Compared September 2026
Curios is a creator marketplace with a storefront attached.
The same sentence as this product — sell direct, keep 100% — arranged the opposite way. Their fee is real and is charged to your reader at checkout, at 1–10% of the price plus the card fee; ours is charged to you, at $0 or $19 a month. Then the split widens: they are a marketplace with an app, an account and an NFT receipt, and this is a shop on your own domain handing over a file.
The table above cannot show their real cost, and that is not an oversight: their fee is billed to your reader rather than to you, so it never appears in a column of what the author pays. Read the two together. Their $9 a month is the true cost to you and it is genuinely less than $19 — while every reader you send them pays 1–10% more than the price you set, plus the card fee, on the page where they are deciding whether to buy at all. Whether that trade is good depends on something no calculator knows: how a $10.99 total on a $9.99 book reads to a reader who came from your newsletter.
Printed because a headline rate is not the whole bill, and because what a competitor charges for is the clearest statement of what it thinks it is selling.
| Inkwharf | Curios | |
|---|---|---|
| Who pays the platform's fee | You do — $0 or $19 a month | Your reader, at 1–10% of the price |
| Cut of each sale | Nothing, on every plan including free | None from you; 15% + 25¢ on the free tier after 25 sales |
| Cheapest paid plan | $19 a month | $9 a month |
| Free tier | Yes, to $500 of sales a month, permanently | Yes, for the first 25 sales |
| Who takes the payment | Your own Stripe account. We never hold a cent | They do, and pay out on a schedule set by your plan |
| Merchant of record | You are the merchant of record | Their platform processes the sale |
| Where your shop lives | Your own domain, or a free address on Inkwharf | Their marketplace, under their brand |
| Discovery | None. Your shop is not listed anywhere on this site | A marketplace with 27,100+ creators |
| Buyer email addresses | Every buyer's email address is yours | Given to the creator |
| What the buyer receives | DRM-free EPUB, watermarked to the buyer | An NFT receipt; downloads only if the creator enables them |
| Reader needs an account | None. An email address and a card | Yes, plus an app for the best experience |
| Formats | EPUB only | Any — ebooks, audio, video, anything |
| Reading experience | In-browser reader and send-to-Kindle on every book | Their app, or the marketplace in a browser |
| Track record | New, and small | 27,100+ creators, 259,000+ transactions |
A dot marks the side a row genuinely favours. Rows without one are a draw, and the ones marked against us are why the rest is worth reading.
A marketplace with 27,100+ creators and 259,000+ transactions puts your book in front of people who did not come from your newsletter. This site deliberately lists nothing, so every visitor to your shop is one you brought. If discovery is what you are shopping for, that is the whole argument and it is theirs.
Their platform fee and the card fee are added to the buyer's total, so a $9.99 book pays you $9.99. Set against a subscription that is due whether or not you sell anything, that is genuinely better for a small or seasonal catalogue — and it is why their free tier can exist at all.
$9 a month against $19. If you are comparing rate cards and nothing else, Lite wins and it is worth saying so before the rest of this page argues about where the money actually comes from.
iOS and Android apps, and any format rather than EPUB only — audiobooks included. If you sell audio, this product cannot help you at any price.
Content lives inside their account and app, so a reader who changed phones is their support problem rather than yours. A file you hand over is a file you may have to explain.
Their support page says it plainly: the fee is charged to the buyer, 1–10% of the listing price, and the card fee is billed to the buyer as well. So a $9.99 book is not a $9.99 book at their checkout. The fee did not disappear — it moved to the person deciding whether to buy, on the same page where they are deciding. Here the reader pays the price you set, and the $19 lands on you.
Their proof of purchase is an NFT and downloading is off unless the author switches it on. Every sale here is a DRM-free EPUB, watermarked to the buyer, that opens in any reader forever with no account and no app. Two positions on what a reader is buying — theirs is defensible, and it is not the one this product holds.
A marketplace listing lives on their domain, next to other people's books, under their brand. This is your domain, your name in the receipt, and nothing on the page selling anybody else.
They take the payment and release it to you monthly, weekly or daily depending on which tier you bought — payout speed is a paid feature there. Cards here are charged on your own Stripe key, so the money is yours at the moment of sale and there is no balance of ours for a fee or a delay to be applied to.
Theirs keeps 100% for twenty-five sales and then charges 15% + 25¢, which is a percentage that starts the month your list finally converts. The free tier here runs to $500 of sales a month and the plan above it is $19 flat — there is no volume at which a share of a sale appears.
Every figure quoted for Curios above, and the page it was read from, checked September 7, 2026. These pages are re-read against those claims rather than trusted — if one of them changes, this comparison is wrong until it is updated, and you should be able to tell that for yourself.