The relationship between creators and payments platforms is honestly miserable. Patreon takes 8-12% before Stripe processing. Substack takes 10%. Ko-fi takes 5% plus their card fees. Every one of them adds a context switch that costs you conversion — your fan has to leave your page, sign up for an account on the tipping platform, and only then can they send you money.
Tips on Linkstacked are different. The tip jar lives inline on your link page. Fan taps a preset amount or types their own, fills out their card (or Apple Pay / Google Pay, one tap), the money is on the way to your bank in 48 hours. Platform fees vary by plan — see our pricing page at linkstacked.com/pricing for current rates.. The fan never leaves your page.
How payouts actually work
We use Stripe Connect under the hood. The flow:
- 1Visitor taps the tip jar block. The amount and card form render inline.
- 2Visitor confirms — usually one tap with Apple Pay or saved card. Stripe captures the charge.
- 3LinkStacked platform fee routes to us per your plan (see /pricing). The remainder routes to your connected Stripe account.
- 4Stripe pays out to your bank on a rolling schedule — default is 2 business days, configurable up to weekly or instant (Instant has a small additional Stripe fee).
Stripe is your money's first stop, not us. We never hold your tips. The money flows from card → Stripe → your bank, with our fee taken at the moment of capture. This means if Linkstacked disappeared overnight, you'd still have access to all the tips that already settled.
Tip
Apple Pay and Google Pay drive 60-80% of tip conversions on mobile. If you turn them off in settings (you can), your tip volume will drop by half. Keep them on.
Tip amounts — what to set
You can preset suggested amounts (default: $3, $10, $25). Visitors can pick one or type any amount. Some opinionated guidance from the data:
- Three preset amounts converts better than five. Too many options is decision paralysis.
- Your middle option is what most tippers pick. Don't make it $5 — set it to where you actually want it ($10-$15 for general creators, $20-$30 for more niche/premium audiences).
- Always include a custom-amount field. The 'tip whatever you want' option is what generous fans use to send you $50 or $100.
- Don't ladder by 10x ($1, $10, $100). The big number anchors the smaller ones and most tippers pick the smallest. Use $5, $15, $30 instead.
Custom messages and thank-you notes
Tip jars on Linkstacked support an optional 'leave a message' field. Visitors can type a note with their tip — what they liked, what episode they're tipping for, who they are. You see the message in your dashboard alongside the tip.
You can also configure a thank-you email that fires automatically when a tip lands. We render it as a personal note from you ('Hey {first name}, thanks for the $10 tip — it genuinely means a lot, here's a link to the next episode early'), and it sends from your verified domain. The auto-email is the single highest-leverage thing you can do to convert tippers into repeat tippers.
“I made $480 in tips in my first month. That's not life-changing money, but it covered my podcast hosting plus a few coffees. The bigger win was the 50 messages from listeners. I'd never gotten that volume of direct feedback before.”
Tax, receipts, and the paperwork
Tips are income. You owe tax on them. We issue a year-end summary statement via Stripe (1099-K in the US, equivalents in other jurisdictions) when you cross the platform thresholds. We don't withhold tax — that's your job — but we make the bookkeeping straightforward.
You can attach a receipt template that gets emailed to every tipper automatically. Most creators leave it as the default 'thank you for your contribution' wording. Some niche creators (especially in the US, where tips above certain amounts may be tax-deductible depending on creator status) customise it with deduction language. Talk to your accountant if that's relevant.
Comparing to other tip platforms
Three real-money-out comparisons on a $10 tip:
- Ko-fi: $10 - 5% platform - 2.9% + 30¢ Stripe = $8.91 to you
- Buy Me a Coffee: $10 - 5% platform - 2.9% + 30¢ Stripe = $8.91 to you
- Patreon (one-time tip equivalent): $10 - 8% (Pro tier) - 2.9% + 30¢ Stripe = $8.81 to you
- Platform fees vary by plan — see our pricing page at linkstacked.com/pricing for current rates..9% + 30¢ Stripe = $8.81 to you
- Platform fees vary by plan — see our pricing page at linkstacked.com/pricing for current rates..9% + 30¢ Stripe = $9.01 to you
- Platform fees vary by plan — see our pricing page at linkstacked.com/pricing for current rates..9% + 30¢ Stripe = $9.21 to you
On Earn we are price-neutral with Ko-fi/BMAC. Where we win is the inline placement — your fan tips without ever leaving your page. That alone converts at 3-4× the rate of a redirect-out tip jar.
Plan and rollout
Tip jars are available on all plans when Stripe Connect is set up. Platform fees vary by plan — see our pricing page for current rates. Lower plans can link out to external tip platforms but cannot host the inline tip block. The reason Earn gates it: the Stripe Connect setup, the payout reliability infrastructure, and the per-tip customer support load we take are real costs we don't want to subsidise on free.
Add a tip jar this week
If you're on Earn, the setup is: connect Stripe (5 minutes if you don't already have a Stripe account, instant if you do), add the tip-jar block to your page, set your suggested amounts. You're live in under 10 minutes. Even one tip in the first month tells you whether the audience is going to support you here.
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