> Content index: https://devbio.me/blogs/llms.txt > Canonical page: https://devbio.me/blogs/linktree-vs-beacons --- title: Linktree vs Beacons: Which Fee Model Costs Less description: Beacons takes 9% of your sales until you pay $30/mo. Linktree charges by tier and publishes no fee number. Here's which model actually costs you less. keywords: linktree vs beacons, beacons vs linktree, beacons seller fee, linktree vs beacons pricing published: 2026-09-08 updated: 2026-09-11 url: https://devbio.me/blogs/linktree-vs-beacons word_count: 2376 --- # Linktree vs Beacons: Which Fee Model Costs Less > Beacons takes 9% of your sales until you pay $30/mo. Linktree charges by tier and publishes no fee number. Here's which model actually costs you less. Canonical: https://devbio.me/blogs/linktree-vs-beacons Published: 2026-09-08 ## Related Pages - [Beacons Pricing: What the 9% Seller Fee Costs](https://devbio.me/blogs/beacons-pricing-tiers) - [Linktree Pricing: What Each Tier Actually Unlocks](https://devbio.me/blogs/linktree-pricing-tiers) - [Stan Store Pricing: What $29 and $99 Really Cost](https://devbio.me/blogs/stan-store-pricing) - [Linktree Alternatives: 8 Tools Compared for 2026](https://devbio.me/blogs/linktree-alternatives-compared) - [Linktree Alternative for Developers: REST API](https://devbio.me/blogs/linktree-alternative-developers) - [Beacons Alternative for Developers in 2026 (No 9% Cut)](https://devbio.me/blogs/beacons-alternative-developers) - [The Best Link in Bio for Developers in 2026](https://devbio.me/blogs/link-in-bio-for-developers) - [Custom Domain Developer Bio: What the CNAME Doesn't Change](https://devbio.me/blogs/custom-domain-developer-bio) - [Developer Bio Analytics: See Who's Viewing Your Profile in Real Time](https://devbio.me/blogs/developer-bio-analytics) ![two roads between trees](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1429743305873-d4065c15f93e?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3w4OTM1MDJ8MHwxfHNlYXJjaHwxfHx0d28lMjBwYXRocyUyMGRpdmVyZ2luZyUyMGZvcmslMjBpbiUyMHJvYWQlMjBtaW5pbWFsJTIwZGFya3xlbnwwfDB8fHwxNzg4ODI5NTEzfDA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=1080) *Photo by [Jens Lelie](https://unsplash.com/@madebyjens?utm_source=quillly&utm_medium=referral) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com?utm_source=quillly&utm_medium=referral)* Sell $1,000 of anything through a Beacons page on the free plan and you hand over $90. Sell the same $1,000 through Linktree and you also pay a seller fee — except Linktree doesn't publish what it is. That single asymmetry does more to decide this comparison than any feature list, and almost every "Beacons vs Linktree" roundup skips it. **Linktree and Beacons don't compete on price — they compete on pricing *model*. Beacons takes a published 9% cut of your sales until you reach the $30/month tier, where it drops to 0%. Linktree charges a regional subscription and reduces seller fees on paid plans without publishing the percentage. If you sell, Beacons is the one you can actually do maths on.** Everything below is checked against [Beacons' pricing page](https://beacons.ai/i/pricing) and [Linktree's pricing page](https://linktr.ee/s/pricing/) as of September 2026. **On this page:** [At a glance](#linktree-vs-beacons-at-a-glance) · [Two different fee models](#the-real-split-a-subscription-versus-a-cut) · [What Beacons charges](#what-beacons-charges-9-until-30-a-month) · [What Linktree charges](#what-linktree-charges-a-ladder-with-no-published-fee) · [The break-even maths](#the-break-even-maths-nobody-runs) · [Where each one wins](#where-each-one-actually-wins) · [The developer case](#what-neither-is-built-for-the-developer-case) · [FAQ](#frequently-asked-questions) ## Linktree vs Beacons at a Glance | | Linktree | Beacons | | --- | --- | --- | | Entry price | Free tier, no clock | Free tier, no clock | | Paid tiers | Starter, Pro, Premium | Creator $10/mo, Creator Plus $30/mo, Creator Max $90/mo | | Prices published? | No — varies by region, local currency | Yes — flat USD | | Seller fee on free | Charged, percentage not published | **9%** | | Seller fee on cheapest paid tier | "Lower", percentage not published | **9%** — unchanged | | Where the fee hits 0% | Not published | Creator Plus, $30/mo | | Branding removal | Pro tier | Paid tiers | | Best for | Campaigns, attribution, link scheduling | Selling digital products at volume | The row that matters is the fourth one down. Beacons will tell you exactly what it costs to sell through it. Linktree won't — not because it's hiding something sinister, but