SubscribeStar Help Center

SubscribeStar is an independent membership media platform that operates on a subscription basis. Creators can develop their talents while earning money. We also provide our users with proper tools to discover information, establish new connections, and communicate with the ones who matter.

To read our statement, learn about our values and mission - visit About Us section.

SubscribeStar enables the audience to discover new celebrities/talents or just follow the ones they already know. On another hand, we welcome all Stars, established or emerging, in areas including but not limited to music, literature, art, dancing, photography, acting, sports, business, media, finances, science and so on.

If you are vlogger, celebrity or entertainer, teacher or coach, political commentator or radio host, gamers with streaming experience, event venue or event organizer, clerical organization or individual preacher - just click "Become a Star" and start your journey!

For the Stars we do have the option to mark their page as "18+ only". This way we can tailor our service with needed precision: subscribers will be clearly warned whenever they access this sort of content so their experience is always safe and enjoyable.

In addition, to pay for the subscription or make commission, a subscriber needs to be of legal age for such transactions in his/her area of residency.

Yes, it is. Unless you engage in any activities clearly stated (but not limited to) in Terms and Conditions.

Regarding the security of transactions, storage, etc. we do have all the proper certificates and protocols to keep your experience as safe as possible unless stated otherwise in other documents or by the third party.

It should not take more than a minute - just click "Become a Star" at the top of any page on the site, fill out a short and easy form, confirm your email address and that’s it! Now you can post your content and make money. If you feel lost - drop us a line on [email protected].

Our service fee is only 5%. We can make it lower per our sole discretion. Some profiles request extra services and agree on individual fees.

This is what payment processor takes from each transaction. SubscribeStar is not a payment processor (not a company processing credit card transactions). A single credit card transaction fee is 2.9% + $0.30 on average. For transactions over $30 it's 3.5% + $0.30 per transaction.

• Bank transfers (Wire, ACH), almost any country international transfers.
• other types of electronic accounts providing bank credentials (ask the support team for the full list)

ACH is the most reliable option: 1) it's faster 2) it's safer,  you're not receiving your money through a 3rd-party service which has its own regulations and terms.

Any service which has bank account credentials is supported. Please, let us know if there is a payout method that is more convenient for you - we will definitely consider alternative payout options.

You make a request on your Payouts page with the amount you want to withdraw. You can submit requests every two weeks. You need to reach $150 on your balance to make a request. The minimum request amount starts from $50.

Sometimes a single payout is made in multiple transactions.

Please follow the rules and instructions described in the Markdown Guide.

Sorry, but the answer is "No". Check out Kickstarter or other crowdfunding platforms.

Make the Star contact us directly.

This is totally up to you. Whether that be writings, audio, video or photos - you can post your content taking into consideration the copyright laws and other human norms.

If you are uploading video:

Upload it on YouTube or Vimeo and paste a link in the post body, it will automatically embed the video player.

If YouTube or Vimeo isn't an option, consider Mega, Dropbox, GoogleDrive.

Please, keep in mind that upon reaching a certain volume of content we may charge you for the storage. You will be clearly notified in advance about such an additional charge.

Some of our Stars earn five-figure income monthly. It's all up to you.

Any.

For the European Union, Canada and United Kingdom: no need to worry about it, we handle and pay VAT. 

To subscribe, first, you need to find a Star to subscribe to. You can do it by browsing our extensive Stars directory or by conducting a search - you can see it at the top of every page on this site. Once you find somebody you are interested in, just click the "Subscribe" button placed on the Star's page.

You can unsubscribe at any time - just go to the page "My Subscriptions" and click the "Unsubscribe" link that can be found next to the Star's name.

While subscribing, you will be asked to fill out a payment method form (i.e., credit card or debit card acceptable). You need to do it only once when subscribing for the first time. For subsequent subscriptions, you can use the same payment method or add a new one.

There are many reasons why your payment can be declined. Credit card companies don't tell us the reason behind it. The best way to handle this situation is to contact your bank directly to make sure that your account information is accurate and/or you have sufficient funds.

After a short period of time, we will automatically retry to make the payment and notify you of this attempt and the outcome of it.

This is not common but can happen. Normally when a Star puts his/her page on pause there will be a message that explains the situation. In this case, your recurring payment remains frozen (on pause) until the Star returns and resumes their activity. So, you are not being charged for the officially paused subscription.

