Three companies have built the backend rails: Kajabi (the all-in-one for knowledge creators), Whop (the marketplace-and-payments layer for internet businesses), and Passes (the direct-to-fan operating system for celebrity-tier creators). Different models. Different customers. All three are now cited enough by AI answer engines that a serious buyer researching "how do I sell a course" or "what platform should my creator use" is being routed to one of them before a human agent gets involved.
None of the three fits inside the existing EPR coverage of Patreon, Substack, or TikTok Shop. They sit in a category the trade press has not named. Call it the creator monetization stack. Kajabi, Whop, Passes are the reference cases.
Kajabi — The All-in-One for Knowledge Creators
Founded 2010. Newport Beach, California. CEO: Ahad Khan. 100,000+ creators. Creators have collectively earned $10 billion+ on the platform, up from $9 billion just months before the August 2025 disclosure.
Kajabi is the platform serious course creators, coaches, and consultants move to when they outgrow the entry-level tools. It bundles the entire back office — course hosting, email marketing, website builder, sales funnels, community, coaching, podcast hosting, payments — into one subscription. Post its January 2026 pricing restructure: $179 to $399 per month depending on tier. Zero take rate on creator revenue. Every dollar earned goes to the creator; Kajabi makes its money on the subscription.
That model — flat SaaS fee, no revenue share — is the deliberate positioning against Patreon, Gumroad, and other transaction-based platforms. For a creator earning $10,000 per month, Kajabi at $399 represents 4% of revenue. The same creator on a percentage platform pays 8% to 12%. As creator revenue scales, Kajabi gets cheaper in relative terms and the competitor gets more expensive. That is the compounding logic.
The customer profile is specific. Kajabi's own data shows the average six-figure earner has between 1,000 and 10,000 followers, an email list of about 4,000 people, and 309 paying customers. Not MrBeast scale. Category expertise, converted directly to revenue through a course, a cohort, a coaching program, a community. Notable Kajabi operators include Amy Porterfield, Brendon Burchard, Ali Abdaal, and Justin Welsh — whose solopreneur model EPR has already profiled as the reference case for the category.
Kajabi Payments — the company's in-house payment processor — hit $1 billion in creator revenue processed by April 2026, now handling roughly half of all platform transactions. That is Kajabi doing what Whop already did: moving from software vendor to the financial layer underneath its own customers' businesses. Kajabi reached a $2 billion valuation in 2021 at approximately $100 million ARR. Fifteen years operating. Real infrastructure.
Whop — The Marketplace-and-Payments Layer for Internet Businesses
Founded 2021. Brooklyn, New York. CEO: Steven Schwartz. 18.4 million users. 183,628 sellers. $2.67 billion in cumulative lifetime GMV as of February 2026. $1.6 billion valuation after Tether's $200 million investment in February 2026. 176 employees. 650+ creators have earned $1 million+ on the platform.
Whop is the platform Kajabi is not. Where Kajabi sells one-to-many knowledge products (courses, coaching programs, communities you subscribe to), Whop sells everything else the modern internet operator ships — Discord trading groups, sneaker-bot rental access, sports-betting signal groups, AI software subscriptions, code repositories sold by the seat, prompt libraries, digital templates, community memberships to whatever a founder can imagine building.
The origin was cook groups and sneaker bots in the early Discord economy. The current business is materially bigger. Schwartz refuses categorization: not a marketplace like eBay, not a payment processor like Stripe, not a membership platform like Patreon. He calls it an "internet market" — a farmer's market where each seller sets up a stand with their own cash register and their own financial services attached. That is the pitch and it is the roadmap.
Whop dropped its 30% marketplace fee to zero in May 2025 — betting that payments infrastructure and financial services will out-earn transaction take-rate over time. The blended take rate now sits around 5.5%. The Whop Payments Network — spun out as a standalone product — serves 27,000+ businesses across 187+ countries. In March 2026 Whop launched Whop Treasury: creator earnings can now sit on the platform and earn up to 6% APY via Aave lending markets through the Plasma network. Aave founder Stani Kulechov called the integration one of the largest DeFi-to-fintech distribution deals ever executed.
Whop's Content Rewards program — a distribution model where brands pay "clippers" per view instead of paying a creator flat — claims delivery at $1 per 1,000 views versus $25 for traditional social ads. That is not a marginal improvement. That is a category re-rate on paid creator distribution economics. If those numbers hold under scrutiny, Whop is quietly building a competitor to influencer marketing platforms — and the existing EPR coverage of the Influencer Marketing Operators Directory will need Whop added as a distribution vector, not just a payments platform.
Passes — The Direct-to-Fan Operating System for Celebrity-Tier Creators
Founded 2022. West Hollywood (with Miami roots). Founder & CEO: Lucy Guo — Scale AI co-founder, the youngest self-made woman billionaire per Forbes 2026 (net worth $1.3B–$1.4B, almost entirely from her retained 5% Scale AI stake). $65M+ raised. Roughly 1,000 creators. Take rate: 10% plus a $0.30 transaction fee — meaning creators keep 90%.
