We built Horizon Studio because every creator we worked with had the same problem and none of the available tools solved it: they were running a real business on infrastructure they did not own, and the only alternatives on offer were another platform taking another share.
Studio is the single dashboard you run your business from. Horizon Vault is the paid-content engine underneath it: subscription walls, locked pages, pay-per-view and custom orders, billed through your own merchant account. Fans pay you directly. We take no commission on your earnings, only a flat monthly fee. You still pay card processing like any merchant, around 9.9% on an adult CCBill account, so roughly 90% of what a fan pays reaches you before the monthly fee, against 80% on a 20% platform.
Deciding whether to build a site at all, rather than which tool to use? That is a different question and we have written it up separately: custom adult website vs creator platforms.
This is a product story rather than a buying guide. It is the reasoning behind Horizon Studio and Horizon Vault, written down so you can judge whether we built the right thing.
The short version of the problem: every creator business runs on infrastructure, and very few creators own any of it. The publishing tool belongs to someone else. The subscriber list belongs to someone else. The payment relationship belongs to someone else. And the content library, the actual product, sits on someone else’s storage behind someone else’s rules, governed by terms that can be rewritten with an email and thirty days’ notice.
That arrangement is normal. It is not safe, and it is not cheap. We had watched it go wrong often enough, in the same way each time, that building the alternative stopped feeling optional.
What we kept running into
Three things came up in almost every conversation, and they are the three things Studio was shaped around.
The commission was the smallest problem. Creators would open with the 20%, and the 20% is real money, but it was rarely what actually hurt. What hurt was that the 20% bought no security. Paying a fifth of revenue did not stop an account being suspended, a payout being held, or a content category being reclassified overnight. They were paying a premium and carrying the risk anyway.
Nobody could answer a simple question about their own business. Who are my highest-value fans? Which piece of content actually converted? What is my churn? On a platform, that data either does not exist or cannot be exported. A creator with five years of history often could not tell you which month was their best, because the record of it belonged to a company that had no reason to hand it over.
Leaving was designed to be expensive. Not by an explicit lock-in clause, but structurally: subscribers who cannot be contacted off-platform, a content library that has to be re-uploaded by hand, and a payment relationship that has to be rebuilt from zero with a processor that has never seen your history. The exit was not blocked, it was just made costly enough that most people did not attempt it.
What we decided to build instead
The design followed from those three. Everything else was detail.
No commission, ever. A flat monthly fee, whatever you earn. If we take a share of your revenue, our incentive is for you to stay dependent on us, and we did not want to build a business that only works while our customers cannot leave.
Your merchant account, not ours. Fans pay you. The money goes to your bank account without passing through ours, because a payment relationship you do not hold is a payment relationship someone else can end. This is the single most important structural decision in the product and the one that costs us the most to support.
Your data, exportable, always. Your subscriber list, your content and your revenue history are yours, in a form you can take somewhere else. We would rather you stay because leaving is easy and you chose not to.
Your domain. Everything runs on a domain you own, so your audience and your search equity accrue to you rather than to us. If you left tomorrow, the URLs would still work.
What we got wrong first
Worth recording, because the first version was a worse product for a defensible reason.
We initially assumed the hard part was features, so we built toward matching what platforms offered. It was the wrong target. Creators were not leaving platforms because of a missing feature; they were leaving because of a risk they could not price and a dependency they could not exit. Feature parity with a platform is not a reason to move off one.
The second mistake was assuming the migration was a technical problem. It is mostly an audience problem. Moving files is trivial; moving people is not, and a tool that does not help with the second half is not really helping. That is why the migration path matters more to us than the feature list, and why the honest answer to “should I move” is often “not yet”.
How Horizon Studio and Horizon Vault fit together
Horizon Studio is the one application you actually touch. It sits on top of your whole stack, and it exists so that infrastructure you control does not mean becoming a systems administrator.
The five components
Horizon Studio
- One login for everything
- Look & Feel, Feed, Vault, Insights, Merch, Settings
- You never see a WordPress screen
Horizon Vault
- Subscription walls and locked pages
- Pay-per-view and custom orders
- Your subscribers in your own list
Horizon Core
- The foundation your site runs on
- Hard isolation between creators
- You will never need to think about it
Broadcast
- Your content feed
- Email to subscribers you own
- Stream scheduling and social posting
Nexxusbio
- Your own link-in-bio page at nexxus.bio
- Social-safe front door for every creator
- Free, with Pro for a custom domain and white-label branding
Studio is the interface. Vault is where the business earns. And the way Vault handles money is the part that answers the 50% question directly:
When a fan buys from you, the payment runs through your own merchant account: not Automate Horizon’s. The money settles to you. Horizon is never in the payment path, which means there is nothing to hold, delay or take a cut from.
Broadcast deserves a specific note. A website on your own domain solves publishing, access and payment. It does not solve notification: the moment you need the audience you own to know something new exists. Studio holds the audience; Broadcast reaches it. Running Vault without Broadcast just means a quieter version of the same system.