If the Star has not made an announcement about the pause, you may want to contact this Star and find out what is happening. As a result, you may receive a refund from the Star.

Also, you can cancel your subscription at any time. Furthermore, while canceling, you will be asked for the reason why you wish to cancel. Each and every answer will be counted towards the Star's credibility and may have consequences.

More on our policy regarding refunds you can find on dedicated page Refund policy.

You are able to manage email notifications (updates) under "My Subscriptions" page https://www.subscribestar.com/subscriptions

Just click on the green envelope icon and confirm that you are really want to disable all notifications from the selected Star.

You need to be logged in to your account to do so.

If you are a Star (content creator), you can change your display name (account name) on the Profile Page Settings page in the General section ( https://www.subscribestar.com/profile/settings ). This will also change your display name if you are a Star and have subscriptions as well. Please, notice that this won't change your URL/slug.

And if you are a Subscriber, to change your display name to a desired one, simply go to your Account Settings page - https://www.subscribestar.com/account/settings and edit the Name / Nickname information. 

To sign in (log in) to SubscribeStar, you can click on the "Log In" link in the upper right corner (for desktop users). If you are on the mobile device - click on the "Menu" icon in the upper right corner of the screen (three stacked lines, aka "triple bar") and then click on the "Log In" link.

As an alternative, you can directly access the login screen by going straight to this page - https://www.subscribestar.com/login .

Please, remember - you can not just "subscribe to the site" - you always subscribe to the particular Star (content creator). Therefore, after you logged in, you probably would want to proceed to the list of your subscriptions - https://www.subscribestar.com/subscriptions .

There is an option called "Trust Period" - you can find it here - https://www.subscribestar.com/profile/settings

Enabled/disabled by the Star, this option manages the amount of time for how long your new Subscribers will be seeing a content limited by the 3 very latest posts of the corresponding subscription tier. After the Trust Period is over, Subscribers will get access to all posts in the related tier. This may help to eliminate "content skimmers" and encourage the real supporters to stay for good.

First of all - make sure you have enough funds on your card. You may want to verify this with your bank or with whoever issued the card in question.

After that, you should go to My Account Settings ( https://www.subscribestar.com/account/settings ) and look under section Billing Info. You will want to delete the existing and failed card by clicking an "X" icon to the right of the card in question. Then you will be able to add the same card again and make it a default payment method.

Please, be aware that while you believe your card has failed simply because of the insufficient funds, the reality may be that your card didn't go through the rigorous verification process that is performed by our payment processor. This may happen by half-a-dozen of reasons. Please, make sure you entered all information required for the credit card and that the information you entered is as precise as possible

Please, shoot us a message at [email protected] from the email address you would want to be your current email address on the account, describing the situation. Also, that will be helpful to understand what wrong email address do you think you have used to sign up.

Yes, we do accept prepaid cards as a payment method.

Payments can be made by subscription or by paying commissions.

Monthly payments are results of a subscription avenue. If the content creator you would want to support got subscription tier with higher subscription price, then just switch to the higher tier by going to My Subscriptions page (https://subscribestar.com/subscriptions) and clicking on a teal-colored cog icon placed inline with the Star you care.

If the Star doesn't have a higher tier (the subscription tier with a higher price than you currently pay), then you can request your Star to make one. This is easy and will benefit everybody who's involved.

If the aforementioned solution isn't an option, you can resort to the manual donation via the "Donate" feature that is available with (almost) all Stars. To make a Donation, simply login to your account and proceed to the Star's profile page. There, you will see the button "Donate" under the Star's avatar (left side of the page).

We do not envision us using PayPal as a payment option in the foreseeable future.

The cardholder's name is between you, us and a payment processor. The Star you commissioned (and other members of our community) will see only whatever you put as your Name/Nickname in My Account Settings page - https://subscribestar.com/account/settings. You can change it at any time.

There may be a number of reasons for some functionality of the site isn't working as expected. 

From the experience, the most common one is on the client-side based reason. What this means is that you, as a client, may employ a firewall or some sort of popup blocker (browser plugin or extension) that prevent our site from functioning as expected. To understand if this is the real reason behind the issue, please, disable all firewalls and potentially relevant browser plugins and extensions to see if the issue is gone.

