When I started, I thought I knew how OnlyFans worked. You set a subscription price, you share almost everything on your feed, you send a mass message here and there, and the subscriptions pay you. A simple subscription website.
That's what most new creators think. It's what I thought too.
Then something happened that I didn't expect. A few of my very first fans started tipping me out of the blue. I never asked them to. They bought every piece of content I had made, and then they asked for more.
That's when it clicked: the subscription was never where the money was.
The Receipt
Here's what I mean, in numbers. Over a full year on my page, only 12% of what I made came from subscriptions. 61% came from messages, and 27% came from tips.
And it's not just me. On the other pages we manage, messages brought in between 61% and 88% of everything they earned. Subscriptions never went above 14%.
Where the Money Actually Comes From
On OnlyFans, money comes in three main ways:
- Subscriptions: the monthly price a fan pays to see your feed.
- Messages: content you sell in private messages, called PPV (pay-per-view). You can send it to one fan, or to a whole list of fans at once as a mass message.
- Tips: money fans send you because they want to, on a post, during a livestream, or by buying from your wishlist.
Custom content usually gets paid through messages and tips too.
You can see exactly where your own money comes from. Your statistics page on OnlyFans breaks your earnings down by type. Check it once a week, and you'll never have to guess.
Why Messages Win: The Connection
Here's the thing nobody tells you. Most fans come in looking for one exact thing. They see it, they buy it (or they don't), and they leave. One and done. That's fine. It's part of the business.
But a few fans are different. They're easy to talk to. You find out you have things in common. Before you know it, you're chatting every day, and without you ever asking, they start spoiling you: tipping, buying gifts from your wishlist, picking up everything you make.
Those are your VIPs, and they deserve special care and treatment.
A subscription caps what a fan can spend at your monthly price. A connection doesn't. On my page, a fan who actually pays is worth almost 20 times what the subscription costs.
Most of your subscribers will never become VIPs, and that's okay. The goal is to find the ones who will. So give every new fan a fair shot at the start, and once you find your VIPs, take good care of them.
Free Trials: Why I Stopped Using Them
Free trial links let fans in without paying for their first month. I used to be open to them. Now I'm completely against them, and here's why.
Too many people come in through a free trial without a dime to spend. On my page, free-trial fans were 40% of all my fans, and they brought in 1.3% of the money. 95% of them never spent anything at all.
Every hour you spend chatting with someone who will never pay is an hour you're not spending with the fans who can. Someone who paid for your subscription already proved two things: they have a working card, and they're willing to use it. That's who deserves your energy.
There's one exception. If you're brand new, with almost no traffic, and you want to practise talking to fans, a few free trials can help you get started. But once you have decent traffic coming in, stop. It's low-quality traffic, and your time is better spent on the fans you know can pay.
What to Charge for Your Subscription
Your subscription is the door, not the house. Its job isn't to make you rich. Its job is to let the right people in and keep them coming back.
So before you pick a price, ask yourself one question: where do my fans live?
- Mostly in Latin America: $5 a month.
- Mostly in the US: $9.99 a month.
Why so different? Because $10 doesn't mean the same thing everywhere. For a fan in Colombia, a $10 charge feels like $100 does to an American. The big companies figured this out years ago: Netflix, Spotify and Steam, the biggest video game store, all charge Latin America a fraction of their US price, often around half. Steam even used to sell games in Argentine pesos for next to nothing, until people from other countries started buying through Argentina. In 2023 it switched the whole region to about half the US price. So $5 here and $9.99 in the US is really the same deal, priced for each wallet. Pricing for Latino fans deserves its own article, so I'm writing one.
The goal is a price fans don't even notice when it renews. Price it too high and most of them cancel right away, before you ever get the chance to build anything. Price it right and they stay, month after month, and that gives you time to build a real relationship. They like you more, and they buy more from you.
One more thing: everything here is about your subscription price. Pricing your PPVs is a whole topic on its own, and it deserves its own article. Subscribe to our newsletter so you don't miss it.
Don't Forget: OnlyFans Keeps 20%
For every dollar a fan spends, OnlyFans keeps 20 cents and you keep 80. So a $5 subscription puts $4 in your pocket. One more reason the subscription can't be your whole business: the real money is in what fans spend after they walk through the door.
Getting that money from OnlyFans into your bank account in Latin America is its own adventure, so I gave it its own article.
What to Do With This
- Stop judging your page by subscriber count and subscription price alone.
- Price your subscription for where your fans live: about $5 for Latin America, $9.99 for the US.
- Skip free trial links once you have real traffic.
- Put your energy into the messages: give every new fan a fair shot, and take care of your VIPs.
- Check your statistics page every week to see where your money really comes from.
The subscription gets them in the door. The connection is what pays the bills.
And when the messages get to be more than you can handle on your own, that's a good problem to have. It means it's time to think about help. If you'd like that help to be us, reach out using the form, and I'll be in touch if I think we're a good fit. And subscribe to our newsletter so you don't miss the next one.
Besos!
Mari Minx