Compliance is not a tier
Worth stating plainly, because it is unusual. The compliance groundwork ships with the site from day one, and none of it sits behind a pricing tier:
A 18 U.S.C. §2257 statement is set up for the creators who need one, which depends on whether you produce your own explicit content rather than on which tier you are on. What the law asks of you as a producer stays yours: we build the surfaces, we do not hold your records. Our Terms of Service sets out where that line sits, and a site showing explicit content also needs a full age verification provider.
Creators in restricted categories should not have to choose between being compliant and being able to afford it. Pricing that forces that choice is not really an option.
Which kind of creator are you?
This is the decision the rest of the article is building towards. Most creators are clearly one or the other.
Infrastructure you control genuinely loses on one thing: discovery. There is no built-in algorithm sending you strangers, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. That is exactly why the recommendation below is not “leave the platforms”.
Where you fit right now
The right move depends on where you’re starting from. Most creators recognise themselves in one of these.
Find the one that sounds like you
Recover, then rebuild
- Export whatever content and subscriber data you still can, do this first, before appeals
- Set up a website on your own domain and an email list before going back to any platform
- Don’t rebuild the audience into a second rented account
Run both, then let the numbers decide
- Build the owned destination first
- Give your audience a real reason to move, early access, direct contact
- Don’t attempt an overnight migration
Consolidate for the clarity
- Content in one place, subscribers in one place, one view of earnings
- The fee saving is real, but the operational relief lands first
- You don’t need to rebuild everything at once
Assume enforcement, design for it
- Owned domain, owned content, owned subscriber records
- Processing arranged with a provider that contracts for your category
- A documented fallback before you need it
Capture the audience from day one
- Use the platforms for discovery. That’s what they’re good at
- Capture subscribers somewhere you control from the very start
- Full infrastructure probably isn’t your first purchase
The one number to watch
- How many of your paying audience could you reach if every platform went dark tonight?
- If the honest answer is “none”, that’s the most important metric in your business
What it costs
Worth putting real numbers against the argument, because “control your infrastructure” means nothing without them.
| Tier | Monthly | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Nexxusbio Free | Free | Your own link-in-bio page at nexxus.bio. Every creator gets one, used or not. |
| Nexxusbio Pro | $99/yr or $15/mo | Custom domain, white-label, full brand control, richer media and commerce blocks. |
| Website | $39/mo or $390/yr | Your own domain and a real multi-page site, structured for search. Email marketing, 2,000 sends a month. |
| Website + Merch | $69/mo or $690/yr | Everything in Website, plus your own branded merch store. |
| Vault Add-On | $49/mo bolt-on | Sell content directly from your site. Adds to Website + Merch, by application. |
Now put that against the earlier arithmetic, honestly, including the processing fee, which every merchant pays and no one should pretend away.
| On £5,000 a month | What it costs you | You keep |
|---|---|---|
| Platform at 20% | £1,000 | £4,000 |
| Platform at 50% | £2,500 | £2,500 |
| Owned (Website + Merch with Vault) | £495 processing + ~£92 platform fee | £4,413 |
So the real gap is about £413 a month against a 20% platform: a little under £5,000 a year, and roughly £1,913 a month against a 50/50 split, which is nearly £23,000 a year. Smaller than “keep everything”, and still the difference between a fee and rent.
How to actually move
The strongest setup for most working creators is not platform-only or owned-only. It is a deliberate split along the line drawn earlier: rent discovery, own everything else.
- Own the domain. Every link you post anywhere should end up somewhere you control. Cheapest, highest-leverage step, available today.
- Own the content. Get the archive onto your site so publishing destinations become interchangeable instead of load-bearing.
- Own the audience record. Capture subscribers into a system you hold. This is the one asset that makes recovery from any platform loss possible.
- Own the money. Hold the merchant relationship in your own name, so no platform decision can interrupt income you have already earned.
- Keep using the platforms. Post there, grow there, benefit from the algorithms, just stop letting them hold the assets.
- Actually use the audience you own. A subscriber list does nothing if it is never used. This is where Broadcast closes the loop.
Horizon Studio is built to make the first four a single setup rather than four separate projects.
Mistakes worth avoiding
- Treating a link-in-bio page as infrastructure you control. A link page you don’t host, on a domain you don’t own, is a rented account with fewer features. It moves the dependency; it doesn’t remove it.
- Migrating everything at once. Sudden migrations lose audience. Run both, give people a real reason to move, and let the numbers set the pace.
- Ignoring the content library until it’s gone. Everyone talks about subscriber lists; almost nobody talks about the archive. A subscriber can be won back. Four years of work cannot be re-shot.
- Assuming a site of your own means “unprotected”. A site without access control is just a public website with a paywall you hope people respect. Subscription walls and entitlements are exactly what Vault handles.
- Confusing a payout with a merchant relationship. Being paid by a platform is not the same as being a merchant. Only one of those survives the platform.
- Making it a crusade. Platforms aren’t villains. They’re landlords, useful right up until you want to renovate. This is a business decision, not a moral one.