If not - just shoot us a message with the description of your problem - we will take care of it.

Yet another reason for some or our site is acting upon you is that you may use an extremely outdated operating system (i.e. Windows XP). We do not support such systems nor we support fairly outdated browsers. We understand that somebody may get emotionally attached to the operating system he/she uses for decades, and recognize the expenses associated with the upgrade. However, we also calculate the cost of supporting such systems and browsers and this is not the route we are ready to follow. Please, upgrade and update as often as it is reasonable for you. 

The approval process is a complex and non-unidirectional endeavor. On average it takes between 24 and 72 hours for our Onboarding team to review an application and make a decision. However, sometimes it requires more back and forth correspondence between us and an applicant.

To expedite the process, simply add your SubscribeStar profile address to your existing social networks Contact/About pages and/or to the personal website. When done, send us links to these pages with the word EXPEDITE in the subject line. Such links can be removed after the approval process is over. As an alternative, the link to the profile page can be used in a post or publication just to prove that an applicant has full control over that online entity.

At the moment we have the following upload limits (each file):

• Audio: 50Mb
• Video: 250Mb
• Image: 5Mb
• Document: 300Mb

This will satisfy the absolute majority of our users and we have plans on increasing these limits sooner rather than later. 

If you are willing to increase the file upload limit, get in touch with our Support Team by email - we WON'T charge any additional fee for that. 

However, for those who would want to post bigger files we recommend (but not endorse) the following:

1. Use major video hosting platforms - YouTube, Vimeo, BitChute - and then simply embed the video link to your post. The video will be played using the original video player, exactly the way it does on the original publishing platform.
2. For the large archives - use the cloud-based storage such as Mega, Dropbox, SpiderOak, ElephantDrive and similar - and simply post a link to your archive in the body of your post.

Yes, we do.

However, this doesn't mean that we can transfer monies to all countries existing in the world. Please, contact us via [email protected] to verify if we can send payouts to your country. 

Yes, there is the way.

Log in to your account. Then, on My Profile Settings page ( https://www.subscribestar.com/profile/settings )  scroll down to the Subscription Tiers section and create a new or edit an existing tier. While doing this, you could set "Limit the number of Subscribers to this tier to ... " number. If you don't enter anything, then there is no limit on how many subscribers can join this particular Subscription Tier.

You don't need to contact us to unsubscribe. Simply log in to your account and proceed to My Subscription page. Then, in the section Active Subscriptions you can manage your subscriptions: unsubscribe from updates, switch Subscription Tier (the price of the subscription, if such an option exists for particular Star) or completely unsubscribe from the Star. 

Be aware - by unsubscribing, you instantly lose access to the content of the Star you just unsubscribed from. If you change your mind later, you will be charged full price for the new subscription.
We do not issue any refund to the unsubscribed whatsoever, no matter how quickly that unsubscription was following the initial subscription.

Based on our experience, potential Stars who don't have any or have a very limited social media presence will have difficulties with reaching any significant financial success in the subscription business. A large piece of being successful as a Star is to have an established and significant followers base that is ready to make monetary pledges.

However, there are cases when somebody with close to zero social media presence is just a writer or a science persona or an artist or a musician whose content is published mostly in specialized media outlets or in the industry-specific magazines only. If you feel you can prove you've got a solid body of creative work - please, submit the links to your published materials and we will be more than happy to review your application. 

Our billing process includes a number of industry-standard verifications. Each of such verifications may result in your card being refused to be processed. As a result, we will receive a decline message, and your card won't be charged. In this case, no attempts to charge your card is going to be made.

Unfortunately, we may have only a generic decline notice in our possession, which won't help you much. The best way to solve this issue is to check if all information related to your payment method is entered correctly.

While you can submit a payout request at will (but not more frequently than once in 14 days), it will take time to process your payout request.  In the "Payouts" section of our Terms of Service, you can read the following: 

"Payouts of less than $20,000.00 USD are going to be processed within the next 2 weeks after payout request is submitted by the Star. Processing time for the payouts that are equal to or more than $20,000.00 USD is going to be no lesser than 2 weeks and will correlate to the requested amount."

