How an OFM agency is paid: the full stack

Everyone in this business is paid out of the same money, and the order of the deductions decides whether an account is worth running. This chapter follows one fan payment to the end, on both platforms, using only rates the platforms publish themselves.

2.1Three ways an operator charges

Almost every arrangement is one of these three, or a blend. The first is by far the most common, and the only one that ties the operator's income to the account's performance.

• Revenue share. A percentage of the creator's earnings, that is, of what is left after the platform's cut. The number is agreed privately and no benchmark is published.
• A fee. A fixed monthly amount, sometimes with a setup fee. Common for a narrow service such as content scheduling or traffic, rare for full management.
• A tool bill passed through. Software priced per creator per month, often with a percentage on top of what the software sells. Vendor prices are public, and are in chapter 4.

2.2Stage one: the OnlyFans cut, 80/20

The platform is served first, and this is the one figure in the whole chain that is published in a binding document. The OnlyFans Terms of Use, last updated August 2024, state under Creator payouts:

"All Fan Payments will be received and processed by a third-party payment provider we approve. Our Fee is calculated as 20% of the total Fan Payment and will be deducted from each Fan Payment."

OnlyFans, Terms of Use, read 14 September 2026^[1]

The Contract between Fan and Creator names the same deduction as the FIL Fee, defined as "the 20% of all Fan Payments charged to Creators in accordance with the Terms of Use"^[2]. The complementary figure, the one the industry quotes, appears not in the terms but in the company's filed accounts, where the Strategic Report states that creators "earn 80 percent of all Fan payments made on the platform, which means that Creators make $4 for every $1 retained by OnlyFans"^[3]. Same arithmetic, two documents, both public.

2.3Stage two: the agency's cut

Below the platform line there is no published rate. The only independent documentation we could source is a BBC investigation reported in June 2026: contracts reviewed by journalists showed commissions "commonly around 50%, with some rising as high as 70%" of creator earnings, and one creator was told she would have to pay 10,000 pounds to leave her contract^[4]. Lawyers quoted in that reporting described some arrangements as resembling financial dependency because of the exit terms.

2.4Telegram: a different stack, with published numbers

Telegram publishes its economics in more detail than OnlyFans does. Paid media inside a chat is sold for Stars. Telegram's developer documentation prints a table showing what a fan pays for Stars, what the app stores take, what Telegram keeps, and what reaches the account. These are the published rows, in United States dollars, for a purchase billed in USD at zero VAT.

Source: Telegram, Bot Payments with Telegram Stars, price breakdown table, read 14 September 2026^[5]. Telegram prints this footnote under it: "This table shows estimates for a user purchasing Telegram Stars in either the App Store or Play Store, billed in USD with 0% VAT. Any discrepancies from the values stated above would be caused by the purchaser's location, the payment provider they use or applicable local laws, such as tax regulations."

Three consequences worth holding on to. First, the rate the account receives is fixed and published: Telegram's developer terms say developers "can receive an equivalent of 0.013 USD worth of rewards for each Telegram Star"^[6], which is exactly the 13 dollars per thousand in the table. The same 0.013 rate applies to channel owners who lock a post behind Stars^[7]. Second, the largest deduction is not Telegram's: on a 19.99 dollar purchase the app store takes 6.00 and Telegram takes 0.99. Third, that is only true when the fan buys Stars inside an app; the published price applies to App Store and Play Store purchases.

Two more rules shape the cash flow. Stars take time to become withdrawable: "For technical reasons, Stars in your balance may not become available for advertising credits or rewards for up to 21 days after their receipt"^[6]. And payouts leave Telegram's own perimeter: Telegram states that it "currently outsources the processing of rewards to Fragment, a platform owned and operated by Fragment Corp"^[6].

2.5Worked example, one OnlyFans month

An illustration, not a benchmark. The platform rate is the published one. The agency share and the tool usage are chosen to show the arithmetic, and are marked as assumptions.

Arithmetic by this site on published rates. The 40 percent share and the 10,000 dollar month are assumptions used to show the mechanism. Chatter payroll, if the operator employs chatters instead, is chapter 4.

2.6Worked example, one Telegram month

Same method, using Telegram's published rates all the way through. Say an account sells 100,000 Stars of paid media in a month, and the fans bought those Stars in an app at the published price.

Arithmetic by this site on rates published by Telegram, read 14 September 2026. The 40 percent share is an assumption. Note the comparison that falls out of the two tables: on OnlyFans roughly 20 percent is taken before the account sees anything, on this Telegram route roughly 35 percent is, and most of that goes to the app store rather than to Telegram.

One genuine advantage sits on the other side of that trade. Telegram states that "all sales of Telegram Stars are final and Telegram does not issue refunds for unwanted or unintentional purchases of Stars"^[8]. On OnlyFans, by contrast, the terms state that if a fan obtains a refund or chargeback, "we may deduct an amount equal to the Creator Earnings portion of the refunded or chargedback amount"^[1]. One platform prices in a slower, larger haircut and closes the dispute; the other takes less and leaves the dispute open.

2.7What is not published, and should not be guessed

Three numbers get repeated constantly and we could not source any of them to an official page. The OnlyFans terms confirm a minimum payout exists, stating that "your account balance must meet the minimum payout amount requirement", but the amount itself is not in the terms or the contract^[1]. No payout hold period appears in either document. And the Referral Program Terms, although named as part of the binding agreement, are served only to a browser running scripts, so the widely quoted referral rate could not be verified from the source. Where a figure could not be read on the page that is supposed to publish it, this handbook leaves it out. See Sources and method for why.

Last, a timing rule that catches new operators: the OnlyFans terms reserve the right to "close, restrict payouts from, or restrict earnings from your account" where a creator becomes tax non-compliant in relation to their use of the platform^[1]. Registration and tax are not administration to do later, they sit on the payout path. That is chapter 3.