Stan Store vs Beacons (2026): which one for selling calls?

Stan Store and Beacons walk into a bar. Within five minutes, both are trying to sell you an ebook about it.

That’s not a dig. It’s what they’re built for. Both are link-in-bio pages with a shop built in: digital downloads, courses, memberships, and yes, coaching calls as one of the things on the shelf. If you’ve typed “Stan Store vs Beacons” into Google and calls are a big part of what you sell, here’s how they compare, with prices read off their own sites, and a third option they’d rather you didn’t see.

Stan Store pricing and fees

• Price: Creator is $29 a month or $300 a year. Creator Pro is $99 a month or $948 a year. Both come with a 14-day free trial. There’s no free plan.
• Fees: 0% of your sales, on both plans.
• Calls: the Coaching Call product is on Creator. It syncs with Google Calendar and adds a Zoom or Google Meet link. A “max attendees” setting lets you run group calls.
• Payments: Stripe and PayPal. Stan sets up a new Stripe account for you; you can’t connect one you already have.
• Pro-only bits: discount codes, payment plans and removing the Stan branding. Yes, the logo costs $99 a month to lose.

Stan’s pricing is refreshingly simple: there’s one number. It turns up every month like a cat at dinner time, whether you sold anything or not.

Beacons pricing and fees

• Price: Free, then Creator at $10 a month ($100 a year), Creator Plus at $30 a month ($300 a year), and Creator Max at $100 a month.
• Fees: 9% of your sales on Free and Creator, 0% from Creator Plus up. (Their homepage says the free plan has no platform fees, but their pricing page and help centre both say 9%. We went with the pricing page, which is where the invoice lives.)
• Calls: sold as an Appointments product in your store, with Google Calendar and Zoom. You can connect one Google account. We couldn’t find group sessions.
• Payments: Stripe or PayPal.
• Branding: removing the Beacons branding starts at Creator Plus, $30 a month.

9% doesn’t sound like much until you notice it’s roughly what you’d tip a waiter. Every time someone books you, Beacons gets tipped. Notice too that the $10 plan keeps the 9% fee, so for selling calls it costs more than Free, not less. It’s the only upgrade we’ve seen that works as a downgrade.

What a year costs at three incomes

Percentages are hard to feel, so here’s the yearly cost of each plan at three monthly incomes from calls, billed yearly where that’s cheaper. Stripe’s fee (about 2.9% + 30¢ a payment) applies on top for all of them, so it’s left out.

At $100 a month, the free plans win, and shinetree Starter edges Beacons Free because 8% is less than 9%. Past that, the flat plans win, and shinetree Pro at $144 a year is less than half of Stan Creator or Beacons Creator Plus. Same 0%, less than half the bill.

The thing about selling your time

Here’s where the shop idea starts to creak. A shop is built for things that sit on a shelf. Your ebook can sell a thousand copies while you sleep.

An unsold ebook keeps. An unsold Tuesday at 3pm doesn’t.

Selling time brings problems a shop never has to think about: time zones (your 3pm is someone else’s 3am, and this has ended friendships), no-shows, reschedules, the meeting link, and the quiet Tuesday nobody booked. That’s what shinetree was built around, with the link-in-bio part underneath:

• Offers. Set a session to take offers, and people pick a time and say what they’d pay. You compare them and accept the one you want. Busy times go to the best offer, and you decide what a quiet Tuesday is worth. This is free on Starter.
• Group sessions on every plan, free included: one time, many seats, one meeting link.
• Zoom, Google Meet or Discord, connected once, with a fresh link for each booking. On Discord, each booking gets its own private voice room in your server.
• Free sessions are always free. No fee on a free intro call, on any plan.

Put all three next to each other on the things that matter when the product is your time:

Stan Store or Beacons for coaching calls?

Stan Store vs Beacons really comes down to one question: would you rather pay $29 every month whether anyone books or not, or hand over 9% of every booking forever? It’s like choosing between a leaky bucket and a slightly smaller bucket.

If your whole business is ebooks and presets, pick a bucket. A shop is a shop, and either will do. But you’re reading a post about selling calls, so we suspect your Tuesday at 3pm is the product, and for that the third corner brought better gloves: shinetree Starter is free with 8% on paid sessions, Pro is $144 a year with 0%, and both were built for selling time, not ebooks.

🎁 Right now, Pro’s first 3 months are free, no card needed. Stan’s cat, meanwhile, still turns up at dinner time.

Your sessions sit at the top of your page, your links sit underneath, and your week looks like this instead of a list of orders:

Quick answers

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