Stan vs Whop
Jan-Erik Asplund
TL;DR: The fastest-growing creator economy platforms in 2025, like Stan and Whop, are those enabling creators to sell shadow market digital SKUs not found on Patreon, Kajabi, or Shopify. Sacra estimates that Stan ended 2024 at $28.3M in ARR, up 92% year-over-year. For more, check out our full report and dataset on Stan.
We first covered Stan at $14.7M ARR in February 2024, growing 765% YoY, as store-in-bio was replacing link-in-bio as the default home base for online creators.
We followed up at $27M ARR in May 2024, growing ~20% month-over-month, and interviewed Stan CTO Vitalii Dodonov about Stan’s eclectic creator base and their approach to retaining notoriously high-churn creators.
Here's our Stan update with key points via Sacra AI:
- Sacra estimates that Stan reached $28.3M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) at the end of 2024, up 93% year-over-year from $14.7M in 2023, with growth slowing from 20% MoM at the beginning of the year to nearly flat at the end of the year, with 61,462 paying customers for an average revenue per customer of $460.
- In early 2024, Master Resell Rights (MRR) exploded—an MLM-esque scheme by which a single white-labeled course on passive income or digital product sales could be endlessly resold by buyers as sellers to new buyers—driving 20% month-over-month growth through Q1 for Stan before the trend saturated and died, with signups dropping, churn spiking and ARR growth plateauing to 0.61% MoM by year-end.
- Not unlike the rise of eBay (1995)—built on beanie babies, grey market electronics, sneakers and pirated CDs—Stan along with Whop ($934M GMV in 2024, up 199% YoY) have grown extremely quickly with niche, shadow market digital SKUs like manifestation guides, at-home dentistry PDFs, and sports betting picks that you can’t find on conventional creator economy platforms like Patreon (~$1.5B GMV in 2024), Kajabi ($115M ARR in 2023), & Thinkific ($459M GMV in 2024) or ecommerce platforms like Shopify ($292B GMV in 2024).
For more, check out this other research from our platform:
- Vitalii Dodonov, CTO of Stan, on building a creator-aligned store-in-bio
- Stan: from $15M to $27M ARR in 3 months
- Gumroad: The Android of the Creator Economy that Powered $142M in GMV [2021]
- Neal Jean, CEO of Beacons, on building vertical SaaS for creators
- Beehiiv vs. ConvertKit vs. Substack vs. Mailchimp
- C-suite at creator economy company on the competitive dynamics of checkout
- Creator economy marketer and co-founder on building a sustainable business online
- Gumroad creator on Gumroad's economics and user journey
- Creator economy entrepreneur on content distribution and monetization
- Online educator on the economics of online course creation
