Ko-fi on your own site.

Unlike Patreon (REST API v2 with OAuth) or Substack (RSS plus API), Ko-fi does not expose a traditional public REST API for creator data. Instead, Ko-fi uses two distinct surfaces. The first is the public creator page at ko-fi.com slash your-handle, which renders your tip jar, shop grid, commission status, Gold tier, and recent supporter ticker as crawlable HTML. Any third-party widget can pull this content using standard public-page scraping (Ko-fi's terms permit non-abusive read access to public creator data). The Poper widget uses this mode by default, polling your public page every 6 hours on Free plans and every 30 minutes on Pro plans to refresh shop inventory, commission status, and Gold tier benefits. The second surface is Ko-fi's official webhook system, which you enable from the API page in your Ko-fi account settings. You generate a verification token, paste it into Poper, and we register a webhook endpoint that receives an HTTP POST every time a fan tips you, buys a shop item, places a commission order, or signs up for your Gold tier. The payload includes the supporter name (or anonymous flag), the amount, the currency, the timestamp, and a message field if the supporter left one. Webhook mode is what powers the live supporter wall, the recent-tip ticker, and the auto-decrementing commission slot counter. The verification token is the only credential exchanged (no password, no OAuth flow), and you can revoke it from the Ko-fi API page any time, which immediately stops new webhook deliveries. We store the token encrypted at rest using AES-256. Public-page mode and webhook mode can run side by side: the public page provides shop inventory and commission status, the webhook provides the live tip and supporter feed. This dual-mode design is why Poper supports any Ko-fi creator page (no Ko-fi sign-in required for basic embeds) while still offering the live supporter feel for creators who do connect the webhook.

Ko-fi is unusual among creator platforms because a single creator page can host four distinct monetization surfaces simultaneously: a tip jar (for one-off support, often $3 to $10), a shop (for digital downloads, physical zines, soundtracks, art prints, and more), a commissions board (for custom artwork or written work, with open or closed slots and a configurable price per slot), and a Gold subscription tier (a flat $6 a month for creators, with creator-defined benefits like patron-only updates, Discord roles, or download codes). The official Ko-fi iframe forces you to pick one surface per embed: a tip-only iframe, a shop-only iframe, or a commissions-only iframe. That means a creator who runs all four has to embed four separate iframes, each redirecting visitors away to ko-fi.com to convert. The Poper widget consolidates all four into one combined storefront layout, with each block sized and styled according to your conversion priority. A typical pattern: tip jar above the fold (low friction, drives the highest click-through), shop grid in the middle (medium friction, highest revenue per conversion), commission status as a sticky badge (creates urgency when slots are open), Gold tier as a footer card (low immediate conversion but highest lifetime value). You can also pick any single block as Featured to add a glowing accent ring and slightly larger card size, nudging visitors toward whichever surface you most want to push. Combining all four surfaces on one page means a visitor who arrives interested in your art might tip, then notice your shop has a soundtrack from the same project, then notice your Gold tier offers monthly process videos, then notice you have one commission slot open. Each new surface is a fresh chance to convert, and the visitor never leaves your domain until they actually click through to Ko-fi's checkout.

Ko-fi Gold is the platform's monthly subscription product for creators. It costs creators $6 a month flat (not a percentage of revenue), and in exchange unlocks the supporter-membership tier on the creator's page where fans can pay a creator-set monthly amount (commonly $3, $5, or $10) for ongoing perks. Ko-fi takes 0 percent on these subscription payments beyond the $6 a month creator fee, which is a structural difference from Patreon (which takes 8 percent on Pro and 12 percent on Premium plus payment processing) and Buy Me a Coffee (which takes 5 percent on memberships). For a creator earning $500 a month from members, the math is roughly $494 take-home on Ko-fi (after the $6 Gold fee and standard payment processing of about 2.9 percent plus $0.30) versus about $441 on Patreon Pro. The trade-off is that Ko-fi Gold has fewer tier-management features than Patreon: a single membership level per creator (with optional creator-defined benefit list) rather than Patreon's up-to-12 stacked tiers with cascading access. So a creator with a tip-jar plus single-tier model often picks Ko-fi for the better fee math, while a creator running a complex tier ladder ($3 access, $10 monthly art pack, $25 video tutorial, $100 producer credit) picks Patreon for the tier tooling. The Poper Ko-fi widget renders Gold tier with the full benefits list, the current supporter count (pulled from the public page), and a one-click join button that hands off to Ko-fi's signup flow. Highlighting the Gold tier as Featured (with the recommended-block accent) typically lifts Gold sign-ups by 30 to 40 percent compared to a flat tip-only embed.

