If a fan hands you a dollar, how much of it actually reaches your bank account? On YouTube, about 55 cents of every ad dollar — and that’s the generous version. On Patreon and Substack, roughly 83 to 84 cents of a $10 subscription. But the platform that keeps the smallest percentage can still pay you the most money, because percentages are only half the story. The other half is how many fans you have, how they pay, and how long you wait to get paid.
This guide runs the same fan money through all three systems with the fee schedules in force in November 2026, so you can see the real take-home numbers instead of the headline percentages. The fee figures below cross-check against MilX’s three-way money-flow comparison and the platforms’ own fee pages.
The short answer: where $1 of fan money lands
| Platform | What the fan pays | Platform cut | Processing | You keep (web, card) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube (long-form ads) | $1 of ad revenue | 45% | None | $0.55 |
| YouTube (Shorts ads) | $1 of Shorts pool revenue | 55% | None | $0.45 |
| YouTube (memberships, Super Chat) | $1 | 30% | Included | $0.70 |
| Patreon (new creators) | $10 subscription | 10% | 2.9% + $0.30 | $8.41 |
| Substack | $10 subscription | 10% | 2.9% + $0.30 + 0.7% Billing | $8.34 |
The headline is simple: membership and subscription platforms keep roughly 84% of a fan’s payment in your hands, while YouTube’s ad split keeps 55%. But YouTube is the only one of the three that brings you the audience in the first place. That’s the trade that decides everything, and it’s why the rest of this article works in dollars per fan, not just percentages.
YouTube: the scale machine that pays the smallest share
YouTube is the reference point for the whole creator economy, and its split has barely moved in over a decade. Through the YouTube Partner Program, you keep 55% of net revenue from ads on long-form watch-page videos, 45% of your share of the Shorts Creator Pool, and 70% of net revenue from channel memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers and Super Thanks. Those figures come straight from YouTube’s own help pages, and they’re the most transparent numbers in this comparison.
The catch is volume. YouTube pays per thousand views, not per fan, and the rate — RPM, or revenue per thousand views — sits roughly between $1 and $7 in tier-1 countries depending on your niche. Finance and business channels sit near the top of that range; entertainment and gaming sit near the bottom. A channel earning a $4 RPM needs 250,000 views a month to gross $1,000. At a $2 RPM, that same $1,000 needs half a million views.
Then there’s the gate. Joining the Partner Program today requires 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the last 12 months (or 10 million Shorts views in 90 days). That bar is about to get much higher: YouTube’s February 1, 2027 terms change doubles the entry threshold to 8,000 watch hours or 20 million Shorts views, as covered in our February 2027 thresholds action plan. If you’re building toward monetization now, that deadline matters more than any fee percentage.
And there’s the wait. AdSense pays once a month, between the 21st and 26th, for revenue that closed at the end of the prior month. Earn money in October and you see it in late November. For a creator living off the channel, that 30-to-60-day lag is a real cash-flow cost that no fee table shows.
YouTube’s superpower is that it finds the audience for you. Search and recommendations do the distribution work that Patreon and Substack simply don’t. Nobody joins Patreon by accident. Millions of people find a YouTube channel by accident every day.
Patreon: the membership workhorse
Patreon is the oldest of the three subscription rails, and its pricing changed in a way a lot of creators still haven’t caught up with. Since August 4, 2025, every new creator page sits on a flat 10% platform fee. The old Lite (5%) and Pro (8%) tiers still exist, but only for creators who published before that date. If you published your page after August 4, 2025, you pay 10%, full stop.
On top of the platform fee comes payment processing: about 2.9% plus $0.30 per pledge on a US card. There’s also a 2.5% currency conversion fee if a fan pays in a different currency from your payout currency — a charge most creators never notice until an overseas fan subscribes. Add it up and a $10 monthly subscription paid by card on the web leaves you $8.41.
Here’s the worked math at a realistic small scale — 200 patrons paying $7 a month:
- Gross: 200 × $7 = $1,400
- Platform fee (10%): $140
- Processing (2.9%): $40.60
- Per-pledge fee ($0.30 × 200): $60
- You keep: $1,159.40 a month
Notice how much of the bill is that flat 30 cents. On a $7 pledge it’s more than 4% by itself. That’s why annual billing matters: when a patron pays yearly, the 30 cents lands once instead of twelve times, which is worth roughly $330 a year across 100 subscribers.
Patreon pays out on the 5th of the month for the standard monthly cycle, with daily payout options for established creators. What Patreon doesn’t do is bring you fans. There’s no discovery engine to speak of. Every patron you have is one you brought yourself — from YouTube, from TikTok, from a newsletter, from somewhere else.
One warning that costs real money: if you unpublish your Patreon page, legacy creators on the 5% or 8% plans jump to the standard 10% permanently when they republish. Don’t unpublish to “take a break.” Pause billing or go quiet instead.
