Everyone leads with the percentage. That is the trap. These two platforms are not competing for the same creator at all, and the rule that decides it is buried in a paragraph almost nobody quotes.
Last updated July 2026
Tell us what you post and what following you have, and we will tell you honestly whether Passes, OnlyFans or neither is the right home for it. Then we promote, price and message for you on whichever you pick. Free, confidential, a reply within 24 hours, and your login and payouts stay yours.
Content policy decides this, not the fee. Passes prohibits explicit content outright, and it also prohibits linking or pointing fans to an NSFW platform from your page. OnlyFans permits explicit content, and that is the whole reason its buyers are there. So if you post explicit content, Passes is not open to you at any percentage, and it will not even let you use it as a clean funnel into the page that is. If you are brand-safe and you already have a following, Passes is a genuine option worth applying to.
Then there is the number itself, and here is the headline nobody else is printing: on the marketing rate Passes is half of OnlyFans, and on its own Terms the two are identical at 20%. Both figures are published by Passes right now. We break that down below, quote for quote. For everything else about the platform, the application, the payouts and the fine print, read our full Passes review.
| Passes | OnlyFans | |
|---|---|---|
| Published take rate | Two different numbers, live at the same time. The homepage says "Passes takes just 10%. You keep 90% of everything you earn". The Creator Terms of Service say "We take a 20% fee of all credit/debit Sales" | One number. The Terms of Service state "Our Fee is calculated as 20% of the total Fan Payment and will be deducted from each Fan Payment" |
| Other rates | Shop and marketplace sales published at 0% for up to one year (company blog, Aug 26, 2025). DMs and exclusive content published at 10% | The 20% applies across subscriptions, tips, pay-per-view messages and customs |
| Explicit content | Banned. The Community Guidelines say "We do not allow explicit adult content, nudity, or pornography". Selling panties, lingerie or inherently sexual items is also banned | Permitted. It is the reason the platform exists and the reason its buyers are there |
| Linking to an adult page | Banned too. "Direct linking or calls to action to a NSFW platform within the bio, captions, text/audio/video posts, etc. is prohibited". You cannot run Passes as a funnel into OnlyFans | No restriction on linking out to your other platforms |
| Who can join | Application with review. You must be 18+ and have a "size-able following" across your social accounts, with engagement assessed. Review takes "a few days". No follower minimum is published | Open signup. Anyone 18+ who passes ID verification can have a live page today |
| Fan age | Fans aged 13 to 17 are allowed. They cannot receive DMs and see only age-appropriate content | 18+ only, on both sides of the transaction |
| Payouts | Published minimum payout of $50, by ACH or PayPal. Automatic payouts are free and land 3 to 5 business days after schedule. Instant options carry extra fees whose amounts are not published | Standard payout options once you are ID verified |
| Best for | Brand-safe creators who already have a real mainstream audience and no intention of posting explicit content anywhere they would want to link to | Explicit creators, and anyone who wants to start earning this week without waiting on an approval |
The income tools are real and well built. So are the walls. Read both columns before you spend a week on an application.
No. The Passes Community Guidelines say it in one line: "We do not allow explicit adult content, nudity, or pornography. We recognize that not all content is inherently pornographic, such as nudity in art, but we are unable to support any such explicit Content." It also bans the sale of panties, lingerie and inherently sexual items. That is the whole comparison for a large share of the people reading this.
OnlyFans permits explicit content. That is not a tolerated grey area, it is the product, and its buyers arrived with their cards already on file for it. The two platforms are not alternatives to each other in the way the search box implies. They are different businesses that happen to share a subscribe button.
Here is the part almost every other comparison leaves out, and it is the most consequential sentence on either platform's site. Passes does not only ban explicit content on Passes. It bans pointing at it. Verbatim from the guidelines: "Direct linking or calls to action to a NSFW platform within the bio, captions, text/audio/video posts, etc. is prohibited."
Read that again if you skimmed it. The standard advice on every listicle is to keep a clean brand-safe page as your top of funnel and let it feed your adult page. On Passes that strategy breaks the rules. You cannot link out, you cannot write a call to action, and your Passes page is not allowed to know your OnlyFans exists. For an explicit creator, Passes is not a complement to OnlyFans. Running both is not a plan.
So the brand-safe creator on Passes has to build income out of what they are allowed to do. Memberships, exclusive drops, calls, tickets, and the quiet durable one: they earn from the products they actually recommend, the gear and software they were going to mention anyway. It is a slower income shape than the explicit lane, and worth being clear-eyed about.
