Membership platforms

A membership platform is the layer between a creator and their audience's money. It hosts the paid feed, runs the recurring billing, gates the content, and takes a cut. That makes it a processor of some genuinely sensitive material: the list of who funds a journalist, a political commentator or a union organiser, along with the payment records that go with it. Patreon, the market default, is Patreon, Inc. of San Francisco, and everything on it sits within direct US legal reach.

The European alternatives are real and there are more of them than most people expect. Steady in Berlin serves publishers and newsletters and, unusually, acts as merchant of record so that EU VAT is collected and remitted for the creator. Tipeee in Paris is registered with ORIAS as a regulated crowdfunding intermediary and supports per-creation as well as recurring funding. Petje Af in the Netherlands takes 6% and never touches the money, because the creator connects their own payment account. Patronite is Poland's default and runs on Polish payment rails. Liberapay is a French non-profit association that takes nothing at all. Herohero is dominant in the Czech and Slovak markets. Ko-fi, a UK company, is included because European creators use it heavily, not because it is European in the sense this directory means.

The pattern worth carrying away is that in this category the storefront and the payment rail are separate decisions, and a European storefront very often sits on an American rail. That is the axis the listings below are sorted on: not just who owns the platform, but who moves the money, where the audience data is stored, and which of those facts the vendor is willing to write down. Nobody in this category publishes a DPA or a sub-processors list, so every table below is compiled from primary sources and labelled with where each line came from.