Stan Store vs a membership site: what each is for, and when to move

The short answer

Stan and a membership site solve different problems. Stan is a shop in your bio link: someone taps through from Instagram or TikTok, buys one thing in a couple of taps, and gets it by email. A membership site is a place members come back to: they log in, find this week’s recipes or today’s workout, and pay every month for as long as it’s useful.

Plenty of creators should start on Stan. The question is when the product you sell stops being a thing people buy once and becomes a place they use every week.

	Stan Store	A membership site
Built for	One-off sales from your bio link	Members who pay and come back
Cost (October 2026)	US$29 or US$99 a month, 0% of sales	A monthly fee, a share of sales, or both
Where members get content	An access link by email; a login for courses and Stan’s Community	A member area they log in to
Your own domain	No, your store is stan.store/yourname	Usually yes
Food and fitness tools	None built in	Depends on the platform
Whose Stripe account	A Stripe Custom account Stan manages	Often your own

What Stan Store costs, as of 20 October 2026

Stan’s own pricing post (updated 22 July 2026) lists two plans, with a 14-day free trial and no free plan:

Plan	Monthly	Billed yearly	Highlights
Creator	US$29	US$300 a year (about US$25 a month)	Storefront, courses, bookings, recurring subscriptions, lead magnets, Community, AutoDM
Creator Pro	US$99	US$948 a year (US$79 a month)	Adds discount codes, upsells and order bumps, email broadcasts and flows, affiliates, pixel tracking, Afterpay and Klarna

Stan takes 0% of sales on both plans. Its help page on fees (updated 23 September 2026) says Stripe’s fees still apply, and lists 2.9% + 30¢ for a standard US card payment, 0.5% more on recurring payments, 1.5% more for an international card, and a payout fee of 0.25% + 25¢ per payout. Customers paying with PayPal pay PayPal’s fees instead.

One thing to notice for a membership: email broadcasts and email flows are Creator Pro features. If you want to send members a weekly “here’s what’s new” email from Stan, budget for US$99 a month, not US$29.

How a membership works on Stan

Stan has a Recurring Membership product. According to its help page, you set a price, choose how often it charges (daily, weekly, monthly or yearly), and optionally end the subscription after a set number of payments. Stan’s own list of membership ideas is group coaching calls, community access, training videos, regular texts or emails, and exclusive e-books or guides.

Delivery is the part to understand before you build on it. When someone joins a Recurring Membership, Stan sends a confirmation email that you customise with your access link. The content itself lives wherever that link points: a Stan Community, a course, a private video folder or another tool.

Stan’s help pages say a customer login (its Customer Portal) exists only for the Course product. Stan’s Community gives members a login too, with a Purchases tab that shows what they’ve bought from you, and there’s a Stan Community app for iPhone. Members can’t change their payment details in that app; Stan’s help says they need a browser for that.

Where Stan runs out for a membership

None of these is a flaw in a storefront. They start to matter when members pay every month.

• No custom domain. Stan’s help page says you can’t connect your own domain; your store stays at stan.store/yourname, though you can forward a domain to it. A membership is something members bookmark and return to, so the address carries more weight than it does for a one-off sale.
• No content tools for food or fitness. There’s no recipe card that scales servings, no shopping list, no meal plan and no day-by-day program. Courses are the closest thing, so a 12-week program becomes 84 lessons.
• Tiers mean separate products. Stan’s list of common feature requests (March 2026) says there’s no native way to offer pricing tiers under one product; you create a product per tier.
• Price changes don’t reach existing members. Stan’s help says existing members stay at the price they joined on. That’s handy for rewarding founding members, but there’s no described way to move them to a new price later. Our guide on when to raise your membership price explains why that matters.
• Cancellations are manual. Deleting a membership product, or cancelling your Stan plan, doesn’t cancel members’ subscriptions; Stan’s help says you cancel each one by hand “or else they’ll continue to be charged”.
• Receipts. Stan’s help says customers get a receipt for the first membership payment, but not Stripe receipts for the renewals after it.
• The Stripe account is Stan’s to run. When you connect payments, Stan sets up a Stripe Custom account that it manages, with no separate Stripe Dashboard login. Connecting an existing Stripe account is an experiment open to a share of new creators (help page dated August 2025). That affects what happens if you move: our guide to who owns your member list covers it platform by platform.