because its fee schedule is regional and bundled into documentation rather than the price card. ## The Real Split: A Subscription Versus a Cut Most comparisons line these two up feature by feature and declare a winner on link scheduling or template count. That's the wrong axis. These products take your money in structurally different ways, and which one is cheaper depends entirely on a number neither company asks you about: how much you sell per month. A subscription is a fixed cost. It doesn't care whether you had a good month. A percentage cut is a variable cost — cheap when you're small, brutal when you're not. The two lines cross at a specific point, and the whole Linktree vs Beacons pricing decision is really just "which side of that crossing point do you live on." ![Side-by-side cards contrasting Linktree's fixed regional subscription model against Beacons' percentage-of-sales model](https://quillly.com/serve/v1/019e3623-8b91-738d-ae30-42d5bcd996a0/images/6ef9c6574957c0e2bb5658dc3daec31a6cb2028f.webp) If you never sell anything through the page — and most developer profiles never do — this entire distinction collapses and you should pick on features alone. That's a legitimate outcome, and it's worth knowing before you spend an evening comparing tiers. ## What Beacons Charges: 9% Until $30 a Month Beacons publishes four tiers, and the seller fee is the spine of all four. - **Free — $0/mo, 9% seller fees.** A complete page, and every sale gives up 9%. - **Creator — $10/mo ($8.33/mo billed annually), 9% seller fees.** This is the tier that surprises people: paying $10 a month does *not* reduce the cut. It's unchanged. - **Creator Plus — $30/mo ($25/mo billed annually), 0% seller fees.** The fee disappears entirely here. This is the real upgrade. - **Creator Max — $90/mo ($75/mo billed annually), 0% seller fees.** Volume features on top of the same 0%. Read that ladder twice. The jump from Free to Creator costs you $10 a month and changes nothing about the beacons seller fee. Every dollar of that upgrade buys features, not margin. The fee only goes away at Creator Plus, which is three times the price. That's an unusual design, and it's honest of Beacons to print it plainly on the pricing page rather than bury it. We worked through where that upgrade pays for itself in [our breakdown of Beacons pricing and the 9% fee](https://devbio.me/blogs/beacons-pricing-tiers). ## What Linktree Charges: A Ladder With No Published Fee Linktree runs four tiers too — Free, Starter, Pro, Premium — and they're cumulative, each one being everything below it plus a few unlocks. The headline gates: - **Free** — unlimited links, one featured link, basic analytics, Linktree footer stays. - **Starter** — 90-day analytics, link scheduling, redirect links, and "lower seller fees" on digital products. - **Pro** — removes the Linktree footer, 365-day analytics, Meta Pixel, UTM parameters, Google Analytics. - **Premium** — lifetime analytics, video profile image, uncapped Instagram auto-reply DMs. Two things about this ladder catch people out. The first is that **branding removal sits at Pro, not at the first paid tier** — an inversion of how nearly every other SaaS ladder works. The second is the fee language. Linktree's [paid-features documentation](https://linktr.ee/help/en/articles/5434140-an-overview-of-paid-features-available-on-linktree) says paid plans get "lower seller fees" so you "keep more of what you earn," but publishes no percentage for any tier — free or paid. And the subscription price itself can't be quoted either. Linktree's pricing page states that pricing varies by region and displays in local currency, which is why two "Linktree pricing 2026" articles will confidently give you two different numbers and both be right for someone. The full tier-by-tier reading is in [our Linktree pricing guide](https://devbio.me/blogs/linktree-pricing-tiers). So the comparison is asymmetric in a way you should factor in directly: one company hands you the numbers to model your costs, and the other asks you to open a checkout page and find out. That's not a moral failing — but if you're choosing a platform to sell through, being able to forecast the cost is a feature. ## The Break-Even Maths Nobody Runs Because Beacons publishes real numbers, you can do something you can't do with Linktree: work out exactly when to upgrade. Beacons Creator Plus costs $30/month and removes a 9% cut. So it pays for itself the moment 9% of your sales exceeds $30 — which is **$333 a month in sales**. Below that, you're paying more in subscription than you'd