Patreon also has an Apple problem. Memberships bought inside the Patreon iOS app go through Apple’s in-app purchase system, and Apple takes up to 30% (15% for small businesses in Apple’s program). Your money from those sales can also be held up to 75 days. Web signups avoid all of that, which is why so many creators now push fans to join on the web.
Substack: the writer’s engine with a discovery bonus
Substack runs on a single clean number — 10% of paid subscription revenue — and then quietly adds two more charges. Stripe takes about 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, and there’s a 0.7% Stripe Billing fee on recurring payments that Substack itself says doesn’t show up in the Stripe processing line where you’d look for it. CartMango’s fee breakdown confirms the same stacking from Substack’s own pricing help page. All in, a card-paid web subscription costs 13.6% plus 30 cents. A $10 subscription leaves you $8.34 — seven cents less than Patreon on the same ten dollars.
The same 200-fan math at $7 a month:
- Gross: 200 × $7 = $1,400
- Platform fee (10%): $140
- Stripe card fee (2.9%): $40.60
- Per-transaction fee ($0.30 × 200): $60
- Stripe Billing (0.7%): $9.80
- You keep: $1,149.60 a month
That’s $9.80 a month less than Patreon on identical volume — the entire gap is the Billing fee. At $1,000 a month across 200 members paying $5, the gap is the same story: Patreon keeps you about $811, Substack about $804.
So why does anyone pick Substack? Because it’s the only one of the three with a real discovery engine built in. Notes and the recommendations network put your writing in front of readers who never heard of you, and top writers report 30% to 60% of new paid subscribers arriving through in-network recommendations. Patreon has nothing comparable. You’re paying the extra 0.7% partly for a growth channel, not just a checkout.
Payouts are faster than Patreon’s, too. Web payments reach your bank usually within 48 hours through Stripe, though the very first payout takes 7 to 14 days. Apple in-app sales are the exception — those can arrive up to 45 days after month-end, and Apple takes its 15% to 30% cut first.
One more date to put on the calendar: from December 1, 2026, Substack collects and remits sales tax and VAT on paid subscriptions for writers. The payout mechanics don’t change, but a new tax line will show up on your Stripe dashboard. Check your Stripe tax settings before December, and talk to your accountant about state-specific questions — this isn’t tax advice, just a heads-up that the line is coming. Our Substack fees guide breaks down the full fee stack if you want the line-by-line version.
The same 1,000 fans, three ways
Percentages hide the real question, which is: how much money does the same audience produce on each platform? Here’s the honest version, worked from the fee schedules above.
Scenario A: 200 paying fans at $7 a month
– Patreon: $1,159.40/month net
– Substack: $1,149.60/month net
– YouTube equivalent: at a $4 RPM, you’d need about 290,000 monthly views to net the same $1,160. At a $2 RPM, about 580,000 views.
Scenario B: 1,000 true fans
– Patreon at $5/month: 1,000 × $5 = $5,000 gross; fees roughly $945; ~$4,055/month net
– Substack at $5/month: same gross; fees roughly $980; ~$4,020/month net
– YouTube at a $4 RPM: $4,055 a month needs just over 1 million monthly views
Scenario C: one fan, one year
– Patreon backer at $7/month, monthly billing: about $69.56 net per year
– Substack subscriber at $7/month, monthly billing: about $68.98 net per year
– Substack subscriber on an annual plan ($80/year, two months free): about $68.82 net — the discount costs you almost nothing because the $0.30 fee lands once
The pattern is consistent: Patreon and Substack are effectively tied on take-home, with Patreon ahead by a few dollars per thousand. YouTube needs an audience roughly a thousand times the size of a membership base to produce the same income — but YouTube is also the only platform that can deliver an audience that size without you bringing it yourself.
The hidden costs nobody quotes
The Apple tax. Any subscription sold inside an iOS app hands Apple 15% to 30% on top of everything else. On Substack that’s on top of the 13.6% you already pay; on Patreon, on top of the 12.9%. A $10 subscription bought in the Patreon iOS app can leave you with barely $6. Both platforms let fans subscribe on the web instead. Tell your audience to do that, every time.
Currency conversion. Patreon adds 2.5% when a fan’s currency differs from your payout currency, calculated on the full payment including tax. If a meaningful share of your audience is overseas, that quietly eats the small edge Patreon holds over Substack.
Payout lag. YouTube pays 30 to 60 days after you earn it. Substack web payouts land in about 48 hours. Patreon pays on the 5th. If you run a business with monthly bills, a platform that pays in two days is worth more than a platform that pays in two months, even at the same fee.