What a membership site adds

“Membership site” covers a wide range, from Kajabi and Uscreen to food or fitness specific platforms and custom builds. What they share is a member area: a home members log in to, with everything they’ve paid for in one place and new content waiting when they arrive.

For a food creator, that usually means recipes members cook from, not PDFs they download: servings that scale, metric and imperial units, a shopping list that combines ingredients across recipes, and a weekly meal plan. The membership is the reason to open your site on a Sunday afternoon.

For a fitness creator, it means programs that know where each member is up to: today’s workout based on their start date, challenges with a start line, a searchable workout library, and maybe live classes.

Most membership platforms also let members manage their own subscription, give you one product with several prices (monthly and annual, for example), and run on your own domain. Check each of those during a trial; they vary.

The money: a worked example

Here are three creators, with illustrative numbers. Stripe’s fees apply on every platform, so they’re left out of the comparison.

1. The e-book seller. A recipe creator sells a US$19 e-book, about 40 copies a month: US$760. Stan Creator costs US$29 a month, about 4% of sales. A 10% revenue share would cost US$76. Stan is the cheaper and simpler tool here.

2. The small membership. A fitness creator has 150 members at US$12 a month: US$1,800. They want to email members every week, so they need Creator Pro at US$99 (US$79 billed yearly), about 4.4% to 5.5% of sales. A 10% share would cost US$180.

3. The growing membership. The same creator reaches 600 members: US$7,200 a month. Stan Creator Pro is still US$99, about 1.4%. A 10% share costs US$720.

The break-even point is simple. A 10% share costs less than Stan Creator below US$290 a month in sales, and less than Creator Pro below US$990. Above that, a flat fee is cheaper on paper. For flat-fee membership platforms, Kajabi costs US$179 to US$499 a month according to its website on 8 October 2026, so the fee itself is rarely what decides between Stan and a membership site.

What decides it is the product. If members leave because there’s no reason to log in, the cheapest tool still loses money. Put your own audience and price into the membership revenue calculator, and read revenue share vs monthly fee for the longer version of this sum.

Using both

You don’t have to choose one forever. Common patterns:

• Stan first, membership later. Sell an e-book or a 4-week program on Stan, learn what people buy, then launch a membership for the buyers who want more.
• Stan as the front door. Keep Stan in your bio for one-off products and point its membership button at your membership site’s join page. Stan’s External Links product does this.
• Membership site with its own link in bio. Some membership platforms include a link-in-bio page, so the bio link leads straight into your own site and Stan becomes optional.

If you’re moving members from a Stan Recurring Membership, remember the manual cancellations above: plan the date, give members their new login first, then cancel the Stan subscriptions so nobody pays twice. Our guide to turning Instagram followers into paying members covers the funnel from bio link to membership.

Which to pick

Choose Stan if:

• you mostly sell one-off products: e-books, guides, templates, coaching calls;
• you want to be selling this week, from your phone;
• a membership is a small extra, such as a monthly group call or a private community.

Choose a membership site if:

• members pay every month for content they use every week;
• you sell recipes, meal plans, programs or challenges that need more than a PDF or a course lesson;
• you want your own domain and your own Stripe account;
• you plan to grow past a few hundred members, add annual plans, or launch an app later.

Where Voyage fits

Launch with Voyage (us) is one option on the membership side. Voyage, a product and growth agency in New Zealand, designs, builds and launches your own membership site on the Voyage membership platform: recipes that scale with shopping lists and meal plans, day-by-day programs and challenges, e-books and passes sold alongside the membership, and a link-in-bio page included. It runs on your own domain, and members pay into your own Stripe account. There’s no monthly fee and no setup fee; we take a share of sales, from 10%, agreed before launch, and Stripe’s card fees apply. A native app under your name is an optional add-on; members who subscribe inside it pay through the App Store or Google Play via RevenueCat, and Apple and Google take their commission on those sales. See how we compare with Stan for food creators and fitness creators, or every platform side by side.