Can You Use Your Own Stripe Account With Stan?
A creator on r/passive_income says you cannot, and wrote up what that cost them in currency conversion on top of Stan's advertised 0% cut. Here is why whose Stripe account it is changes your bill, and what to ask any platform before you sell through it.
According to a creator who posted about it in r/passive_income, no. In their account of it, Stan puts you on a Stripe Custom account that Stan controls, rather than letting you connect the Stripe account you already have.
That reads like a technicality. It was the reason they were paid in EUR while selling in USD with a USD business bank account, and the reason Stan’s advertised 0% cut did not describe what the sale actually cost them.
Stan is built around Stripe, a payment provider known for supporting international payments and multiple settlement currencies. However, Stan does not allow regular creators to connect their own existing Stripe account. Instead, you are forced to use a Stripe Custom account controlled by Stan.
The platform’s cut is one line in a longer bill
Their complaint was not that Stan was taking too much. It was that the advertised number described only a fraction of what getting paid actually cost.
In addition to the transaction fee, international fee, currency-conversion fee and payout fee, the conversion is carried out using an exchange rate that was approximately 2% worse than the prevailing reference rate in my case.
This means creators pay a separate currency-conversion fee and then lose approximately another 2% through the exchange rate used for that same conversion.
We have not audited those numbers and cannot verify them. What is worth taking from the post regardless is the shape of the problem: a conversion spread is a cost that does not look like a fee. It has no line item. It shows up as a slightly smaller number arriving in your bank account, and unless you are checking the rate on the day against a reference rate, you will not see it at all.
Then there is the answer they got when they raised it:
I have raised this repeatedly with Stan. Instead of addressing the inaccurate fee information or offering a solution, support keeps responding that “Stan takes 0%.” That completely misses the point. It does not matter whether Stan or Stripe receives the money.
They are right that it misses the point, and the reason is structural. A platform that controls the payment account decides the currency, the conversion, the payout timing and the bank the money lands in. Its own commission can be zero while every one of those other decisions still costs the seller money. “We take 0%” is a statement about one line. It is not a statement about the bill.
Why whose account it is decides everything else
Every platform in this category makes one of two arrangements with your money.
In the first, the customer pays the platform. The platform holds the balance, does whatever conversion it does, and forwards you a payout on its own schedule. Your Stripe account, if you have one, belongs to the platform in every way that matters. You cannot see the raw transaction, you did not choose the settlement currency, and you cannot leave without waiting for a final payout. This is the arrangement the creator above describes at Stan, and it is also how Gumroad, Linktree and Beacons handle a sale.
In the second, the customer pays you. The platform is the software that presented the checkout, and the charge is created directly on your account.
The creator in that thread was asking for the second arrangement. Their first suggested fix was “allow creators to connect their own Stripe account,” and their second was “enable USD payouts to eligible USD bank accounts.” Those are the same request. The second follows from the first, because settlement currency is a property of your Stripe account rather than something a platform grants you.
How Keepp handles it
You connect your own Stripe account to Keepp. Every sale is a direct charge on that account, so the money settles into it and never passes through ours. You are the merchant of record.
The practical consequences are the ones the thread was asking for. You configure the payout currency, the payout schedule and the destination bank yourself, in your own Stripe dashboard. If a conversion to your bank’s currency has to happen, it happens on the terms you set with Stripe, and you can see the rate that was used. Your Stripe dashboard shows every charge, every fee and every payout at full detail, because it is your dashboard. If you close your Keepp account tomorrow, the Stripe account, the customer records and the money are already yours and stay where they are.
Keepp sells in seven currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, INR, AUD, CAD and SGD. You set the currency on the product, and it is the currency the customer is charged in.
What Keepp charges
Free is $0 a month and takes 5% of a sale. Pro is $9.99 a month and takes 3%. Influencer is $24.99 a month and takes 0%.
Stripe’s card processing sits on top of whichever of those you are on. That is Stripe’s fee, charged on your own account, at the rate Stripe publishes for your country, and you can read it on your own statement rather than taking our word for it. Every platform in this category has this cost, whatever their pricing page does with it.
We are telling you the commission and telling you there is processing underneath it, because the alternative is the situation in that thread, where the headline number was accurate and the total was not.
Three questions worth asking anywhere
Ask these of any platform you are considering, Stan and Keepp included, and ask them before you build the page rather than after the first payout.
When a customer pays, whose account does the charge hit first? If the answer involves the platform holding it and forwarding it on, everything below follows from that.
Who chooses the settlement currency, and who sets the exchange rate? If you sell in one currency and get paid in another, someone is converting, and the rate they use is a cost whether or not it is called a fee.
Can I see the raw transactions? A payout figure with no underlying detail cannot be checked. If you can open a processor dashboard in your own name and reconcile against it, you can audit what you are being charged. If you cannot, you are relying on the platform’s summary.
The creator in that thread found out the answers a month in, from their bank statement. They are all answerable on day one, from the outside, before any of it is your problem.