There is a number of reasons why your card can keep getting declined. Please, contact our Support Team ([email protected]) and provide us with a description of the issue with adding your card. We will investigate and reply promptly.

Not an issue. However, before requesting your first payout, you will need to fill the appropriate Tax Identification form (W-9, W-8BEN or W-8BEN-E), where you have to use the name that matches the one on your bank account.

Please, read the section "Payouts" of our Terms of Service page - https://www.subscribestar.com/tos#payouts . It says: 

The User pays all and any fees and taxes associated with receiving money on their account.

Payouts are available after all submitted payments are settled to our bank account and cleared against possible chargebacks. There much more details on payouts, including some conditions that have to be met.

Our payout process is described in details here - https://www.subscribestar.com/tos#payouts

1. Enable "Markdown editor" under profile settings: https://www.subscribestar.com/profile/settings#configuration
2. Use the following code structure in your new post form:
   <details><summary></summary><p>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ</p></details>

You will find More info about using Markdown here - https://www.subscribestar.com/markdown_guide

We do not really delete profiles - we just put them on pause, so they can be easily restored at any moment.

This can be done for a number of reasons, but the main is this: the Star was inactive and hasn't visited his/her profile for a significant period of time and still has subscribers (or not). All we're trying to do is to prevent any damage in a form of monetary loss and disappointment taken by subscribers. Eventually, subscribers will realize that they paid for the content that wasn't delivered and may request a refund.

With all that being said, all funds collected on the paused profile are kept intact and are safe and will be returned to the Star upon proper payout request or refunded to Subscribers.

If you feel like your profile was disabled or paused, please, contact our Support team at  [email protected].

Charges by SubscribeStar will be shown on your bank/credit card statements as SUBSCRIBE STAR and our Support's contact phone number.

For the OAuth2 and GraphQL Integrations please refer to the dedicated page - https://www.subscribestar.com/api.  We also have Webhooks and Discord Integration.

Any subscriber, who subscribed to a not-free tier and whose payments aren’t currently processing, is being labeled as “Inactive Subscriber”. 

The reasons for the subscription payments not being processed varies from the expired credit card on file, to the case when Subscriber deliberately paused payments. 

To become an Active Subscriber again, this Subscriber has to verify the information for the payment method on file, and then hit the “Extend Subscription” button.

 These numbers aren't supposed to match. The Form 1099 you've received serves only as a rough approximation for the funds you've received. It is because, as a payment service, we must report our transactional volume attached to you, not the amount paid to you.

That means that the reports will reflect the full amount of all transactions, including the Service fee, Payout fee, Payment Processing fees, refunds, failed transactions, and VAT (if applicable), which is not disclosed, as we handle that ourselves. So, this reporting will not align with your payouts, nor should it.

Below you can see what the IRS says on how payment handlers (e.g., SubscribeStar) need to report the earnings (General FAQs on New Payment Card Reporting Requirements): 

Gross payment card and third party network transaction amounts are reported on the Form 1099-K, Payment Card and Third Party Network Transactions. The "gross amount" of reportable transactions means the total unadjusted dollar amount of aggregate payment transactions for each participating payee. 

The 1099 reports are supposed to include all the amount earned in the year (before any fee taken), which also includes sales that weren't paid out in the same year.

For example, if you, as a Star,  have got a Subscriber at $10 on December 31st, you are not going to be paid out that money in the same year. That's why your payout summary for that year won't include this particular sale, but your 1099 report will. Also, there'll be some sales from the penultimate year that were paid in January of last year — and while these will show up in the "Payouts" section, they will not be in the 1099 reports.

Furthermore, our payment processors often bring in some reporting changes that will cause a mismatch between our numbers and theirs. So you might see that for some months, your 1099 reports a higher income as compared to ones reflected in your "Payouts" section, while it might be just the opposite for some other months.

Please, keep in mind: this answer is neither legal advice nor tax advice. We strongly recommend that you speak to your certified professional tax adviser with any questions or concerns around tax reporting. 

Please recheck your inbox and spam folder. After reviewing tax forms, we always send out detailed instructions on what to fix.

TIN is a tax identification number. Each country has its own. You can find more information about specific countries and their TINs on the The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development portal.

