Linktree Alternatives: What Each One Takes When You Start Selling

A link-in-bio page costs nothing to build. The bill shows up the first time someone buys through it, and that is where the plans differ most. Two tools can look identical on your Instagram profile and still leave you $6 apart on a $400 month of sales.

This guide is for freelancers and solopreneurs who already have a Linktree-style page, or are about to make one, and who want it to do more than list links: sell a template, take a booking deposit, collect emails. Everything below was read from the vendors’ own pages on 23 October 2026. Where a page did not state a figure clearly, the figure is left out.

The only question that sorts these tools: percentage or flat fee?

Ignore the themes and the animated buttons for a minute. Every option here charges for selling in one of two ways. Either the platform takes a slice of each sale, or you pay a fixed monthly (or yearly) amount and keep the rest, minus whatever your payment processor charges. A percentage is painless at ten dollars of sales a month and expensive at a thousand. A flat fee is the opposite.

Tool	Cheapest plan that sells	What it takes per sale	Email
Beacons Free	$0	9%	50 sends a month
Beacons Creator Plus	$30 a month ($300 a year)	0%	Unlimited sends
Stan Store Creator	$29 a month ($300 a year)	0%, plus Stripe or PayPal processing	Email collection; no send cap stated
Carrd Pro Standard	$19 a year	Not stated; you embed a third-party checkout	Forms included
Linktree	Figures not readable on the page	Page says “0% fees” on Pro, FAQ mentions $0.25 per payout	Email and phone sign-ups on Free

Prices above are from Beacons, Stan Store, Carrd and Linktree, read on 23 October 2026.

Linktree: read the fee line before the plan name

Linktree is the default for a reason. According to its Wikipedia entry, it launched in 2016 to solve the one-link limit on social profiles, and the free plan still collects email and phone sign-ups. The trouble is the paid-tier wording. On 23 October the plan cards on its pricing page showed no dollar figures in the page text, so this article does not quote any. What the page does say is that Pro and Premium let you “sell and earn with 0% fees”, while a note in the same page’s FAQ says Linktree “currently only charge[s] USD$0.25 per payout” and that transaction and processing fees may apply.

Those two statements may well be consistent, since a payout fee is not a percentage. But the page does not say whether the $0.25 applies to every plan, so check the live checkout screen before you promise a client or an audience anything about what you keep. If you are only linking out, none of this matters and the free plan is enough.

Beacons: the 9% that disappears at $30

Beacons is the closest like-for-like swap. Its free plan includes a link-in-bio page, unlimited digital product sales, affiliate links, automated Instagram DM replies and analytics, and it takes 9% of each sale. The $10 Creator tier keeps the 9% and raises email sends from 50 to 500 a month. The $30 Creator Plus tier is where the fee drops to 0% and sends become unlimited.

That gives a clean break-even, and it is our own arithmetic rather than a vendor claim: $30 divided by 9% is about $333. Below roughly $333 of sales a month, the free plan costs you less. Above it, Creator Plus does. The middle tier never wins on fees alone, because you pay $10 and still lose 9%; it only makes sense if you need the 500 sends and sell very little.

Stan Store: a flat $29, but not a free plan

Stan Store sells itself as a store first and a link page second. Its pricing article (updated 22 July 2026) lists Creator at $29 a month or $300 a year and Creator Pro at $99 a month or $948 a year, both at 0% platform fees, with Stripe or PayPal processing on top. There is a 14-day trial, but no free plan. Creator lists lead magnets and email collection; Creator Pro adds unlimited email broadcasts and flows.

The same arithmetic applies: $29 divided by 9% is roughly $322. If you expect to sell less than about $320 a month, a 9% fee on Beacons’ free plan is cheaper than a flat fee here, though the two are not exactly comparable because Stan’s 0% sits on top of processor fees and Beacons’ 9% may or may not include them (the pricing page does not say). If you plan to sell consistently, a flat fee gets easier to justify every month.

Carrd: the cheap page with no store built in

Carrd is a one-page site builder that happens to make a good link-in-bio page. Its Pro Lite plan is $9 a year for three sites; Pro Standard is $19 a year for ten sites and adds forms, widgets and embeds. The pricing page does not mention transaction fees, and it names Stripe only as an example of something you can embed, so the sensible reading is that Carrd hosts the page and you bring your own checkout, such as a payment link from a processor you already use.

At $19 a year, that is under $1.60 a month. For a freelancer whose “store” is one service with a payment link and a contact form, it is the cheapest honest setup on this list. For anyone selling several digital products, the missing built-in checkout is a real cost in your time.

A worked example: ten sales of a $40 template

Take $400 of sales in a month, before processor fees. On Beacons Free, 9% is $36. On Creator Plus you pay $30 and keep the rest, so you are $6 ahead. On Stan Store Creator you pay $29, so about $7 ahead of the free plan. At $200 of sales the free plan wins: 9% is $18 against $29 or $30. The crossover is the point, not the tool, so work out which side of it your month is on, and revisit it when your sales change.

If you are still deciding what to sell, the Gumroad alternatives comparison shows the same fee-versus-subscription trade-off for stand-alone stores. And if the point of your link page is building a list, the email limits above matter more than the fee, so read what happens to your list after 250 contacts before you commit to a plan with a send cap.

Which one to pick, and who should walk past

Choose Linktree if you only need links and email sign-ups and already have it. Choose Beacons if you want to try selling at no cost and move up when monthly sales pass about $333. Choose Stan Store if selling is the main job of the page and you will clear $320 a month soon. Choose Carrd if you want the cheapest possible page and already have a payment link or checkout you trust.

Walk past all of them if you have fewer than a handful of products and a working website: a single page on your own domain, with a payment link, is simpler to maintain than another login. And if social posting is your bigger bottleneck than the link page, the AI tools for freelance social media managers list is a better use of the next hour. For the wider budget picture, see the cheapest freelance software stack under $30 a month or browse the Freelance Business & Money category.

One rule to carry out of this: pick the plan for the month you expect, not the one on your best day, and put a reminder in your calendar to compare the fee against your actual sales after ninety days.