have paid in fees. Above it, every extra dollar of sales is pure saving. If you're already on Creator at \$10/month, the sum changes. You're paying \$20 extra to move to Creator Plus, so the crossing point drops to \$20 ÷ 0.09 = \*\*\$222 a month in sales. Billed annually, Creator Plus works out to \$25/month, and the free-plan crossover falls again to about \$278 a month\*\*. ![Line chart showing total monthly Beacons cost against monthly sales volume for Free, Creator and Creator Plus tiers, with the lines crossing around 333 dollars of sales](https://quillly.com/serve/v1/019e3623-8b91-738d-ae30-42d5bcd996a0/images/85deaa600273daaeb1d405987227d76e7ccd01a3.webp) Look at the \$1,000 row. On Free you pay \$90 in fees. On Creator you pay \$100 — the subscription \*plus\* the same untouched 9%. On Creator Plus you pay \$30. At that volume, the middle tier is the worst possible choice, costing more than the free plan for the privilege of extra features. That's the practical warning to take away: **on Beacons, Creator is a features tier, not a savings tier.** If your reason for upgrading is "I'm giving away too much of my revenue," Creator does not solve it and Creator Plus does. No equivalent chart exists for Linktree, and that's not an oversight on our part. Without a published percentage, there's no line to draw. There is a third model worth holding against both: a flat subscription with no cut at all. Stan Store charges $29/month and takes 0% of sales, so it overtakes a 9% fee at roughly $322 a month in revenue — [the Stan Store pricing breakdown](https://devbio.me/blogs/stan-store-pricing) runs that crossing point next to the processor fees every platform on this page still leaves you paying. If you want the wider field rather than a head-to-head, we ranked it in [Linktree alternatives compared](https://devbio.me/blogs/linktree-alternatives-compared). And if running this arithmetic just told you the page never needed a storefront to begin with, [start from a free developer bio instead](https://devbio.me) — there's no tier maths to run. ## Where Each One Actually Wins Strip away the marketing and each product has one job it's genuinely better at. **Beacons wins if you sell.** The storefront, the digital-product handling, and the 0% path at Creator Plus are built for someone moving real volume through the page. The maths is legible, the fee is flat worldwide, and above roughly $333 a month in sales the platform gets cheaper per dollar as you grow. **Linktree wins if you run campaigns.** Meta Pixel, UTM parameters, Google Analytics, Mailchimp and Klaviyo integrations, link scheduling and redirect links — that's an attribution stack. If you're pushing paid traffic at a page and need to know which post converted, Linktree Pro is priced fairly for that job and Beacons isn't really competing for it. ![Vertical decision flowchart choosing between Linktree, Beacons and a developer profile based on whether you sell products, run paid campaigns, or want to show engineering work](https://quillly.com/serve/v1/019e3623-8b91-738d-ae30-42d5bcd996a0/images/87ca97d057f2296e50cc4964e92bbe3cdedd05e1.webp) Run that flowchart honestly and a lot of developers fall out the bottom-right. Neither tool loses on quality — they're both good at what they were built for. They were just built for someone selling presets or running ad campaigns, not for someone whose entire case is a commit history. If that's you, [start from a free developer bio instead](https://devbio.me) and skip the tier maths altogether. ## What Neither Is Built For: The Developer Case Here's where we're the interested party, so the numbers are stated plainly and you can check every one on our own homepage. A link-in-bio page is a list of URLs. That's the product, in both cases. It works because a creator's proof lives elsewhere — on Instagram, on YouTube, in a storefront — and the page just routes people to it. A developer's proof doesn't work that way. Your evidence is contribution history, shipped projects, the languages you actually write, and sometimes revenue from something you built. A list of links can point at that. It can't *show* it. DevBio's free tier is \$0 forever: a public bio at \`devbio.me/\{you}\`, all bio components, GitHub public-repo metadata, a LaTeX PDF resume compiled from the same data, a marketplace listing, and custom theming with dark mode. Pro is \$2/month or \$12/year with a 7-day trial, adding a custom domain, removal of the "Powered by devbio" footer, full analytics with 30-day history, a Pro founder badge, GitHub private repos plus the contribution heatmap, and hourly revenue sync instead of every six hours. There's a founding-member option too: \$39 once for Pro permanently, capped at the first 100 buyers. Critically, **there is no seller fee, because there's nothing to take a cut of.