The dimensions of the source file for the hero banner should be no less than 2000 pixels wide and around 900 pixels tall. The bigger - the better. Just keep the aspect ratio around these numbers. Please, provide the best possible render without compression (i.e., PNG, TIFF lossless formats).

As for the composition, you can use our existing hero banners as a guide, keeping in mind that they are also used for mobile view too when text goes over the art. Therefore, no text should be used on your source art. 

We leave the right to not proceed with any submitter art without explanations.

In the tax Identification forms taxpayers - W-9 for the US individual/business, W-8BEN for the foreign individuals and W-BEN-E for entities - there is a requirement to enter a “Foreign tax identifying number” (FTIN), line 6a. The instructions on what it is and how to do that can be found on the official IRS website - https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/iw8ben.pdf. Simply open this document and search for “Line 6a”. 

In short, if you are a citizen of any country - the US or any other country - and you pay taxes, you will have your tax identifying number assigned to you.

Yes. The Public Posts are public and are free for anybody to see, even for the Inactive Subscribers (aka, “Not Paid Subscribers”). 

As an alternative to “Public Post” you can create and publish posts with no price associated with them that are only visible to the subscribers of this tier. Simply create a tier with a $0 subscription price (i.e., effectively creating a “Free Tier”) and start publishing there. Anybody subscribed to this free tier will have access to the posts published under this tier at no charge, while others won’t.

You can bulk-upload your images while creating a post. Then, you can rearrange the position of each individual image within this batch. 

To place any individual image to an arbitrary position in the body of the post, simply drag-and-drop the image from the uploaded batch to the desired spot in the text. You can do it later while editing the already published post.

We are not a bank and cannot hold on to funds that are payable to our Stars for a prolonged period of time.

Therefore, we strongly advise requesting a payout at least four times a year, unless your account balance hasn’t reached a certain threshold (e.g., $30 for the US creators). Read more on this topic here - https://www.subscribestar.com/tos#payouts

Simply let us know via [email protected]  the nickname of the subscriber in question and the reason you report them. 

Please, provide all possible information about the claim, including screenshots and other related details.

The cards can be declined for various reasons. The banks provide us with the explanation (a very short note) on what went wrong, but more often than not this explanation is somewhat vague. 

Please, reach out to [email protected] and we will review your case.

Yes, but the procedure depends on if you are a Subscriber or a Star.

Being a Subscriber, you can delete your account at any time. Please, keep in mind that you will lose access to your current active subscriptions, if you have any, at the moment of the account termination. Read more on this in our Terms of Service. 

For the Star deleting the account is a similar procedure, with one exception - no accounts with Active Subscribers can be immediately deleted. The Active Subscribers are those who subscribed to the not-free tier and paid for the current time period. 

No, we do not. Read more in our Privacy Policy.

We can transfer the funds accumulated in Star's account to the account of another Star upon request. In this case, if sending Star is eligible for a 1099-K, this form will reflect only payments processed toward this Star, i.e., no transfers from this Star to other content creators will be reflected in the 1099-K.

Advertisement-blocking browser extensions or plugins can indeed interfere with our Platform functionality. Such plugins may include the following: AdBlock Plus, Total Adblock, uBlock, AdGuard, Ghostery, AdLock, and many others. Whenever you have issues with logging in or other unexpected behaviors, simply try to disable/pause any browser extensions that may have caused this. This is true for all browsers and all computer systems.

Yes, the Commissions option will remain available in the described case.

To pause your profile with different options, you can use Vacation Mode. Read more on it here - https://www.subscribestar.com/posts/951355 

 Unfortunately, this isn't possible as it would create unforeseen far-spread complications across the Platform. 

Yes, it works exactly the way you described.

 Certainly, you can. Just ensure that the payout information for all accounts is identical, up-to-date, and that you are indeed the rightful ultimate beneficiary of those accounts. 

Yes, you can do it by following these steps:

1. Create a new tier with the new, higher or lower price.
2. Announce to all Subscribers in the current tier that you are moving them to the higher or lower tier and ask them to upgrade/downgrade.
3. Hide your existing tier by going to Profile Page Settings → Subscription Tiers, selecting the tier edit (the little green pen), and ticking the "Hide From Subscribers" checkbox near the bottom of the page.

This will encourage Subscribers to move to a new tier and prevent new Subscribers from joining the deprecated one.