ByteSell vs Beacons

Beacons settles money the same way we do. Every sale pays out directly to your own Stripe or PayPal account, and its terms state plainly that Beacons does not handle or process any payments. Custody is one thing these two products agree on, so it is not an argument on this page.

The argument is the fee. On the Free plan and the $10 Creator plan, Beacons takes 9% of every sale. The 0% rate lives on Creator Plus at $30 a month, and memberships require that same plan. ByteSell charges 0% on every plan, starting with a free one, and it is a full storefront where Beacons gives you a store block inside a bio page. At $2,500 a month in sales, the Beacons free plan costs you $225 that month. The ByteSell free plan costs you nothing.

Beacons publishes its fee schedule openly, which we respect: 9% on Free and on the $10 Creator plan, 0% on Creator Plus and Creator Max. The problem is which plans carry the 9%. Those are the two tiers nearly everyone starts on, and paying the $10 does nothing to the fee that scales with your revenue. The ten dollars buys a custom domain for the first year and 500 email sends, while your cut of each sale stays exactly where it was. The same split runs through affiliate income, where Free and Creator sellers keep 91% of commissions and only Plus and Max keep 100%.

Run the numbers at modest volume and the structure shows itself. At $1,000 a month in sales, the free plan hands Beacons $90, which is already triple the $30 Creator Plus subscription that would have zeroed the fee out. The 9% rises with your success, and the pricing ladder is built around the assumption that you will upgrade to escape it. ByteSell skips that arc entirely: the platform takes 0% on the free plan, on Pro at $29 and on Business at $99, and there is no tier anywhere in the lineup where a percentage of your sales reappears.

Beacons’ help center states it directly.

Neither the Free plan nor the $10 Creator plan can sell a recurring product at all. Recurring revenue is the business most creators are trying to build toward, and on Beacons it sits behind the second-highest tier, alongside order bumps, which are also a Creator Plus feature.

ByteSell ships subscriptions on every plan. It also closes the loop that a bare membership product leaves open: paid Discord and paid Telegram access, where the buyer gets in the moment the payment clears and gets removed automatically when the subscription lapses. If your model is a paid community or any kind of monthly product, the comparison is between a $30 floor at Beacons and a free plan that already includes the gating, the entitlement API, and webhooks for anything custom you want to build on top.

Beacons is a link-in-bio product first, and a good one. The store is one module among the media kit, the email tools, and the AI outreach features, and it lives on a Beacons page in a Beacons layout. For a creator whose selling is occasional, that is exactly the right amount of store.

ByteSell starts from the other end. You get an actual storefront at yourstore.mybyte.app or on your own custom domain, with theme choice all the way up to fully custom-coded themes, and the ByteSell branding removed. Underneath it sits delivery infrastructure built for people whose product is the file: single files up to 10 GB on Pro and 25 GB on Business, license key delivery from your own pool, PDF stamping that watermarks the buyer’s identity into every copy, and checkout filtering that blocks VPN, Tor, and proxy traffic along with disposable email addresses.

Both platforms pass the test that matters most in this category. Beacons’ terms state that payments are facilitated directly between buyer and seller, and its help center is specific about where the money goes.

ByteSell works on the same principle, with nothing held in between and no payout day to wait for.

Three differences remain inside that shared structure.

• Two rails, and only two. Beacons’ terms name Stripe and PayPal as its payment providers. ByteSell connects your own Stripe and PayPal as well, and adds crypto payments that settle straight to your own wallet.
• The bank path is slower than the story suggests. Beacons’ bank-account payouts route through PayPal and land 7 to 14 days after the payment date, so direct settlement holds cleanest if you keep the money inside PayPal itself, where payouts run daily.
• Refunds are yours on both. Beacons’ terms state it is unable to issue refunds or provide financial compensation for transactions on the platform. That is the consequence of non-custodial design and it applies to ByteSell the same way, so on either platform refunds run through your own processor.

Beacons has a creator toolkit ByteSell does not match.

• Your files are big

  ByteSell Free holds 500 MB, with files up to 50 MB. A video course needs Pro.

• The creator toolkit

  AI media kit, brand outreach and email marketing. ByteSell offers none of it.

• 0% is reachable

  Creator Plus at $30 a month matches the 0% ByteSell leads with.

• Recognition and reach

  One of the biggest names in link-in-bio, and familiarity converts.

Beacons is the better home when your income leans on brand deals and audience routing, because its media-kit and outreach tooling has no equivalent here and the free plan is a fine place to sell your first few products.

ByteSell makes more sense once selling digital products is the business. The moment you want recurring revenue, Beacons quotes you $30 a month. The moment your volume makes 9% noticeable, it quotes the same $30. ByteSell’s answer to both is a free plan that charges 0% and includes subscriptions with Discord and Telegram gating. Your own domain and theme come with Pro at $29. Run your own numbers in the calculator below.