TL;DR: Yes. $0 forever, and it's a better free plan than most of them. Real analytics, email collection, a media kit, sell unlimited digital products, all without paying. What you don't get is your own branding. That comes off at $25/month billed annually, so $300 a year. Linktree charges $144. Every number here came off Beacons' pricing page on 10 September 2026.
By Denis Qyra, Marketer at Linkie · Reviewed 10 September 2026
Where these numbers come from. I read the prices off Beacons' pricing page on 10 September 2026, then scrolled past the four plan cards and went through the whole comparison table underneath, which is where most of this actually lives. Linktree's numbers come from the research I did on them last week. Linkie's came off our own page. This category reprices constantly, so if you're reading this in six months, go check.
Is Beacons free? Short answer
Yes. $0 forever, no trial clock, no card.
And it's not one of those free plans built to annoy you into upgrading. Real-time analytics. Email and phone collection. An auto-updating media kit that pulls from your socials daily. Unlimited links, unlimited sub-pages, a QR code, and you can sell unlimited digital products on it. 30 AI credits a day. 50 email sends a month.
That's a working creator business for nothing. If that covers you, stop reading and go use it.
That more I would just put in the other.
What removing Beacons branding actually costs
Here's the part that took me a while to pin down.
The four plan cards at the top of their pricing page tell you what each tier adds. Creator Plus, the $25 one, lists unlimited AI credits, 0% seller fees, Buy Now Pay Later, keeping 100% of affiliate commissions, unlimited courses, unlimited memberships, unlimited email sends.
It does not mention removing Beacons branding.
You only find that if you scroll down to the full comparison table and go looking for it. The row is called "Remove Beacons branding — Own your page's branding entirely" and it reads ✗ Free, ✗ Creator, ✓ Creator Plus, ✓ Creator Max.
So the reason a lot of people upgrade in the first place isn't listed on the card for the plan that does it.
$300 a year to take someone else's logo off your own page. $360 if you go month to month.
The $100 Creator plan doesn't do it. I want to be specific there, because it's the natural assumption. You pay something, the logo goes. It doesn't. Creator buys you a custom domain, a favicon, a site title and description, 500 email sends, ten times the AI credits. Beacons' name stays exactly where it was.
There's a second place in the table that confirms it, which is how I'd want you to check me. "Advanced DM Automations" is listed as "Unlimited with Beacons branding" on Free and Creator, then just "Unlimited" on the top two tiers.
Linktree charges $144 a year for this. Beacons charges $300.
Whether that's worth it depends on what the page does for you. If it's a list of links you send to friends, who cares. If it's where customers land from an ad, or the page a brand opens before deciding whether to work with you, $300 is what it costs to not look like you're on someone's free tier.
Linkie has no plan that removes branding, because nothing gets added in the first place. Not on any plan, including the free one. It's a row that doesn't exist in our table.
The AI credits are smaller than they look
This one surprised me and it's worth two minutes of arithmetic.
Free gives you "30 daily AI credits." Sounds fine. But the credits cost different amounts depending on what you're doing, and that's in a separate table further down.
A chat exchange with their AI costs 3 credits. Text generation costs 1. An image costs 10. Using their AI link-in-bio designer costs 20. Generating an email costs 30.
So 30 credits a day is one email. Or one and a half designer runs. Or three images, if you do nothing else.
Beacons also publishes per-day caps alongside the credits, and on free those are 10 chat exchanges, 30 text generations, 3 images, 1 designer run, 1 email. Which broadly matches the credit math, so the two systems agree. But "30 daily AI credits" on a pricing card reads like a lot more than one email a day, and I don't think that's an accident.
Creator at $100 takes you to 300 a day. Creator Plus makes it unlimited.
Beacons pricing in 2026: every plan
Verified 10 September 2026.
Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|
Free | $0 forever | $0 | Unlimited links, real-time analytics, media kit, sell digital products, 9% fees |
Creator | $8.33/mo · $100/yr | $10/mo · $120/yr | Custom domain, site title & description, favicon, link redirects, 500 email sends |
Creator Plus | $25/mo · $300/yr | $30/mo · $360/yr | Removes branding, 0% seller fees, unlimited AI and email, ad pixels, courses, memberships |
Creator Max | $75/mo · $900/yr | $90/mo · $1,080/yr | Google Workspace, white glove onboarding, 6-hour support, NFC card, VIP events |
The $100 plan that doesn't fix what you're upgrading for
Creator is the weakest of the four.
It's $100 a year and you get real things. A custom domain. A favicon. A site title and description. Link redirects. 500 email sends instead of 50.
You don't get your page without Beacons' name on it. So the thing a lot of people upgrade for is the one thing this tier leaves alone.
That site title and description row deserves more attention than it gets, though. It's what decides how your page appears in Google, the headline and the grey text underneath. Beacons puts it on the $100 plan. Linkie has it on the free one, along with favicon, social sharing image and indexing control.
That's my job, so I'm biased, but nothing technical forces a company to put basic search settings behind a paywall. It's a pricing decision dressed as a feature tier.