When you connect Ko-fi's webhook system to Poper, every new tip, shop sale, commission order, and Gold sign-up arrives at our endpoint with the supporter name (or an anonymous flag if the supporter chose to be anonymous), the amount, the currency, the timestamp, and an optional message field. This unlocks two layout patterns that public-page mode cannot: the supporter wall (a grid or list of recent supporter names and amounts, often used as a footer block) and the recent-tip ticker (a horizontal scrolling marquee of recent tips, often placed above the tip jar to create live social proof). Both patterns are powerful conversion drivers because they show fresh activity (new tip from Sarah for $5 thirty seconds ago) which signals to a hesitant visitor that the creator is actively supported and that joining the supporter pool is normal behavior. The GDPR consideration is that Ko-fi already asks every supporter at checkout whether they want their name displayed publicly or whether they want to remain anonymous. The webhook payload respects this choice (anonymous supporters arrive with the anonymous flag set and no name), so re-displaying a non-anonymous supporter on your embed is GDPR-allowed under the same legitimate-interest basis Ko-fi already operates under (the supporter actively opted in to public display at the moment of payment). The widget never displays anonymous supporters by name, only by amount and timestamp. You can also configure the supporter wall to hide amounts entirely, hide all timestamps, or show only the first name and initial (Sarah K. instead of Sarah Kowalski) for additional privacy. We recommend adding a short notice on your page that says the supporter list is sourced from Ko-fi and updates automatically, mirroring the same disclosure Ko-fi makes on its own creator pages. The widget itself does not set tracking cookies on your visitors and does not transmit personally identifiable information from your site to Ko-fi unless a visitor explicitly clicks a tip or join button.

Ko-fi is one of four major creator-monetization platforms that target the same broad audience but with very different fee structures and feature mixes. Ko-fi takes 0 percent on tips (only payment processing) and a flat $6 a month for the Gold subscription product, with about 5 percent on shop sales. Buy Me a Coffee takes 5 percent on memberships and tips, blends one-off tipping with monthly memberships, and is popular among visual creators and one-person businesses. Patreon takes 8 percent on the Pro plan and 12 percent on Premium plus payment processing, but offers the deepest tier and post tooling, the best mobile app for creators, and a dedicated creator success team for accounts above a certain threshold. Substack takes 10 percent plus payment fees on paid subscriptions and is heavily focused on written and audio content (newsletters and podcasts) rather than visual or commission work. Gumroad takes a flat 10 percent on digital product sales and is best suited for one-time purchases rather than recurring memberships. The choice between platforms is largely about audience expectation (writers tend toward Substack, podcasters and YouTubers split between Patreon and Ko-fi, visual artists toward Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee, digital-product creators toward Gumroad, open-source maintainers toward Ko-fi or GitHub Sponsors) and feature mix (Patreon has the deepest tier tooling, Substack has the best email and podcast publishing, Ko-fi has the lowest fees and the most monetization surfaces in one place, Buy Me a Coffee has the simplest one-off tip flow). The Poper widget supports embedding from Ko-fi out of the box, with sister widgets for Buy Me a Coffee, Patreon, Gumroad, and Substack so creators who want to feature multiple monetization channels on one site can do so without juggling four different embed codes from four different vendors. This makes Poper the closest thing to a unified creator-monetization embed layer for the open web. For most creators starting out, the right answer is to pick Ko-fi as the primary platform (lowest fees, most flexibility) and use the secondary widgets for opportunistic surfaces like a Patreon tier embed for visitors who want stacked perks or a Substack widget for visitors who want long-form newsletters. The single-payout simplicity of Ko-fi (Stripe or PayPal direct, no holding period, no minimum balance) is also a real advantage over Patreon's monthly creator-payout cycle, which is why solo creators and small teams without an accounting buffer often pick Ko-fi first.