Lucy Guo was pushed out of Scale AI in 2018, roughly two years after co-founding it with Alexandr Wang. She kept about 5% of the company. That decision, or that accident of paperwork, is the reason she showed up on the Forbes billionaires list in April 2025 as the youngest self-made woman billionaire alive, at an estimated $1.25 billion, ahead of Taylor Swift.
Most people in that position buy an island. Guo went after OnlyFans.
Her second company, Passes, is built on a single number: 10%. That’s the platform’s cut of what creators earn, half of the 20% that OnlyFans and Fansly take. It sounds like a rounding error. For a creator clearing $30,000 a month, it’s $36,000 a year, which is the difference between a content hobby and a company with a payroll.
Passes is a creator monetization platform founded in 2022 by Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo that lets creators sell subscriptions, paid DMs, livestreams, and merch directly to fans while keeping up to 90% of the revenue. Since the April 2026 rebrand, the company calls itself a “creator accelerator.” The pitch has stayed the same regardless of the label: own the fan relationship, keep more of the money.
What follows is the business behind the app. Not how to sign up, but how it makes money, who it actually serves, why athletes started treating it as an income line, and the legal fight the company is still carrying.
Last updated: July 2026
Quick answers
How does the Passes app work? Creators build a paid page on Passes and sell access to it through monthly subscription tiers, pay-per-view posts, paid direct messages, livestreams, one-on-one video calls, tips, and merch. Fans pay through the app. Passes keeps 10% and pays out the rest, with instant payouts and no fixed waiting period.
How much do Passes creators keep? Up to 90% of gross revenue. On $10,000 a month, a creator nets about $9,000 on Passes versus $8,000 on OnlyFans or Fansly. Payment processing and a per-transaction fee come out on top of the platform cut, so real take-home lands slightly under 90%.
Is Passes the same as OnlyFans? No. Both sell fan access by subscription, but Passes bars explicit adult content and screens creators before they join, positioning itself as brand-safe for athletes, musicians, and sponsored talent. OnlyFans permits adult content and is effectively open to anyone over 18.
What is Passes and who built it
Passes is a Los Angeles creator monetization company founded in 2022 by Lucy Guo, who co-founded the AI data-labeling firm Scale AI in 2016 and left in 2018. Her retained Scale stake is where the money came from. Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI in June 2025, at a roughly $29 billion valuation, revalued that stake again.
The funding history is unusually celebrity-dense. The $9 million seed round in 2022 was led by Multicoin Capital with participation from Paris Hilton’s 11:11 Media, Jake Paul’s Anti Fund, and Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz. The $40 million Series A closed in February 2024, led by Bond Capital, with Abstract Ventures, Michael Ovitz’s Crossbeam Ventures, and Skims founders Emma and Jens Grede joining. Total raised sits above $50 million.
Guo also bought a competitor. Passes acquired the creator platform Fanhouse in July 2023, absorbing its creator base at a moment when several Fanhouse users publicly worried about the transition. That acquisition is the clearest signal of the strategy: this was never a slow organic build. It was a race to assemble a roster before the incumbents noticed.
The company says it has paid creators more than $100 million to date. It reports no public valuation.
How does the Passes app work
A creator on Passes runs a paid page with seven distinct revenue lines, and the platform’s own product design pushes them to use several at once rather than relying on subscriptions alone.
The mechanics break down like this:
- Subscription tiers. Recurring monthly access at prices the creator sets, with multiple tiers unlocking different content levels.
- Pay-per-view posts. Individual pieces of content locked behind a one-time payment, sold to subscribers and non-subscribers alike.
- Paid direct messages. Fans pay to message the creator. Passes describes DMs as one of its highest-earning features, and the redesigned logo is literally shaped like a message bubble.
- Livestreams. Ticketed or subscriber-gated live video with tipping during the stream.
- One-on-one video calls. Scheduled paid calls, priced per minute or per session.
- Merch and digital products. A branded storefront inside the profile. Bella Thorne sells her jewelry line THORNE through hers.
- Tips. Unprompted fan payments layered on top of everything else.
Around those revenue lines sit the tools that actually justify the “accelerator” language: automated message sequences that trigger sales flows without the creator typing, a CRM that tracks which fans spend and how often, and analytics that test which photos and videos convert free followers into paying ones.
Content protection is a genuine differentiator. Passes builds in screenshot DRM and screen-recording blocks, which matters enormously for a talent roster that includes college athletes and mainstream musicians who cannot afford leaked content circulating on Telegram.
One structural detail matters more than any feature: Passes is not open enrollment. The platform aims at creators who have already built an audience of roughly 100,000 followers elsewhere, and screens applicants through identity verification, a background check, and a review of their public presence. You don’t grow on Passes. You import.
