ByteSell vs Linktree

Linktree is a bio link that learned to take payments. You get a tidy page of buttons, and if one of those buttons sells a digital product, Linktree keeps 12% of the sale on the free plan, which is the plan nearly everyone selling from a bio link is actually on.

ByteSell charges 0% on every plan, including the cheapest one, and it is a full storefront: your own domain, your own theme, subscriptions, gated Discord and Telegram access, and payments that settle straight to your own Stripe, PayPal or wallet. If the bio page is the product you need, Linktree is good at it. If the store is the product you need, 12% of every sale is the cost of keeping it there.

Linktree’s commerce lives inside its bio page. Your products render as buttons on linktr.ee, the design system is Linktree’s, and removing their footer branding takes a paid plan. That is a reasonable trade for someone whose whole business is an Instagram bio, and Linktree has spent years making that page look good.

ByteSell starts from the other end. You get an actual storefront on your own subdomain or your own custom domain, with a theme you picked or one you coded yourself, and no ByteSell branding on any plan. There is a real product catalog behind it, file delivery up to 10 GB per file on Pro and 25 GB on Business, license key pools for software sellers, and an embeddable checkout if you would rather sell from a site you already run. The question to ask is whether you are selling from your bio or building a shop. Those are different jobs, and each platform is honest about which one it was built for.

Linktree’s own fee article puts the number plainly: a digital product sale on the free plan costs you 12%. The timing matters as much as the rate.

So on a $20 product Linktree keeps $2.40 before you see any of it.

ByteSell has one rate. Every plan is 0% on every sale, whether you pay nothing, $29 a month or $99, because our revenue is the subscription and nothing else. Sell $2,000 a month on Linktree’s free plan and the platform cut alone is $240 of it. On ByteSell it is $0, every month, on the free plan.

Linktree’s community channels feature points visitors at your WhatsApp group, Discord server or Slack workspace. Its help documentation describes exactly two behaviors.

Neither one charges for access or takes it back. A link-out cannot tell a paying member from someone who was forwarded the URL, and it cannot remove anyone when they stop paying. Telegram is not on the list at all.

ByteSell treats membership as a subscription with a lock on it. A buyer pays, access to your Discord or Telegram is granted automatically, and when the subscription lapses the access is revoked without you touching anything. Recurring billing runs on your own processor like everything else, and if you have a custom setup there is an entitlement API and webhooks so your own bot can make the call. If gated communities are any part of your revenue, this is the section that decides the comparison.

Here is something Linktree gets right and says out loud in its Terms: it is not the seller of record, your sales settle from Stripe to an account designated for you, and refunds, chargebacks and taxes are your responsibility. ByteSell’s model is the same and we think it is the correct one, so the comparison is what each platform hands you for doing that job.

Linktree rations analytics history by plan, and a full year of it takes one of the upper tiers. ByteSell ships a full analytics suite with 365-day history on every plan, live chat with your buyers built in, and a delivery security layer that most platforms in any category do not have: PDFs stamped with the buyer’s identity, checkout filtering that blocks VPNs, Tor, proxies and disposable email domains, and blacklists you control. Affiliates and a reseller network are free and unlimited on every plan, as are team seats with per-store permissions. When the refunds and the chargebacks are your problem, the tools for preventing abuse before it happens stop being nice-to-haves.

Linktree is the category leader in link-in-bio, and it earns that in several real places.

• The bio link itself

  The category leader as a bio page, with QR tools and email integrations. ByteSell is not that.

• Brand gravity

  For most audiences, “link in bio” and “Linktree” are the same word.

• Honest fee paperwork

  Linktree states its cut and walks through a worked payout example.

• Your money goes to your Stripe

  Direct sales settle to a Stripe account in your name, on your payout timing.

Linktree is the best bio page in the business, and if a page of links with an occasional product sale attached is your whole requirement, staying put is a defensible choice, and the free tier means you risk nothing to try it.

The case for ByteSell starts the moment selling becomes the point: 0% on every plan instead of only the top one, a storefront on your own domain instead of buttons on theirs, subscriptions with Discord and Telegram access that actually locks and unlocks, and a year of analytics plus delivery security on the entry plan. Plenty of sellers sensibly keep Linktree in their bio and point one of its buttons at a store that takes 0% of the sale.