The annual-billing trick. That flat $0.30 per transaction punishes small monthly payments. A $5 monthly pledge loses 6% to the fixed fee alone; a $60 annual payment loses 0.5%. Offer annual plans with a real discount (two months free is the standard) and a meaningful share of your audience will take them. You keep more per fan and your churn drops at the same time.
Leaving is not free. Both Patreon and Substack let you export subscriber emails. But only a Substack web subscription sits in a Stripe account you actually own, which makes the billing relationship portable in a way Patreon’s isn’t. And Patreon’s legacy-rate trap — unpublish and lose your 8% forever — is the kind of detail that costs hundreds of dollars a year to learn the hard way.
Which platform for which creator
Pick YouTube first if you’re starting from zero. It’s the only platform here with a discovery engine big enough to build an audience from nothing, and ad revenue — even at 55% — is money you earn while you sleep. Treat it as the top of your funnel, not the whole business.
Pick Patreon if you make video, audio, art or anything multimedia, and you already have an audience somewhere. It’s the most flexible membership tool of the three: tiered pricing, Discord integration, one-time purchases alongside subscriptions, and the deepest toolkit for rewarding different fan levels differently.
Pick Substack if you write. The newsletter format, the recommendations network and the Notes feed make it the best place on the internet to turn readers into paying subscribers without running ads. The 0.7% Billing fee is the price of the discovery engine, and for most writers it’s money well spent.
The honest answer for most creators is all three, in order. YouTube finds the audience. Substack or Patreon converts the most loyal slice into paying fans. The membership income — predictable, monthly, roughly 84 cents on the dollar — is what turns a channel into a business. Ad revenue is the variable bonus on top.
What $1,000 a month actually requires
This is the number that stops most creators from quitting their jobs on a fantasy. To net roughly $1,000 a month:
- Patreon: about 173 patrons at $7/month (or 232 at $5)
- Substack: about 175 subscribers at $7/month (or 234 at $5)
- YouTube: about 250,000 monthly views at a $4 RPM — or 500,000 at a $2 RPM
Two hundred true fans is an achievable goal for a focused creator in a year or two of consistent work. A quarter-million monthly views is a much harder hill. That’s not an argument against YouTube — it’s an argument for using YouTube to find the 200 people who’ll pay you directly, instead of trying to live off the ad split alone.
For the full picture on how Patreon itself changed in 2026, see our Patreon auto-switch guide, and if you’re weighing a fourth platform, our Spotify memberships vs Patreon take-home math runs the same exercise for podcasters.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does YouTube pay per 1,000 views in 2026?
YouTube pays creators 55% of long-form ad revenue, and the creator’s RPM — revenue per 1,000 views after YouTube’s cut — typically runs $1 to $7 in tier-1 countries. Your niche decides where you land: finance and business channels earn near the top, entertainment and gaming near the bottom. Shorts pay from a pooled model at 45% of the pool allocation, which usually works out lower per view.
Is Patreon or Substack cheaper for creators?
Patreon is cheaper by a small margin. Both charge a 10% platform fee for new creators, but Substack adds a 0.7% Stripe Billing fee on recurring payments that Patreon doesn’t have. On a $10 web subscription paid by card, Patreon leaves you $8.41 and Substack leaves you $8.34. On $1,000 a month across 200 members, Patreon keeps you about $811 versus Substack’s $804.
Do Patreon and Substack take a cut of tips or one-time payments?
Patreon’s 10% platform fee and processing apply to one-time purchases made through Patreon as well as subscriptions. Substack’s 10% plus Stripe fees apply to paid subscriptions; one-time payments and pledges run through Stripe with its standard processing. Neither platform is free for one-off payments — always check the fee on the payment type, not just the subscription.
How long does it take to get paid on YouTube, Patreon and Substack?
YouTube pays through AdSense between the 21st and 26th of the month for the previous month’s earnings — a 30-to-60-day lag. Patreon pays on the 5th of the month (daily payouts are available for established creators). Substack web payments usually reach your bank within 48 hours through Stripe, though the first payout takes 7 to 14 days. Apple in-app sales are slower on both subscription platforms: up to 45 days on Substack and up to 75 days on Patreon.
Can I use YouTube, Patreon and Substack together?
Yes, and most full-time creators do. YouTube is the discovery engine that finds new fans, while Patreon or Substack converts the most loyal ones into paying supporters. The platforms don’t conflict — YouTube even lets you link your membership platform in video descriptions and channel pages. The stack works because each platform does a different job.
What is the Apple tax on creator subscriptions?
Subscriptions bought inside an iOS app go through Apple’s in-app purchase system, and Apple takes 15% to 30% on top of the platform’s own fees. A $10 subscription bought in the Patreon or Substack iOS app can leave the creator with roughly $6 instead of $8.40. Both platforms let fans subscribe on the web instead, which avoids Apple’s cut entirely — always send your audience to the web checkout.