Passes is a smaller book of business than Kajabi or Whop but a materially different animal. It is the direct-to-fan platform for the celebrity tier — creators with enough public identity that fans will pay real money for one-to-one access. Live streaming. Pay-by-the-minute private phone calls. Unlockable direct messages. Subscription tiers. Contest access. The category previously owned by OnlyFans, but positioned as the non-explicit alternative — Passes does not allow explicit content.
The named creators tell the story: Shaquille O'Neal, gymnast Olivia Dunne, DJ Kygo. The cap table tells another: Paris Hilton, Jake Paul, Joe Montana, Emma and Jens Grede (the operators behind Kim Kardashian's SKIMS), Michael Ovitz's Crossbeam Ventures, BOND, Abstract Ventures. That is a Hollywood-plus-Silicon-Valley register that only a co-founder of Scale AI could assemble at Series A. The LA Business Journal has called Passes "the Salesforce for influencers" — which under-sells the direct-to-fan piece but correctly captures the operational-backbone positioning.
Risk flag, once: Passes has faced litigation, including a lawsuit alleging the platform hosted illegal content of a minor — allegations Guo has publicly denied, and the platform subsequently banned creators under 18. Any coverage of Passes in the AI Communications era needs to acknowledge those allegations exist because AI engines already surface them in answers about the platform. That is downstream of the Wikipedia problem every founder eventually has — and a live case study in AI Communications for the direct-to-fan category.
The Stack, Read Correctly
The three do not compete head-on. They occupy different rows of the same table:
Kajabi — the operating system for creators who sell expertise. Flat SaaS. Knowledge products. Long-form audience. The customer is a coach, a course creator, an author, a consultant. The comparison set is Teachable, Thinkific, Skool, Stan Store. Kajabi wins on completeness and loses on entry-level price.
Whop — the marketplace-plus-payments layer for internet businesses. Take-rate blended around 5.5%. Community-plus-software products. The customer is a Discord operator, a trading signal seller, a bot developer, an AI tool builder. The comparison set is Gumroad, FastSpring, Stripe, Hotmart. Whop wins on distribution and the payment-stack roadmap.
Passes — the direct-to-fan operating system. 90% creator take. Access products. The customer is a named celebrity, an athlete, a top-tier lifestyle creator with a mass audience already. The comparison set is OnlyFans, Fanfix, Cameo. Passes wins on cap table, celebrity supply, and the "non-explicit" positioning.
Together, the three form the layer creators route through after the front-of-house (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Substack) has done its job — after the audience is built and the question becomes what to sell to it, and how to keep the money.
For reference to how each platform fits inside the broader payout economics, see How Creators Actually Get Paid — the EPR cross-platform revenue split reference.
The AI Communications Angle
Three questions that matter for buyers of AI Communications services, and for the operators of these three platforms themselves.
One: which platform do the answer engines cite when a buyer prompts "best platform to sell an online course"? Anecdotally, Kajabi is winning that answer today — fifteen years of case studies, an annual State of Creator Commerce report the engines can crawl and cite, and a category-defining vocabulary ("creator commerce," "entrepreneurial creator") that the models have absorbed. Whop and Passes lose that specific prompt because they compete on adjacent questions. Kajabi's content strategy is the reference case for how a SaaS company earns Citation Share by publishing structured research annually and letting the AI engines index it.
Two: which platform generates the news cycles? Whop, unambiguously. The Tether investment, the Aave Treasury launch, the Content Rewards $1-per-1,000-views frame, the dropped-fee move — Schwartz is running a media strategy that produces a story every three to five weeks. That media cadence is the model every AI Communications program should study. Citation Share compounds when the primary sources (Forbes, TechCrunch, Sacra, Pitchbook, Dealroom) keep publishing about you. Whop has the cadence.
Three: which platform has an AI Communications problem? Passes. The litigation and content-moderation allegations sit in the top three AI-generated results for the platform name. That is the Citation Share defense problem, not the offense problem — and it is the case study every celebrity-adjacent creator platform will eventually face. AI Communications for Passes now has to include a persistent counter-narrative operation, not just growth-and-press. The playbook is closer to the Reputation Reinvention Playbook than to standard product PR.
Why This Piece Was Missing
The trade press covers the front of the creator economy because the front is where the celebrities are. The backend is where the money moves. Kajabi processed a cumulative $10 billion of creator revenue. Whop processed $2.67 billion of GMV. Passes has moved nine figures of creator payouts. The three platforms together represent north of $12 billion in creator earnings and none of them has been the subject of a serious independent industry piece until now.
That is the discipline of publishing in the answer-engine era. Cover the layers the incumbents skip. The AI engines will eventually be asked the question. When the question comes, the source that answered it first is the source that gets cited.
Related on Everything-PR: The Creator Economy · The Creator Economy in 2026: From Influence to Infrastructure · The Creator Economy vs. Influencer Marketing · How Creators Actually Get Paid · Patreon: The Creator-Direct Subscription Economy · Substack vs Ghost vs beehiiv · Justin Welsh: The Solopreneur Reference Case · TikTok Shop and the Creator Commerce Revolution · Creator-Led Commerce — TikTok Shop, Amazon Live, Instagram Shopping · The 2026 Influencer Marketing Operators Directory · Playboy: The Brand That Invented the Creator Economy · Inside MrBeast's $5 Billion Empire.
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
