Steady is a membership platform built for publishers and independent media, operated by Steady Media GmbH from Voltastraße in Berlin. Founded in 2016 by the team behind Krautreporter, it sells memberships for newsletters, magazines, podcasts and video channels, with a hosted member area, an email sending layer, member analytics and a public API. Its investors are German: Müller Medien and the Berlin public venture fund IBB Ventures (VC Fonds Kreativwirtschaft), which is why ownership reads as EU-owned with no US capital in the cap table.
The commercial model is a flat 10% commission on member revenue, plus the payment provider's own fee, with nothing to pay until money comes in. What genuinely separates Steady from the rest of this category is that it is the merchant of record: it contracts with the member, issues compliant invoices, collects and remits VAT at the member's own country rate across the EU, and transfers the creator one consolidated payout. For a German or French creator with subscribers in a dozen member states, that removes the single most tedious part of running paid memberships. Members can pay by card, PayPal, Apple Pay or SEPA direct debit.
For a sovereignty audit the record is mixed and the gaps are documentation gaps. Steady publishes no data processing agreement and no sub-processors list, the privacy notice carries a February 2022 date, and nowhere does the company state which data centre or country the platform runs in. What the notice does disclose is a substantial US chain: Cloudflare in front of the site, Intercom, Inc. for in-product chat, imgix as image CDN, embed.ly (A Medium Corporation) for embedded media, Google Analytics and the Meta pixel, and Google Workspace, Zendesk and Mailchimp visible in the mail records: Material. On the money side, PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. is a Luxembourg entity under US ownership, Apple Pay runs through Apple Distribution International, and SEPA direct debit goes through GoCardless Ltd in the UK; no EU-incorporated card acquirer is named anywhere. Best fit: European publishers that value the VAT and invoicing work being done for them, and that can accept a vendor which has not yet published the procurement paperwork.