You have avatars people use and a room people return to. Here is how that becomes money.
Every rail below is a deliberate switch, off until you turn it on. That’s the right default — a room that starts charging before it’s worth anything teaches its members that the answer to “should I join in” is no.
Do this first, or nothing works
Complete payout onboarding. Payouts run through Stripe Connect, and until that setup is finished nothing can pay you — a checkout will simply refuse rather than take someone’s money into a void.
It takes a few minutes and it is the single most common reason a creator has a live shop and no revenue. Do it on a quiet afternoon before you need it, not on the day something sells.
The rails, and what each is actually for
Tips. The lowest-friction rail and the right first one to switch on. No promise attached, no tier to design, nothing to deliver — just a way for someone who got value to say so. Turn it on early; it costs nothing and it teaches you which moments people actually valued.
Subscriptions. Paid membership tiers for your orbit — monthly, quarterly, or yearly — granting access you define. This is the rail that turns a room into an income, and it’s also the one with an obligation attached: a subscriber expects the thing to keep existing. Don’t switch it on until your rhythm (part five) has survived a couple of months, because that rhythm is what you’re actually selling.
Premium avatars. Sell access to a character you made. The natural home for the one avatar out of ten that clearly landed — you already know it’s wanted, because people kept coming back to it.
Paid calls. Fans book time with you: voice or video, your rates, your availability, your lead time. High value per unit and it doesn’t scale, which is exactly why it’s worth having — it’s the rail that pays properly for the thing only you can do.
Your shop. Products through your orbit’s shop channel. Worth knowing before you plan around it: the app stores require their own billing for digital goods but forbid it for physical ones, so where a customer buys changes what the sale is worth. The product shows you the actual split at the point of sale.
Likeness licensing. If your face, voice, or name is part of your brand, verify it and licensing becomes available — approve a use, set terms, get paid. Your face, your voice, yours is the full argument; part seven is the practical version.
The order I’d switch them on
Tips immediately. Premium avatar when one of yours obviously earned it. Subscriptions when the room has a rhythm worth subscribing to. Calls whenever you want, since they oblige nobody. Shop when you actually have something to ship.
That order has one idea in it: turn on the rails that reward what already happened, before the ones that promise what will happen. The first kind can’t disappoint anyone. The second kind can.
About the numbers
I’m not going to quote splits or rates in an essay. The product shows you the exact figures at the point of sale and in your earnings view, and those are the ones that bind — a number I typed here would be marketing, and it would be stale eventually.
Two mechanics are worth knowing in advance, though, because they surprise people. Store fees are real: a purchase through an app store carries the store’s cut before any split, so the same sale pays differently on iOS than on the web — that’s their economics, not ours, and the product shows the real split either way. And earnings settle when the payment does, through the webhook rather than the moment the buyer returns to your page. If a sale looks missing for a minute, that’s why.
What not to do
Don’t paywall the room itself. The free floor is the reason people are there to be converted at all — a room nobody can enter converts nobody.
Don’t stack every rail at once. A creator surface with six ways to pay and nothing obviously worth buying reads as a toll booth. One rail that clearly makes sense beats six that hedge.
And don’t promise a schedule you haven’t already kept for a month. Subscriptions are the one rail where over-promising has a victim.
Next, and last in the series: protecting what you built.