What this study checked, and when
Four creator-subscription platforms were checked against their own current terms on 20 September 2026: Fanfix, OnlyFans, Patreon and Passes. The study records five things for each one, which are the fee, the payout mechanism, the content policy, who is allowed to join, and whether the platform still exists as an independent business. Fanfix earnings are not among them.
The reason to run it is that nobody maintains it. Platforms change these terms without notice, the pages ranking for comparison queries are written once and left, and verification on 20 September 2026 found three widely published claims that the documents contradict — a dated, sourced snapshot is worth more than a longer article with undated numbers in it. A fourth, the 10,000-follower minimum most Fanfix guides repeat without a source, turned out to be Fanfix’s own, as the corrections section explains.
What creators earn on Fanfix is not disclosed by anyone, so the dataset here is the terms rather than the income. Nothing in it is an estimate.
What four creator platforms charge, as of 20 September 2026
Fanfix, OnlyFans and Passes all take 20%. Patreon takes 10% from creators who began publishing after 4 August 2025 and charges payment processing separately, which makes its headline rate the lowest and its all-in cost impossible to state as one number. The content policies, not the fees, are what separate these platforms.
| Platform | Platform fee | Payout | Content policy | Eligibility | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fanfix | 20% of every transaction, identical on memberships, paid messages and locked posts | Creator picks weekly, bi-weekly or monthly to a linked bank account; pending funds clear in about 5 days | Safe-for-work; nudity is banned | Invite-only, reviewed by the Partnerships team; 18 or older; at least 10,000 followers across all socials, per its application page (read 21 Sep 2026) | Active; $300M paid to creators as of 17 Jun 2026 |
| OnlyFans | 20% of each fan payment | Withdrawal from an account balance | Permits content that Fanfix prohibits | Open signup; 18 or older | Active |
| Patreon | 10% for creators publishing after 4 Aug 2025; legacy plans at 5% and 8%; one-time sales 5% to 12%; payment processing charged on top of all of these | Balance after fees, minus a payout transaction fee | Permits, with restrictions, content that Fanfix prohibits | Open signup | Active |
| Passes | 20% of credit and debit sales | Bi-weekly, within 30 days of period end, by bank transfer | States that nudity is not allowed | Application | Active; defending a class action it calls meritless |
Two platforms that appear on most comparison lists are missing from that table on purpose. Fanhouse and Sunroom are no longer independent platforms, and the corrections section below gives the dates and the documents.
Apps are one row the table cannot carry. Patreon has iOS and Android apps. Fanfix has neither — its FAQ describes a web app and a progressive web app and says a native iOS app is coming, and an iTunes lookup for the Fanfix bundle identifier returned zero results on 20 September 2026. Any page showing you a Fanfix App Store badge is showing you something that does not exist.
Where each cell came from
Every cell was read from a document the platform publishes itself, and every document was read on 20 September 2026, apart from the qualifications dialog on Fanfix’s application form, read on 21 September 2026. No cell was taken from a secondary article, a summary, or an archive copy.
| Platform | Documents read | Where | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fanfix | Creator Terms of Use, General Terms of Service, Payment Terms, payouts setup guide, public FAQ, application form | auth.fanfix.io, blog.fanfix.io, fanfix.io | 20 Sep 2026; application form’s qualifications dialog 21 Sep 2026 |
| OnlyFans | Terms of service | onlyfans.com/terms | 20 Sep 2026 |
| Patreon | Creator fees overview | support.patreon.com | 20 Sep 2026 |
| Passes | Terms, plus TechCrunch’s report of the court filing | passes.com/terms, techcrunch.com | 20 Sep 2026 |
The Fanfix documents carry their own revision dates, and those dates are worth quoting, because three of them are current and one is not. Creator Terms of Use was updated 1 August 2026, General Terms of Service on 20 August 2026, and the payouts guide on 1 May 2026. The Payment Terms are dated 16 August 2024, and the 13% card surcharge they name is the one Fanfix number this study will not put in a table — the document is two years older than the rest of the set and does not say who bears the charge.
For the other three, the sources are Patreon’s creator fees overview, the OnlyFans terms, and the Passes terms with TechCrunch’s report of 3 March 2025 for the litigation.
