Redbubble has a New FEE Structure!

Spoiler alert: I am not happy.

Tonight, I got a mail from Redbubble:

“Redbubble is introducing a new tier structure for artist accounts, and an account fee for some accounts. From today, your account will be classified as either Redbubble Standard, Redbubble Premium, or Redbubble Pro. You can find your account classification on a new Account tiers and fees page on the Artist Dashboard.”

After reading a little but about the new fee structure, I clicked on the link, HOPING that I would have a Premium or Pro account.

I clicked…

…… I have a “Standard account”.

So, what does this mean exactly?

The different Redbubble account tiers

There are 3 different account tiers:

• Redbubble Standard
• Redbubble Premium
• Redbubble Pro

On this Redbubble blog, you can find a complete overview about all the tiers and what they include:

Here's a screenshot of the table:

When you see this, you might think "ah, you have a standard account, it can't be that bad.

… until you see which fees are charged to standard accounts.

Redbubble Standard Account Fees

An example that Redbubble gives on their site:

Say you sold products worth a retail price of $300 in total, and made $75 (avg. 25% margin) during a payment period. Your account fee is based on the total earnings of $75 and is a flat rate of $28 (see the fee table below). This is deducted from your total earnings before your monthly payment is processed, so your payment amount is $47.

28 dollars fees?!!! Are you kidding?!

Fee table:

More info here:

On average, I earn $100 per month on Redbubble.

Well, I "used to" earn $100 per month. After deducting their crazy fee of $33 or $34, only $66 would be left. Are you kidding me?

Why am I so upset by this?

Well first of all, I have been uploading designs to Redbubble since 2020:

I’ve been putting a lot of work, time and effort into these designs and uploading them, and I feel like they’re just ripping me off.

Secondly, I have 851 designs at the time of writing this article, I sold a total of 700 products and made more than $2000 profit over the past years. And this is still considered as “Standard”?

What should I do?

I don’t know, I’ll think about it and do some more research.

I’ll probably keep uploading designs like I’m doing now, because I have them anyway and let’s be honest here — it’s barely any effort to publish a design on Redbubble.

If you’ve read my other POD articles, you might know my process:

1. Upload to Redbubble, optimize tags, titles, description
2. Copy/paste this meta data to other POD sites like Teepublic, Displate, Society6, Teespring, Etsy, Printful, Awkward Styles…

By the way, if you’d like to learn more about Print on Demand, check the list I compiled on Medium.

Is it still worth it to start your POD journey on Redbubble?

Pfff. It’s a hard one. I’m not sure.

Ultimately it’s up to you. Redbubble its still an easy platform to get started, and MAYBE this new tier structure might motivate artists to put more effort into it.. however I’ve been putting so much effort in it already for the past 3 years, and I’m still “just a standard user”?

I think I personally would focus more on Amazon, Etsy and eBay, in combination with the production partners listed below.

You can sell Print on Demand designs on all of these sites, with a production partner. You then link the production partners to these eCommerce sites.

My preferred production partners are:

1. Awkwardstyles.com
2. Printful.com
3. Printify.com

Of course there are a few more, but I mostly use these ones, and preferably Akwkard Styles because they have a very low fee structure and a very broad selection of products. I definitely recommend checking it out.

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What will you do?

If you’re a Redbubble artist reading list, let’s connect and let me know what you think about this in the comments, I’m curious about other opinions!

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