WALRUS takes a share of what you earn — 20% on memberships, less on merch, a flat fee on event tickets. No monthly charge, no upgrade tiers, no per-feature paywalls. If you earn $0 this month, you pay $0.
The rates on this page are read directly from the code that charges the card. If we change one, this page changes with it.
You set the price on everything you sell — memberships, downloads, Encore, tickets, merch. When a fan pays, the money moves through your Stripe account. WALRUS takes its share automatically; the rest is yours.
Stripe charges its own processing fee (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction). That comes out of your portion, not the fan's. It's the same fee anywhere you take cards online, and we don't pad it, double-bill it, or hide it inside the WALRUS cut.
Example: $10.00/mo membership
On most one-off purchases there are two separate things going on, and plenty of platforms only tell you about one of them. We'll tell you both.
A $1.99 processing fee is added on top of your price for Encore and tips. The fan sees it as a line item and pays it — it does not come out of your cut. Separately, WALRUS takes 20% of your price internally.
Digital downloads and memberships have no fee added at all — your listed price is exactly what the fan pays. Event tickets add the flat $4.99 per order instead.
Example: $50.00 Encore video
The processing fee is waived when a fan pays with platform credits.
| Revenue Type | You Keep | WALRUS Takes |
|---|---|---|
| MembershipsYou set the price. Nothing is added at checkout. | 80% | 20% |
| Digital downloadsYour listed price is exactly what the fan pays. | 80% | 20% |
| Encore (video messages)$1.99 processing fee added to the fan's total. | 80% | 20% + $1.99 |
| Tips$1.99 processing fee added to the fan's total. | 80% | 20% + $1.99 |
| Ticketed eventsThe only place we take no percentage. Per order, not per ticket. | 100% | $4.99 flat per order |
| Merch you fulfillOur lightest cut. Shipping passes through to you. |
Merch you make and ship yourself is our lightest cut — 15%, not 20%. You already carry the inventory and the postage, so we take less. Shipping the fan pays passes straight through to you.
Merch is paid on shipment, not on sale. The charge lands when the fan buys, but your payout is transferred when you mark the order shipped. If you buy the shipping label through WALRUS, its cost comes out of that payout. Unshipped orders eventually auto-cancel and refund the fan, so don't sit on them.
WALRUS Made items are ours to produce — we print, pack and ship them. We take 20% plus the $18.00 per-unit production cost, and shipping does not pass through to you. You set the retail price, so your margin is whatever you price above that floor.
Example: $30.00 shirt you ship yourself
The music industry has spent decades nickel-and-diming artists. Labels take the majority. Streaming pays fractions of a penny. Platforms layer fees: a monthly subscription to use the tool, a percentage of every sale, processing on top of that.
We think that's backwards — but we also don't think one number fits everything.
Where WALRUS does the heavy lifting — hosting, delivery, the membership engine — we take 20%. Where you do it, we take less: merch you warehouse and ship yourself is 15%. Where our cost is fixed rather than proportional, we charge a flat fee instead of a percentage, which is why event tickets are $4.99 an order and you keep the whole ticket price.
What stays constant: free tools across the board, no artist subscription, no upgrade tiers, and no fee we haven't put on this page.
The percentages above cover it.
Video delivery, audio storage, payment infrastructure, support, and the engineering work to keep adding tools. We get a slice of every transaction. No artist subscription fees, no per-feature paywalls, no upcharge for a "pro" version of the dashboard.
What we never do: invent a fee, pad processing costs, or charge for something we haven't told you about. The whole schedule is on this page.
| Platform | Fan Pays | Artist Gets | Platform Takes |
|---|---|---|---|
| WALRUS memberships | Artist sets | 80% | 20% |
| WALRUS merch | Artist sets | 85% + shipping | 15% |
| WALRUS event tickets | Artist sets + $4.99/order | 100% | $4.99 flat |
| Patreon | Creator sets | 88–92% | 8–12% + processing |
| Bandcamp | Artist sets | 85% (digital) / 90% (merch) | 15% / 10% + processing |
| Spotify | $10.99 pool | $0.003–$0.005/stream | Almost everything |
| YouTube | Ad-supported | 55% of ad revenue | 45% |
| Cameo | Creator sets | 75% | 25% |
Straight up: Patreon takes less on subscriptions than we do, and Bandcamp takes less on merch. What they don't do is bundle the rest of it. Almost every feature here would be a separate product elsewhere — mailing list, synced lyrics, video, merch, ticketing, direct messages — each with its own monthly bill. Once you're using more than one, the WALRUS split is the cheaper deal. If you're only ever going to do one thing, the specialist may well be cheaper, and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.
We didn't build WALRUS to take a piece of what artists earn from existing tools. We built it to replace the patchwork — bio link, mailing list, merch shop, ticketing, lyrics, Encore — with one platform priced as one product.
You make the work. Fans value the work. The money moves through your Stripe account. We get a share at the door, and we tell you exactly what it is.
Free tools across the board. Every fee on one page. That's WALRUS.
| 85% + shipping |
| 15% |
| Release dropsPre-order campaigns run on the drops engine. | 80% | 20% |
| WALRUS MadeWe print, pack and ship it. Shipping does not pass through to you. | 80% − $18.00/unit | 20% + $18.00/unit |
"You keep" is your share before Stripe. Stripe's processing fee comes out of your portion in every category — it's a real cost of accepting cards, not something we can wave away.
Competitor rates are their published figures as of July 2026, summarised here for comparison — check their pricing pages for current terms.