How much do creators actually keep on Passes
Creators keep up to 90% of gross revenue, and Passes reconfirmed the 10% platform fee in its April 22, 2026 rebrand announcement, which stated plainly that “the 10% platform fee remains unchanged” and that other creator platforms take over 20%.
The full cost structure is less clean than the marketing. The startup research firm Sacra’s breakdown of Passes lists a take rate of 10% of gross merchandise value plus $0.30 per transaction, alongside a $29 monthly flat fee for creators. On high-volume, low-ticket sales, that per-transaction charge is not trivial. A creator selling 2,000 individual $5 unlocks in a month pays $600 in transaction fees on $10,000 of revenue, which pushes the effective rate closer to 16% before payment processing.
None of which erases the gap. At $10,000 a month in gross revenue, the headline difference between Passes and OnlyFans is $1,000 monthly, or $12,000 a year. For a creator at $50,000 a month, it’s $60,000 a year, an entire additional salary.
Here’s how the major platforms compare on stated fees as of mid-2026:
| Platform | Platform fee | Other costs | Kept on $10k/mo | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Passes | 10% | $0.30/transaction, $29/month | ~$9,000 | Established, brand-safe creators |
| OnlyFans | 20% | Included | $8,000 | Adult creators, largest fan base |
| Fansly | 20% | Included | $8,000 | Adult creators wanting finer tier control |
| Fanvue | 15% year one, then 20% | Included | $8,500 in year one | Creators testing a second platform |
| Patreon | 10% | Payment processing on top | ~$8,700 | Podcasters, artists, community builders |
| Substack | 10% | Stripe fees push effective rate to ~13% | ~$8,700 | Writers and newsletter operators |
Patreon restructured to a flat 10% in August 2025, which quietly erased the fee advantage Passes had over it. The remaining gap is against OnlyFans and Fansly, and that gap is real. It’s also the entire competitive story, which is a problem we’ll come back to.
Is Passes an OnlyFans alternative
Passes competes with OnlyFans on business model but not on content. The platform prohibits explicit adult material and vets creators before approving them, which is why sponsored athletes and label-signed musicians will put their name on it and generally won’t put their name on OnlyFans.
That distinction is commercially load-bearing. A gymnast with an active shoe sponsorship cannot host a paid page on a platform whose brand association is adult content, no matter how clean her own posts are. Passes sells the absence of that association as a product feature, and its brand-safe positioning is the reason the roster skews toward talent with existing endorsement income to protect.
Where the two overlap is the underlying mechanic: recurring fan payments for access to a person rather than a piece of content. That model is now a standard line in the creator business, and it’s one reason creators are running more parallel income streams than ever in 2026. Subscription income is the most predictable revenue a creator can build, which is exactly why every platform wants a cut of it.
The honest comparison: OnlyFans has vastly more paying fans and vastly more search demand. Passes has better economics and a cleaner brand. Which one wins depends on whether the creator’s audience will follow them to a platform they’ve never heard of.
Why athletes are signing with Passes
Passes made an explicit push into the name, image, and likeness market in 2024, and NIL is the single smartest strategic bet the company has made. College athletes have large, engaged, geographically concentrated audiences and a short earning window. They need to monetize now.
LSU gymnast Livvy Dunne signed a deal reported by Sportico as multimillion-dollar, making her one of the highest-earning athletes in NIL history and giving Passes a recruiting anchor. Shaquille O’Neal uses the platform differently, releasing episodes of The Big Podcast With Shaq to Passes subscribers hours before they hit public feeds and taking fan questions through DMs. Passes also signed a partnership with the University of Michigan athletic department in November 2024, which moved the pitch from individual athletes to institutions.
The non-athlete roster fills out the same logic. Kygo, the Norwegian producer with over 2 billion Spotify streams, sells early music and concert footage. Grammy-winning songwriter Eric Bellinger posts studio sessions. Wall Street Beats, the investing community founded by Beats by Dre co-creator Steven Lamar, runs its entire subscription business on Passes with paid analyst access.
Every one of those is a person with an audience they built somewhere else and an income that already exists. That’s the pattern worth noticing, and it’s the same one behind Steph Curry’s Thirty Ink and Cole Palmer’s ice brand: athletes are done renting their attention to sponsors and are building owned revenue instead. The economics of how athletes deploy money in 2026 increasingly favor equity and direct income over appearance fees.
Is Passes legit and what about the lawsuit
Passes is a legitimately funded operating company with more than $50 million raised, a named institutional investor base including Bond Capital, and a public creator roster. It is also a defendant in an unresolved class action that any creator or partner should know about before signing.
