Ho we built Ammirator. The OnlyFans competitor
Tags: web3, ethereum, javascript, kubernetes
Published: 2024-06-17 11:18:22

Our journey began a year ago when we started thinking about building a platform for content creators that would work fully with crypto and have the lowest platform fee in the industry (**just 10%**), and that's when we started to build [Ammirator](https://ammirator.com).

We choose crypto because the problem with traditional payment providers is that they may block payments or block your account on their side if your platform contains content they do not like, on top of that they take a fee from each transaction from every subscription or tip, so instead of this money to go to content creators these go to payment providers without them doing anything at all.

To have a truly independent platform we decided to use Ethereum as our currency and all the transactions to be sent directly to the blockchain without having any payment provider in the middle.

We also needed somewhere to store our data, and that place should be fully controllable by us and be a safe one, and not depend on third parties.
We never had the question "Which Database to choose", we were ok with any opensource solution the main question was how to store data in a way that it is available on multiple nodes/machines so that in case some node is shut down or attacked then the database container moves to a new node and data is available there instantly.

For this purpose we picked Longhorn, this is an open-source tool that can replicate your data from one disk to another on a totally different machine.
You guessed it right all mentioned above is most probably possible just with Kubernetes clusters at least in an easy way.

Since we wanted our platform to not depend on third parties we can't afford to use Kubernetes solutions like ECS or others. 
All the tools we use are deployed on bare metal and are fully controlled and managed by us.

Having these infrastructure benefits from the very start is not enough to win competitors like Onlyfans, so we spent the whole year building a lot of features that should help our content creators monetize their content and bring happiness to their fans.
We have features like paid subscriptions, tips, paid posts, and basic things like chats with fans, suggestions, etc. 

Now having all the infrastructure controlled by us and having all the data on our side, we basically can modify the platform fee we take from creators to a minimum at any time just to cover nodes/machines costs and developers' time.
Our platform fee consists **just 10%** which is the lowest one we know in the industry.

Most of the similar platforms have a fee of 20% and from a minimal subscription of 5$ they do not really make money because 20% is just 1$ and most of this goes to the payment provider which also takes a fee from each transaction and the platform remains just with less than a half from there, and on top of that the payment providers dictate them what kind of content they are allowed or not to post.

Because of these poor decisions made by the founders and developers of these platforms, have to lose also content creators who have to pay 20% of their money, which is more than some taxes in some countries for a minute.

At [Ammirator](https://ammirator.com) we do not have all these problems, and we can truly focus on features and creators' happiness while delivering a platform that gives all the necessary tools for them to interact with their fans.

This allows us to become a true competitor for most of content creators' platforms out there, and who knows maybe in this run we'll be the ones to stay at the top due to our futuristic thinking.