OnlyFans is unambiguous. Its Terms of Service, last updated August 2024, state: "Our Fee is calculated as 20% of the total Fan Payment and will be deducted from each Fan Payment." A flat, published, contractual 20%. You can dislike the number, but you always know it.
Passes publishes two different rates at the same time. Its homepage says: "Passes takes just 10%. You keep 90% of everything you earn", presented alongside the words "No Hidden Fees". Its Creator Terms of Service at passes.com/terms, effective April 18, 2024, say: "We take a 20% fee of all credit/debit Sales." Both are live in July 2026.
We are not going to resolve that by picking whichever number suits the story. The marketing rate is 10%. The contractual rate, in the document you actually agree to, is 20%. Until Passes reconciles the two, a creator cannot know in advance which one governs. So the honest conclusion is the headline: on the marketing rate Passes is half of OnlyFans, and on its own Terms the two are identical at 20%.
On $1,000 gross it gets concrete. OnlyFans takes its published 20% and leaves you $800.00. Passes leaves you $900.00 at its marketed 10%, or $800.00 at the 20% in its Terms. The entire advantage, $100 a month on $1,000, rests on which of Passes' own two numbers turns out to apply. That is not a question a creator should have to guess at.
One more clause, reported neutrally. Passes' Terms define "Net Consideration" as the total received "less any fees, taxes, and third-party expenses (e.g. any 'gas' or other payment or transaction processing fees)", which sits awkwardly next to "No Hidden Fees" on the homepage. We will not compute a blended effective rate from it, because any figure we produced would be invented. We are telling you the clause is there. Passes also publishes 0% on Shop and marketplace sales for up to one year (company blog, August 26, 2025) and 10% on DMs and exclusive content.
Yes, in the sense that matters: it is a real, funded company that pays creators. Passes was founded in 2022 by Lucy Guo, a co-founder of Scale AI, and is headquartered in Miami. It acquired Fanhouse in July 2023 and rebranded in April 2026 as "the Creator Accelerator Platform". Reported funding is roughly $49M to $50M. All of that is reported, not audited, and we label it as such.
Its homepage carries self-reported, unaudited numbers: "10,000+ Creators", "1.5M+ Fans", "9 Figures Paid". It also shows "$24.8k Avg Monthly Revenue". Treat that one with real care, because Passes does not define what it is an average of. It is not stated to be what a typical creator earns, and you should not read it that way.
A putative class action, Rosenblum v. Passes, Inc., was filed on February 26, 2025 and is now pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California (No. 2:25-cv-08457). It alleges CSAM-related claims involving a creator said to have been 17 at the time. Passes denies the allegations categorically, calling them "meritless" and, to TechCrunch, "completely and utterly false". In February 2026 the court declined to grant Passes Section 230 immunity at the pleading stage. That is a procedural ruling on a legal defense, not a finding that any allegation is true. As of July 2026 the case is in discovery: no trial, no judgment, no settlement. Sources: TechCrunch, March 3, 2025, and the court docket.
Passes is not open signup. You apply, and the application is reviewed. You must be 18 or over and have what Passes calls a "size-able following" across your social accounts, with engagement assessed. Review takes "a few days". No follower minimum is published anywhere, and any article quoting you a specific number is making it up.
OnlyFans will take you today. Verify your ID and you have a page by the evening, with zero followers and nobody's permission. That is a decisive practical difference and it cuts OnlyFans' way more often than people admit. A platform that will actually have you beats a nicer one that says no.
There is a quieter difference in who the fans are. Passes permits fans aged 13 to 17, with no DMs and only age-appropriate content shown to them. OnlyFans is 18+ on both sides. That tells you who each platform's buyer really is, and buyers with their own credit cards are the ones who pay you.
Passes publishes a $50 minimum payout, paid by ACH bank transfer or PayPal. Automatic payouts are free and land 3 to 5 business days after your schedule. Instant options carry extra fees whose amounts are not published in text, so we will not guess them. One honest line: its Terms commit only to paying "bi-weekly within thirty (30) days", far slower than the "Instant Payouts" the marketing promises.
And one clause to read before you sign: the Creator Terms allow a "leaking fee of $50 per site, platform or medium" for each leaked piece of content, collectible through your payment method. Leaks are not always in your control. Know that it exists.
Patreon is the cheapest of the three on paper: a flat 10% for pages published after August 4, 2025. It allows nudity behind an 18+ paywall but bans real-person sexual activity even behind that paywall, which puts it between Passes and OnlyFans rather than alongside either. For a suggestive-but-not-explicit creator it is the obvious first stop. See how much Patreon takes and what Patreon's NSFW rules actually permit. If you are fully explicit, our Patreon alternatives for adult content is the page you want instead.
