Ko-fi is a creator funding platform operated by Ko-fi Labs Limited from Letchworth Garden City in the United Kingdom, governed by English law and by the exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts. It is the broadest product in this category by feature count: one-off tips, recurring memberships, commissions for custom work, a shop for digital and physical items, Discord and Twitch integrations, stream alerts, goals, polls and embeddable widgets, all on a page that costs nothing to open. The service fee is 0% on tips for the legacy free tier and 5% on memberships, shop sales and commissions, with new creators defaulting to a 5% Standard plan and Ko-fi Gold at 12 USD per month removing service fees entirely.
Structurally Ko-fi works the same way as Petje Af: it never holds the money. The creator connects their own payment account and supporters pay them directly. The difference, and it is the whole difference for a European reader, is which accounts can be connected. Ko-fi's terms are explicit that payments are handled by third-party providers and name PayPal, Inc. and Stripe, Inc., both US-incorporated. There is no Mollie, no Adyen, no SEPA-native option, and no setting that changes this. A European creator using Ko-fi is therefore routing every euro their audience sends through an American payment company, by design rather than by oversight.
The rest of the disclosure is thin. Ko-fi publishes no data processing agreement, no sub-processors list and no statement of where the platform is hosted; the site is served through Cloudflare. The privacy policy does name the third parties it uses: PayPal and Stripe for payments, Google, X, Facebook and Twitch as login providers, YouTube and Twitch for stream integrations, and CookieYes for consent, with Google Workspace, Microsoft and SendGrid visible in the mail configuration, and it commits to appropriate safeguards including standard contractual clauses for transfers outside the UK and EEA: Material. Ko-fi is included here because European creators use it heavily and because a reader specifically asked, not because it is a European alternative. Best fit: creators who want the widest feature set on one free page and for whom payment jurisdiction is not a decision criterion.