 product you only need 29 sales a year, and on a $27 product you need 94.

So the honest read is that Stan gets cheaper as you sell more, and it is one of the most expensive ways to sell if you are not selling much yet. The full numbers behind those competitor rates are in our Gumroad pricing breakdown and Payhip pricing breakdown.

Is Stan Store worth the cost?

Stan Store is worth $29 a month when you are already selling and the link-in-bio format matches how you get traffic. It is poor value while you are still hunting for your first regular sales, because the bill arrives whether or not anyone buys.

A seller in r/digitalproductselling put the risk better than any pricing page does, writing that if you close the store and end the subscription, all the posts and links you shared are dead. They added that $29 a month “doesn’t sound like a lot of money at the start of your journey but the months go by fast”, and that if sales do not cover the subscription, it comes out of your own pocket. You can read the full thread on Reddit.

2 limits are worth checking before you commit, and neither is about price:

• No custom domain, on any plan. Your store stays at stan.store/yourusername. You can point a domain you own at it as a redirect, but the address people land on is Stan’s.
• Digital products only, in practice. Stan says it does not currently sell physical products smoothly, and sellers who try it have to collect addresses manually because Stan calculates neither shipping nor inventory.

If the link-in-bio part is what you actually want and the price is the sticking point, our Stan Store alternative roundup sorts the options by what you need rather than by price alone. If you have no site at all, selling without a website covers the wider set of routes.

Cheaper ways to sell the same digital products

Every alternative to Stan trades something away, and the honest comparison is what each one costs against what it stops doing. Courses and community on the $29 plan are Stan’s genuine strength here, and they are the thing the cheaper options mostly do not match.

At 10 sales a month of a $47 product, Stan Creator costs $300 a year and hosts courses and community, Gumroad costs $624 and hosts neither, Payhip costs $282 and hosts courses but no community, and CartMango costs nothing during its beta.

Being straight about it, CartMango is my own platform, and today it is a checkout rather than an all-in-one: affiliate management arrives September 2026, with courses and community following in October 2026. If you need a course platform this month, Stan does that and CartMango does not yet.

Where CartMango is already different is the last column. CartMango pays into the Stripe or PayPal account you already own and keep, so there is no cash-out button and no platform sitting between a sale and your bank. For a fuller look at that trade, our community platform cost breakdown runs the same math across Skool, Circle and the rest, and the Kajabi pricing breakdown does it for the expensive end of the all-in-one market.

FAQ

How much does Stan Store take from each sale?

Nothing. Stan charges a 0% platform fee on both the $29 Creator plan and the $99 Creator Pro plan. Your only per-sale cost is your payment processor: 2.9% plus $0.30 on Stripe or 3.49% plus $0.49 on PayPal for US domestic cards. Any page telling you the Creator plan carries a 5% fee is quoting a rate Stan retired years ago.

How does Stan Store pay you?

Through a Stripe Custom account that Stan creates and manages for you, or through PayPal where Stripe Custom is unavailable. A sale settles in Stripe over 2 to 7 business days, then you click Cash Out manually with a $10 minimum and no partial withdrawals, then the money takes 24 to 48 hours to reach your bank.

What is cheaper, Stan Store or Shopify?

Shopify, on subscription price alone. Shopify’s entry Basic plan is US$19 a month billed yearly against Stan’s $29.

They solve different problems though. Shopify is built for physical products with inventory and shipping, and Stan handles neither properly, so if you sell digital products from a social bio, price is the wrong axis to pick between them on.

Is there a free Stan Store plan?

No. Stan offers a 14-day free trial and no permanent free tier. Stan’s help centre notes that the free accounts people sometimes hear about are affiliate-only accounts, which let someone collect commission on Stan referrals without giving them a working store.

Can I switch between Stan Store plans?

Yes, though there is a catch. Upgrading from Creator to Creator Pro is immediate and prorated. Downgrading back is blocked for the first 30 days, and Stan’s help centre says the downgrade option will not even appear under Billing during that window, so you have to email support to reverse it early.

Does the price include a custom domain?

No, on either plan. Stan’s help centre says your store URL will always remain stan.store/yourusername and that you will not be able to change it. You can redirect a domain you own to that address from your own hosting, but the store itself stays on Stan’s domain.

The line item you can delete

Look back at what the $29 buys. Most of it is the storefront, the checkout and the plumbing that moves money, and you are renting all of it monthly while a referral banner for Stan sits at the bottom of your own store.

If courses and community are what you are paying for, Stan earns its price and you should keep it. But if the honest answer is that Stan Store pricing is buying you a page and a checkout button for $348 a year, that is the part worth pricing on its own. A checkout subscription does not have to cost $348 a year, and the account your customers pay into does not have to belong to somebody else.

CartMango is free until October 2026 and starts at $10 a year after that, with 0% taken from your sales and payouts going straight into your own Stripe or PayPal.

About the Author

👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.

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