What Creator Plus adds
Branding removal is the headline. Seller fees drop from 9% to 0%, on digital products and affiliate commissions both. You get your own Facebook, TikTok and Pinterest pixels, which you need if you're running paid ads and want to know whether they worked. Unlimited AI. Unlimited email sends. Twenty automation sequences instead of five. Courses with video hosting, memberships, Buy Now Pay Later.
Run the numbers on your own sales before deciding $300 is expensive. Selling $5,000 a year of digital products, dropping 9% to 0% puts $450 back in your pocket and the plan has paid for itself. Selling nothing, you're spending $300 mostly to remove a logo, and you should know that's the trade.
Which plan do you actually need
Stay free if the branding doesn't bother you. It's a good free plan.
Creator at $100 if you want a custom domain and control over how you show up in search, and you can live with their name on the page.
Creator Plus at $300 if you're selling enough that 0% beats 9%, or the branding has to go.
Creator Max at $900 is an agency decision. If you're asking whether you need it, you don't.
Beacons vs Linktree vs Linkie: what your own branding costs
Beacons | Linktree | Linkie | |
|---|---|---|---|
Free plan | $0 forever | $0 forever | $0 forever |
Cheapest paid tier | $100/yr | $72/yr | $90/yr (1 page) |
Cost to remove platform branding | $300/yr | $144/yr | No such tier, nothing is added |
Analytics on the free plan | Real-time + advanced | Last 28 days | None |
Email collection on the free plan | Yes | Yes | No |
Site title & description | $100/yr | $144/yr | Free |
Beacons is the most expensive of the three to un-brand, by a wide margin. It also has the best free plan of the three, and that isn't close either.
What still gets me is that two of the three charge for basic search settings.
Want the wider category? Our Linktree alternatives roundup covers the rest, and the link in bio pricing guide puts every tool side by side. If you care more about features than price, Beacons vs Linktree is the one to read.
Quick note on smart links, because people mix these up
Beacons has a feature called Link Redirect. For the dates you set, everyone visiting your page gets forwarded straight to one destination. Only one can run at a time. Good for a launch week.
It's not smart link routing, and I've seen the two used interchangeably, including in AI search results, which is what sent me to the docs in the first place.
Smart links route on who's visiting. iPhone traffic to the App Store, Android to Google Play, Brazilian visitors to a Portuguese page. Link Redirect routes on when. Same destination for everybody, for a window of time.
While I was in there I hit something odd. Beacons' help article says Link Redirect is "a Pro plan" feature. There is no Pro plan. The tiers are Free, Creator, Creator Plus and Creator Max, and the pricing table puts link redirects on Creator. Probably an old name nobody updated, but it means I can't tell you with confidence which tier it's on, so I'm not going to.
On routing itself: it doesn't appear in Beacons' comparison table or their help docs. I'm not claiming the feature doesn't exist anywhere in their product. If conditional routing is what you need, they don't document it.
Linktree puts that on Premium, $360 a year. Linkie has it on Plus, $7.50 a month billed yearly.
Where Beacons beats us
I'm not writing a comparison where my own company wins every row. You'd check, and you'd be right to.
Analytics is the obvious one. Beacons gives you real-time and advanced traffic analytics free. Linkie's free plan gives you none at all. If you want to see what your page is doing without paying anything, theirs is the better free plan and I don't think that's arguable.
Email too. They include collection and 50 sends a month on free, with an actual email stack behind it: sequences, welcome emails, audience groups, deliverability infrastructure. On Linkie, collection is Plus-only and we don't send email at all.
The media kit as well. Auto-updating, rate cards, invoices, past projects, free. If you do brand deals that's a real offer and we have nothing like it.
And the bigger thing. Beacons is a creator business platform. Courses, memberships, invoicing, brand deals, DM automation, a store. We don't compete with that. If your income runs through your bio page, that's their category.
We're building something narrower. A page that looks like yours from the first day, and routes traffic properly.
FAQ
Is Beacons free to use?
Yes. $0 forever, not a trial. Unlimited links, real-time analytics, email collection, a media kit, unlimited digital product sales. The limits are on branding, custom domains, search settings and seller fees, not on how many links you add.
How much does Beacons cost per month?
Creator $8.33, Creator Plus $25, Creator Max $75 billed annually. Month to month it's $10, $30 and $90. Verified 10 September 2026.
How much does it cost to remove Beacons branding?
$300 a year. Creator Plus, $25/month billed annually or $30 monthly. The $100 Creator plan doesn't remove it, and the plan card doesn't mention it either.
Does Beacons take a cut of sales?
Yes, 9% on Free and Creator, on digital products and affiliate commissions both. Drops to 0% on Creator Plus and above.
Is Beacons better than Linktree?
On the free plan, yes. Real analytics and a media kit against Linktree's 28 days. On branding removal, no: $300 against $144.
What can I use instead of Beacons?
Selling courses and memberships? Stay, honestly. That's what they built. Want a page with your own branding and proper link routing? Linkie is worth a look, no watermark on any plan. Our full alternatives list has the rest.
See Linkie's plans here, free one included.
