How to sell VRChat avatars in 2026: Jinxxy vs Booth vs Payhip vs your own store

Five real options, at five very different prices. The official VRChat Marketplace pays you roughly half of what buyers spend, in exchange for in-app discovery. Jinxxy, the community's creator-first marketplace, takes a 5% platform fee (10% if you want visibility promotion) plus about 3% processing plus $1.50 per payout. Booth, the Japanese-ecosystem default, charges 5.6% plus 45 yen per item. Payhip takes 5% on its free tier and courts avatar sellers openly. Gumroad charges 10% plus $0.50 and prohibits most adult content outright. And a store you run yourself can cost a flat subscription and 0%, which is where ByteSell sits.

Which one is right depends on whether you need discovery or already have it. If your sales come from your own X account, Discord, and word of mouth, every percentage fee is paying for a marketplace audience you are not using.

VRChat's in-app avatar marketplace, launched in 2025, is the only option with native in-game discovery and instant equipping. Its economics are documented plainly in VRChat's own creator docs:

The FAQ confirms it: "After paying out your earnings, you earn approximately 50% of what users spent in your store (excluding VAT)." Selling requires applying to the Creator Economy program, which VRChat says is selective. The price floor is 1,200 Credits, about $10. One oddity worth knowing: VRChat's own pages disagree on the payout minimum, with one stating 30,000 Credits (about $150) and the payout page stating 20,000 (about $100). Either way, half your revenue for discovery is the deal, stated by VRChat itself as "the largest cut of the revenue goes to the avatar creator", which is true in the sense that 50% is the largest single share.

Jinxxy describes itself as "a creator-first marketplace for VR and VTubing" and became the community's default recommendation after Gumroad's 2024 adult-content purge. Its current fees, from its own selling page: a 5% platform fee on the Standard plan, or 10% on the Supporter plan which buys "Enhanced Visibility" in the marketplace. On top of that, "all prices include a 3% fee from the payment processors" and "Jinxxy also charges a $1.50 payout fee per payout." Their own worked example: a $100 sale pays the creator $92 on Standard.

The honest read: that is a fair price for a marketplace that actually understands this niche, allows properly tagged 18+ content under its terms, and brings its own buyers. If Jinxxy's discovery sells avatars for you, 8% all-in beats 50%. If it doesn't, you are paying 8% for a checkout.

Booth, run by pixiv, is where a huge share of the Japanese avatar economy lives. Its service fee rose on October 28, 2025 from 5.6% plus 22 yen to 5.6% plus 45 yen per item, per its own announcement, and payouts carry a 200 to 300 yen transfer fee. Two practical catches for Western sellers: payouts go to a Japanese bank account or PayPal only, and while the buyer side has an English storefront, the seller guides and fee announcements are Japanese-only. If your audience overlaps the Japanese scene, Booth is close to mandatory anyway; sellers commonly run it alongside a second store for everyone else.

Gumroad charges "10% + $0.50 per transaction for all sales through your profile or direct links", and 30% when buyers come through its Discover marketplace, both from its own pricing page. The bigger issue for this niche is content policy: Gumroad's help center states that, because of its payment partners, it does not allow sexually explicit content, which in 2024 pushed a large part of the avatar scene to Jinxxy and Payhip in the first place. For strictly SFW catalogs it remains a functional, well-known checkout at a steep rate.

Payhip takes 5% on its free plan (dropping to 2% at $29 a month and 0% at $99 a month) and actively courts this market with dedicated VRChat category pages. Its prohibited-products page bans pornography, wording the ban around photos and videos with sexual content, and requires compliance with Stripe's and PayPal's terms, which is the clause that actually governs edge cases. For SFW and suggestive-but-not-explicit catalogs it is a solid low-friction option.

No store fixes avatar ripping, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. Rips happen client-side, after purchase, as the community knows well:

The community's working answer is client-side hardening like the free AntiRip (Kanna Protecc) project, which describes its own goal as making rips worthless rather than impossible. What your store choice does control: who received each file, under what license, and whether you can act on a leak. A checkout that records the buyer behind every download, filters obvious fraud traffic at purchase, and attaches your license terms to the sale is the part of the anti-piracy story a platform can honestly own.

The math is simple. At $2,000 a month in avatar sales, Jinxxy's standard stack costs you about $160, Payhip's free tier $100, Gumroad's direct rate $210 plus 50 cents a sale, and the official marketplace roughly $1,000. A store with 0% fees costs its subscription price and nothing else, which at that volume is the difference between a fee and a rounding error.

ByteSell charges 0% on every plan. Card payments run on your own Stripe or PayPal account (which stay bound by those providers' content rules), crypto settles natively to your own wallet, and checkout filtering blocks VPN, proxy, and disposable-email traffic before it becomes a chargeback. Files of any type are delivered automatically. Two honest caveats: ByteSell brings you no marketplace audience, so it fits creators whose buyers already follow them, and the Free plan's 50 MB per-file ceiling is tight for bigger avatar packages, which is what the $29 Pro plan's 10 GB per-file limit is for. Prices are on the pricing page.