Frequently asked questions
A publishing, membership and payment system that runs on infrastructure the creator controls, her own domain, content, subscriber records and merchant account, rather than a third-party account that can be suspended, repriced or closed without consent.
The single control panel for your website. One login covers your website’s look and feel, your content feed, your Vault paid content, your subscriber list, your merch and your earnings, without ever seeing a WordPress admin screen.
Your protected premium content area and payment engine. It runs subscription walls, locked pages, pay-per-view purchases and custom orders on your site, and keeps your paying audience in your own list rather than in a fan platform’s database.
Yes, but not all of it, and it is worth being precise, because “keep 100%” is marketing, not arithmetic. Automate Horizon takes no commission on your earnings. You do still pay card processing, because someone always does: CCBill charges around 9.9% on adult-sector accounts, billed to your own merchant account.
So roughly 90% of each payment reaches you, against 80% on a 20% platform and 50% on a half-and-half split. Your monthly platform fee comes out of that, but it is a flat amount rather than a slice, which is why the gap widens as you earn more. On £5,000 a month you are about £428 better off than on a 20% platform, and £1,930 better off than on a 50/50 split.
No, and most creators shouldn’t. Keep using platforms for discovery while moving your content, subscriber records and payment relationship onto infrastructure you own. Platforms become traffic sources rather than landlords.
You lose a traffic source rather than the business. Your content, subscriber records, payment relationship and domain are unaffected, because none of them live inside the suspended account.
You can invite them, and how many follow depends on the relationship rather than the technology. Most platforms restrict bulk subscriber export, so the practical approach is to run both in parallel and give your audience a genuine reason to move, early access, exclusive content, or direct contact.
Not day to day. Horizon Studio is one dashboard that replaces what most creators currently run across four or five disconnected tools, and you never touch the technical layer underneath it. The genuine additions are holding your own merchant account and staying compliant, both of which come set up rather than left to you.
Plans run from a free Nexxusbio link page, through Nexxusbio Pro at $99/yr, to a website at $39/mo or Website + Merch at $69/mo, each with a setup fee paid once ($500 or $750). Vault is a $49/mo bolt-on for Website + Merch, by application. Current pricing always lives on the pricing page.
It’s built specifically for them. The compliance groundwork, age gate, terms, privacy and compliant email, ships with the site from day one and is never behind a tier gate. A 2257 statement is set up for the creators who need one, and a site showing explicit content also needs a full age verification provider, which is the creator’s own obligation. Payment processing runs through CCBill, which contracts for adult and adult-adjacent business.
Worth doing yourself before you commit: read CCBill’s Merchant Acceptable Use Policy and check your own content against it. It sets out what is not accepted regardless of legality elsewhere, and it is the document your account will actually be judged against.
Key takeaways
- 1A content business has six layers. Only discovery should be rented, the other five are the business itself.
- 2A percentage fee punishes growth; a flat fee rewards it. At £5,000 a month, 20% is £12,000 a year.
- 3Deplatforming is financially violent because everything goes at once, archive, audience, income and the ability to say where you went.
- 4A platform taking a percentage has to sit between you and your customer. A system taking nothing doesn’t need to be there at all.
- 5The terms have always moved, card network rules in 2021, a content ban announced and reversed in six days, split changes, fee restructures. Not malice; just incentives that were never yours.
- 6Horizon takes no commission on your earnings, but processing is real: CCBill charges around 9.9%, so roughly 90% of each payment reaches you, not 100%. Anyone promising all of it is not counting.
- 7Rent discovery. Own everything else.
Work out whether this is worth it for you
Take what your platform took from you last month, in pounds, not percentages, and put it against processing plus a flat monthly fee, the whole cost, not a headline rate. If the first number is bigger, you’re already paying for a platform. You’re just not the one who owns it.
Join the Horizon Studio waitlistWe onboard creators in stages rather than all at once, so the list is the queue. It costs nothing to hold your place.
Sources & further reading
- Mastercard, “Preventing illegal adult content on our network”, specialty merchant requirements, announced April 2021, enforced 15 October 2021.
- Washington Post, “OnlyFans reverses ban on sexually explicit content after wide backlash from its users”, 25 August 2021.
- NBC News, “OnlyFans reverses decision to ban sexually explicit content after backlash”, August 2021.
- Variety, “Twitch Partner Plus: 70% revenue split for streamers”, 16 June 2023.
- TechCrunch, “Twitch announces expanded Partner Plus program”, 24 January 2024.
- Patreon Help Centre, “A standard platform fee for new creators, effective after August 4, 2025”.
- CCBill, Merchant Acceptable Use Policy, content restrictions, 18 U.S.C. §2257 obligations and merchant conduct requirements.
- CCBill, Corporate Responsibility & Merchant Policies, full policy index.
- Horizon System product specifications, Automate Horizon, July 2026.
- For the general case for infrastructure you control, rather than this product story, see The Adult Creator Infrastructure Guide.
Platform fees and terms change. Every figure above was accurate as published on the dates cited. Check each provider’s current terms before relying on them.