Fansly is the closest like-for-like swap for OnlyFans, and it is a straight 20% too. Its Help Center states that "Creators receive 80% of revenue from subscriptions, sold media, messages, and tips. No hidden fees for payouts, processing, or currency conversion." It permits explicit content. So for an explicit creator the real choice is Fansly or OnlyFans, at the same take rate, and Passes never enters the conversation. Read what Fansly is and how much Fansly takes.
This is the genuinely useful comparison, because Passes and Fanfix are the real alternatives to each other, not to OnlyFans. Fanfix is the other strictly safe-for-work, invite-only platform, reported at 80/20 though it does not publish the number itself. Both want an existing mainstream audience. Both ban nudity. A brand-safe creator is really choosing between those two and should read our Fanfix review and Fanfix vs OnlyFans alongside our Passes review.
No, and Passes would not want the title. It bans explicit adult content, nudity and pornography, allows minors on the fan side, and refuses to let creators even link to an adult platform. Whatever it is building, it is not a replacement for the thing OnlyFans does. The headline writers who keep pairing the two are chasing the search volume, not the facts.
Nothing, if you are explicit and you mean total earnings. OnlyFans' scale is the honest counterweight to every headline split: it has an enormous, established base of buyers already used to paying for this content. A better percentage on a much smaller audience nets less money, every time, and that arithmetic beats a 10-point difference in take rate without breaking a sweat. For the wider field, our OnlyFans alternatives roundup covers every serious option, and our guide to creator monetization platforms maps them by content policy rather than by fee.
Run it as a flowchart. If your content is explicit, pick OnlyFans or Fansly, because Passes will not have you and will not let you point at you. If your content is brand-safe and you already have a real following, apply to Passes, apply to Fanfix, and compare what comes back. If your content is brand-safe and you have no following yet, neither door opens, so go and build the audience first.
Then stop comparing and start promoting. Neither platform has a discovery feed that hands you subscribers. Ninety percent of nothing and eighty percent of nothing are the same number. The only variable here that moves your income by an order of magnitude is how many of the right people see your link, and that is decided on Instagram, TikTok, X and Reddit, not in a fee table. Start with how to promote an OnlyFans page: the funnel is the same wherever the checkout lives.
Passes or OnlyFans, neither one goes out and finds your fans, and neither one answers them at 2am. We do both: we promote where your buyers already gather, price your offers, and put trained chatters on your messages around the clock. You keep your login, your payouts and the large majority of what you earn.
Apply to FansPromo freeNo, and it is not trying to be. Passes bans explicit adult content, nudity and pornography in its Community Guidelines, while OnlyFans is built around permitting it. They serve different creators and different buyers. Passes is closer to a brand-safe membership platform than to an OnlyFans replacement.
No. Its Community Guidelines state: "We do not allow explicit adult content, nudity, or pornography." It also bans the sale of panties, lingerie or inherently sexual items, and it prohibits direct linking or calls to action to an NSFW platform from your bio, captions or posts. If you are explicit, Passes is closed to you.
It is a real, funded company: founded in 2022 by Lucy Guo, headquartered in Miami, reported funding of roughly $49M to $50M, and it acquired Fanhouse in July 2023. It pays creators. The open questions are its two conflicting published take rates and a pending lawsuit it denies, both covered below.
Both numbers are published by Passes right now. Its homepage says "Passes takes just 10%. You keep 90% of everything you earn". Its Creator Terms of Service say "We take a 20% fee of all credit/debit Sales". On the marketing rate Passes is half of OnlyFans. On its own Terms the two are identical at 20%.
Technically you can hold both accounts, but you cannot connect them. Passes prohibits direct linking or calls to action to an NSFW platform in your bio, captions or posts, which removes the entire point of running Passes as a top-of-funnel for OnlyFans. Most comparison articles miss this. It is the single most important rule on the page.
It depends on what you post. If you are explicit, Fansly is the closest like-for-like at the same 20%. If you are brand-safe, Passes and Fanfix are the real alternatives to each other, and Patreon publishes a flat 10% for pages created after August 4, 2025. Nothing beats OnlyFans on buyer volume for explicit content.
How Passes works, the application, the two published take rates and the fine print in its Terms.
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Captions, bios, DM scripts, tip menus, pricing and more, generated in seconds. No card needed.