** DevBio isn't a storefront. That removes the entire axis this article has been about — which is either exactly what you want or completely beside the point, depending on whether you sell. [Claim your handle on the free tier](https://devbio.me) and see how it reads with your own GitHub data in it — it takes about a minute and there's no card involved. ![Three-column comparison of Linktree, Beacons and DevBio showing pricing model, seller fee and what each platform is built to prove](https://quillly.com/serve/v1/019e3623-8b91-738d-ae30-42d5bcd996a0/images/7daad75e2b173ddded1e5d04e6a7f18a5ca22a59.webp) The developer-specific arguments for each sit in [the Linktree alternative for developers](https://devbio.me/blogs/linktree-alternative-developers) and [the Beacons alternative for developers](https://devbio.me/blogs/beacons-alternative-developers), and the wider category reasoning is in [the best link in bio for developers](https://devbio.me/blogs/link-in-bio-for-developers). A custom domain is worth its own ten minutes too — [pointing your own domain at a bio](https://devbio.me/blogs/custom-domain-developer-bio) is what makes the page yours rather than rented. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Is Beacons cheaper than Linktree? It depends entirely on whether you sell. If you sell nothing, both free tiers cost $0 and the question is moot. If you sell, Beacons costs 9% of revenue on Free and Creator, so a $1,000 month costs $90 in fees — while Linktree charges a regional subscription plus an unpublished seller fee, which can't be compared numerically. ### Does Beacons really take 9% on a paid plan? Yes, on the $10/month Creator tier. Beacons' pricing page lists "9% seller fees" on both Free and Creator, and 0% only from Creator Plus at $30/month upward. Paying $10 a month buys features, not a reduced cut — which is the single most misunderstood thing about beacons vs linktree pricing. ### What does Linktree charge in seller fees? Linktree doesn't publish a percentage. Its paid-features documentation says paid plans carry "lower seller fees" on digital products so you keep more of what you earn, but no figure is given for the free tier or any paid tier. You'll see the actual rate at checkout in your own region. ### Which one removes the branding first? Beacons removes it on its paid tiers, starting at Creator. Linktree makes you go two steps up to Pro — Starter does not remove the footer. If an unbranded page is your only reason for upgrading, that difference is most of the decision. ### When should I upgrade to Beacons Creator Plus? When you're selling more than about $333 a month through the page, since 9% of $333 is roughly the $30 subscription. If you're already paying for Creator, the crossing point is lower — around $222 a month — because you're only adding $20 to your bill. ### Are either of these good for a developer portfolio? Only as a link list. Both are built to route traffic to proof stored somewhere else, which suits creators and doesn't suit engineers. If the page needs to show live GitHub data, a contribution heatmap, or an ATS-readable resume, a [developer-focused profile](https://devbio.me/blogs/developer-bio-analytics) does that natively and neither of these does it at all. ## Key Takeaways Linktree vs Beacons isn't a feature fight, it's a choice between a fixed cost and a variable one. Beacons publishes its numbers — 9% on Free and on the $10 Creator tier, 0% from $30/month Creator Plus — so you can calculate your break-even at roughly $333 a month in sales, or $222 if you're already on Creator. Linktree publishes neither its regional subscription price nor its seller-fee percentage, so the same calculation is impossible before checkout. Pick Beacons if you sell and can do the arithmetic. Pick Linktree if you run paid campaigns and need Pixel and UTM attribution. And if the page exists to prove you can build software rather than to sell to an audience, neither fee model is the question you should be answering. > **Your commit history is the proof, not a link list** > A free developer bio at devbio.me/{you} with live GitHub data, a LaTeX PDF resume and every component included. No seller fee, because there is nothing to take a cut of. Pro is $12/year when you want your own domain and the footer gone. > → [Claim your handle](https://devbio.me)