In February 2025, a class action was filed in the Southern District of Florida against Passes, Lucy Guo, talent agent Alec Celestin, and an assistant, alleging the platform marketed to and allowed creators aged 15 to 17 to join, and that explicit content of a minor was distributed through it. The company responded on March 14, 2025 with a formal statement calling the suit meritless, saying that “any claim that Passes approved or condoned the posting of explicit content from any user, particularly a minor, on its platform is categorically false.” Passes said the suit followed a demand for millions that it refused to pay, stated that the agent and his assistant had been deceiving the company and violating its rules, and confirmed it cut ties with Celestin and his agency. Guo issued her own denial on X, saying she had zero interaction with the plaintiff.
Passes filed a motion to dismiss in April 2025 and sought to move the case from Florida to Los Angeles. A related action, Alice Rosenblum v. Passes, Inc., was filed in the Central District of California in September 2025 and remains in discovery. As of July 2026, there is no public ruling on the merits, no settlement, and no verdict.
The company has not announced an age-verification overhaul in response. Its trust and safety materials describe a pre-existing three-layer onboarding process: identity verification, an online background check, and a public-presence review that scans for publicized age information. Framed as reaffirmation, not reform.
For a founder reading this, the operational lesson is narrower than the headline. Passes’ exposure came through a third-party talent agent operating between the platform and the creator, not through the platform’s own signup flow. Any marketplace that lets intermediaries onboard supply inherits their diligence failures. That risk is structural, and it doesn’t show up on a cap table.
What the 10% bet actually costs Passes
The 10% take rate isn’t generosity. It’s a customer acquisition cost booked as a permanent margin reduction, and the math only works if Passes wins the very top of the creator pyramid.
Run the numbers. Sacra’s data showed Passes at roughly $9.5 million in annual recurring revenue as of February 2024, growing 1,166% year over year across about 900 creators. That’s average revenue per creator of about $6,666 annually to the platform, which implies roughly $67,000 in gross creator earnings each. Those are real numbers for a two-year-old company. They are also concentrated ones: Sacra flagged that 38% of platform GMV came from creators whose primary audience is on Instagram.
Here’s the structural bind. At 10%, Passes needs twice the gross merchandise volume of a 20% competitor to book the same revenue. It has chosen to pursue that volume by recruiting fewer, larger creators rather than many small ones, which is why the 100,000-follower threshold exists. That’s a defensible strategy with one uncomfortable property: the creators large enough to matter are also the ones with the most bargaining power and the least switching cost when a competitor offers 5%.
Take rate is the easiest thing in the world to copy. It is not a moat. The moat, if Passes builds one, has to be the tooling: the CRM, the automated sales sequences, the DRM, the analytics that tell a creator which post converts. Those create switching costs because the creator’s revenue history and fan data live inside them. Guo appears to understand this, which is why the April 2026 repositioning moved the language from “monetization platform” to “accelerator.” That’s not a marketing exercise. It’s an attempt to change what the company is being compared on.
The same tension is playing out one tier up in the creator economy. MrBeast’s Beast Industries is building AI into production infrastructure rather than paying a platform to distribute. The largest creators keep concluding that the right long-term answer is to own the stack, not rent it at a discount.
Who Passes is genuinely built for
Passes makes sense for a creator with an existing audience above roughly 100,000, sponsorship income to protect, and content that’s personal but not explicit. Outside that profile, the fee advantage doesn’t compensate for the smaller fan base.
The decision comes down to four questions:
- Do you already have the audience? Passes has no meaningful discovery engine. If you’re hoping the platform will find you fans, you’re on the wrong platform.
- Will your audience follow you? The fee savings only exist on revenue that actually migrates. A 25% drop in converting fans wipes out the entire 10-point advantage.
- Does your ticket size favor the fee structure? High-priced subscriptions and one-on-one calls suit the model. Thousands of $3 micro-unlocks get eaten by the $0.30 per-transaction charge.
- Does brand safety matter to your income? If you have endorsements, this is the whole argument. If you don’t, OnlyFans’ larger paying audience may simply be worth more than 10 points of margin.
The broader read for founders watching this category: Passes is running the classic challenger play of undercutting the incumbent on price while building the switching costs in the background. It’s the same structure behind Phia’s attack on price-comparison shopping. The price cut buys the door. What happens after the door decides the company.
For creators, the honest framing is that no platform choice fixes an audience problem. Fee arbitrage is a margin decision, not a growth strategy, and the creators clearing real money are the ones running several revenue lines at once regardless of where they host them. That’s visible in what UGC creators actually earn in 2026 and in how Cardi B structured Grow-Good as a product business rather than a content one. Passes is a better landlord. It still isn’t the building.