Three things the live comparisons get wrong
Three claims recur across the pages currently ranking for these comparisons, and the documents contradict all three. Two are stale because a company disappeared, and one because a fee changed. Each row below gives the claim, what the document says, and the date on the evidence.
| Claim in circulation | What the documents show | Source read | Date on the evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fanhouse is a live Fanfix alternative | Fanhouse shut down and was acquired by Passes | Fanhouse’s own announcement | 21 Aug 2023 |
| Sunroom competes with Fanfix | Sunroom was acquired by Fanfix and is not an independent platform | Access Newswire release | 14 Aug 2025 |
| Patreon takes 5% or 8% | 10% is standard for creators publishing after 4 Aug 2025; 5% and 8% are legacy plans only, and processing is charged on top of any of them | Patreon’s creator fees overview | read 20 Sep 2026 |
This study’s first version, of 20 September 2026, carried a fourth row, “Fanfix requires 10,000 followers”, marked as a claim no Fanfix document supports. That row was wrong. The Creator Qualifications dialog on Fanfix’s application form, checked 21 September 2026, reads: “We require a minimum of 10,000 followers across all socials.” Fanfix’s Creator Terms §1.1 and its FAQ do not mention the figure, and meeting it does not mean approval, since both describe an invite-only review of valid, active social handles at Fanfix’s sole discretion. Most guides that repeat the number cite no source for it, and the source turns out to be Fanfix.
The shutdowns matter for a different reason. Fanhouse announced its closure on 21 August 2023 and Fanfix announced the Sunroom acquisition on 14 August 2025. Any alternatives list naming either as a current option was written before those dates or copied from something that was.
Why Patreon’s 10% and Fanfix’s 20% are not the same kind of number
Fanfix’s 20% is the whole platform take as its own terms describe it, with no separate creator-side processing fee disclosed. Patreon’s 10% is a platform fee with payment processing charged on top, plus a transaction fee on the payout itself. The two percentages therefore measure different things, and subtracting one from the other produces a gap that does not exist.
That is the commonest flattening in this category, and a table is where it should be corrected rather than a footnote. Patreon also runs three fee tiers at once: 10% for creators who started after 4 August 2025, 5% and 8% for legacy plans, and 5% to 12% on one-time sales. A creator who joined Patreon in 2023 and a creator who joins tomorrow are on different economics — which makes “Patreon charges X” an incomplete sentence without a date attached.
What Fanfix earnings figures this study does not contain
No median, no typical income, no earnings range, and no client results. Fanfix publishes a cumulative payout total and two superlatives about top earners that cannot both be true — and no distribution at all. A study that invented the missing middle would be worth less than one that records the gap.
Three other gaps are recorded rather than filled. Fanfix publishes no list of countries it can pay creators in, so no country is marked eligible or ineligible here. Fanfix publishes no subscription price range, because its Creator Terms §2.2 give it sole discretion over prices. And the pricing of the Content Armour add-on Fanfix resells is not published, so it is absent from the fee column.
Method, stated plainly
Six rules, and the fourth is the one that shortened the study. Every figure was read from the platform’s own current document rather than from a secondary page. Where two documents from the same platform disagree, the newer one governs and the conflict is recorded: Fanfix’s FAQ still describes weekly Wednesday processing through a third-party processor, and its Creator Terms still describe payment 30 days after month end, both of which predate the in-house payouts rebuild of 1 May 2026. Under the rebuilt system Airwallex sends the payouts, according to the Step 1 screenshot in Fanfix’s payouts setup guide, read on 21 September 2026.
Fanfix’s own domains refuse automated requests from this environment at the TLS layer, so its pages were read through a plain-text extraction proxy that fetches the live document; no cached or archived copy was used, and the revision date printed on each document is reported above. The follower-rule check now covers the Creator Qualifications dialog on the application form as well as the FAQ and the terms, because the first check read the form’s fields without opening the dialog, and a requirement can sit on the page where you apply without appearing in either document. Nothing was estimated or interpolated; a number a platform does not publish is recorded as not published. And no figure from any agency, including ours, appears anywhere in the dataset.
How to cite this
Cite it as a terms snapshot with its date, because that is the only thing it claims to be: platform fees, payout rules, content policies and eligibility for Fanfix, OnlyFans, Patreon and Passes, read from each platform’s own documents on 20 September 2026, with Fanfix’s application page read on 21 September 2026. The corrections are the part most likely to be useful — each one carries the document and the date behind it.
The per-platform breakdowns sit alongside this page: Fanfix against Patreon, Fanfix against Passes, Fanfix against OnlyFans, and the corrected alternatives list. When any of these terms changes, this page changes and its date changes with it.