Beacons
An AI-flavored creator business platform: link-in-bio, storefront, email, and media kits in one.
About
Beacons started as a link-in-bio builder and grew into an all-in-one creator business platform, founded in 2019 out of Y Combinator's Summer 2019 batch with backing from Andreessen Horowitz and roughly $30 million raised (per third-party reviews). It combines a customizable bio page with a digital storefront, email marketing, auto-generated media kits for brand deals, invoicing, and an affiliate marketplace, so creators can sell and get sponsored without leaving the platform. The free plan is genuinely functional for links, but it takes a 9% cut of anything sold; paid tiers run Creator at $10 a month, Creator Plus at $30, and Creator Max at $90, with the higher tiers dropping the transaction fee to zero. Provider materials cite 7+ million creators.
The honest caveats: an independent 2026 review found a 1.9-out-of-5 Trustpilot score driven by billing and support complaints, and TikTok has intermittently blocked Beacons links since 2024, which is a real risk if TikTok is your main traffic source. Pricing details vary across review sources, so treat exact tiers as approximate. No published independent benchmarks for checkout reliability.
What it can do
- Customizable link-in-bio page with modular blocks
- Digital storefront for ebooks, templates, and courses
- Email capture and audience email marketing
- AI-generated media kits with live social stats
- Brand-deal outreach and invoicing tools
- Affiliate marketplace
- Click, sales, and audience analytics
- Custom domain on paid tiers
- Tips and paid booking blocks
Setup
Sign up free at beacons.ai; the AI-guided onboarding builds a first bio page in minutes.
Prerequisites
None for the free plan; Stripe or PayPal for receiving payouts; paid plan to remove the 9% seller fee.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: multiple 2026 reviews document the 2019 founding, YC S19, ~$30M raised with a16z, the plan ladder ($10/$30/$90), and the 9% free-tier seller fee; the 7M+ creator figure is provider-stated. Strengths: the most complete creator-monetization bundle in the link-in-bio space, genuinely useful free tier. Docked for: (1) a 1.9/5 Trustpilot score centered on billing and support complaints (independent review); (2) reported intermittent TikTok link blocks since 2024; (3) it does not generate traffic, it only monetizes what you bring. License: proprietary.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 8.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 2.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · Founded 2019; Y Combinator Summer 2019; ~$30M raised incl. Andreessen Horowitz
- · 7M+ creators (provider-stated)
- · Link-in-bio plus digital storefront, email marketing, AI media kits
- · Brand-deal outreach, invoicing, affiliate marketplace
- · 9% transaction fee on free plan; 0% on Creator Plus/Max
- · 1.9/5 Trustpilot score driven by billing/support complaints (independent 2026 review)
- · TikTok has intermittently blocked Beacons links since 2024 (reported)
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.