How global creators get paid — without Patreon, Ko-fi, or Stripe

300,000 followers in 60 countries — and no global tip jar

A creator builds an audience over five years on YouTube, TikTok, X, and a newsletter. The audience is genuinely global — followers in the US, the UK, Brazil, Nigeria, the Philippines, Germany, Indonesia, India, Mexico. The content is free. The creator wants to make it possible for the audience to send a tip when something resonates, to support a project, to fund the next series. The infrastructure to do this is a patchwork — and the patchwork excludes a meaningful share of the audience entirely.

Patreon works for some, but takes 8-12% across platform and processing fees. Ko-fi works for others, takes 5% on premium tiers. Buy Me a Coffee takes 5%. Stripe Connect works in 47 countries — meaning roughly half of any global audience cannot use it as a payment source. PayPal works almost everywhere but charges 4-5% on cross-border transactions and freezes accounts on payment volume the creator did not predict. None of these work as a single, simple, global payment surface that the creator can put in their bio and have the entire audience use.

What the creator wants is what every audience interaction already implies: a single handle, anywhere in the world, that turns a moment of appreciation into a transfer in seconds. That is what an Shandle is.

What creators currently use, and what each one costs

The creator economy runs on infrastructure that was not designed for it. Most of the available payment tools are domestic platforms with international workarounds bolted on — and each layer of workaround adds fees, restrictions, and lost reach.

Patreon charges a platform fee (5-12% depending on tier) plus payment processing (typically 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction). A creator on the Pro tier with international subscribers pays close to 15% of every dollar pledged. The creator does not see this as a single line; it is the sum of three or four deductions that happen between the patron's card and the creator's payout.

Ko-fi is more creator-friendly — 0% on the free tier, 5% on Gold — but limits monetisation features without an upgrade and runs payouts through Stripe or PayPal, inheriting their constraints.

Buy Me a Coffee charges 5% and runs on Stripe and PayPal infrastructure, with the same country and currency limitations as those rails.

Substack takes 10% on paid subscriptions plus Stripe processing — meaning a Substack writer with international paid subscribers loses around 13% of every subscription before it lands.

Direct Stripe Connect requires the creator to set up a Connect account and run their own checkout. More importantly, Stripe excludes most of Latin America, Africa, and South Asia from receiving payments — meaning a creator based in Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Argentina, or dozens of other countries cannot use it at all to receive monetisation directly.

The common pattern: the creator picks the least-bad option, accepts the fee structure, and writes off the audience members the chosen platform cannot serve. The lost contribution is invisible because it never happened.

The countries where existing creator platforms simply don't work

The geography of creator monetisation is the part the platforms do not advertise. The list of countries where major creator platforms do not allow direct payouts is long and includes some of the largest creator audiences in the world.

For creators based in Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Vietnam, the Philippines, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Indonesia, and dozens of other countries: Patreon, Stripe Connect, and most direct creator-payout platforms either do not support payouts or require complex workarounds (US business entity, EIN, bank account in a supported country). A YouTuber in Lagos with 500,000 subscribers cannot monetise through Patreon directly. A podcaster in Manila has the same problem. A writer in Buenos Aires faces the same wall.

For creators receiving from supporters in unsupported countries: the issue runs in the other direction. A US-based creator with a strong following in Nigeria, Indonesia, or Egypt cannot easily receive support from those audiences because their local payment instruments don't reach the platform. The supporter wants to give. The infrastructure refuses.

The Spondula network is being built corridor by corridor, but the design assumption is global participation from launch — not a Stripe-style supported-country list with most of the world excluded by default. A creator anywhere the network reaches can receive from supporters anywhere the network reaches, on the same handle, with the same instant settlement.

Stripe Connect — the infrastructure most creator platforms run on — supports payouts in 47 countries. That excludes Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Vietnam, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and most of the largest creator markets outside the US, UK, EU, and a handful of others. The "global creator economy" runs on infrastructure that is geographically anything but global.

— Stripe Connect supported countries documentation, 2025

What Spondula actually costs a creator

This is the part most platform comparisons get wrong, so it is worth stating clearly. Spondula does not charge a platform fee. There is no per-transaction processing charge. There is no monthly account fee. The only cost in the system is a 0.2% spread that applies when a conversion between currencies happens — not on every transaction.

What that means in practice:

A supporter in the US sends USD-S to a US-based creator who holds USD-S. No conversion. No spread. The creator receives the full tip. Spondula's cost: zero.

A supporter in the UK sends GBP-S to a UK-based creator who holds GBP-S. Same currency. No conversion. The creator receives the full tip. Cost: zero.