Manifesto · Founders' note
Creators deserve one home.
On the operator-creator, the cost of a fractured stack, and why we built AGGREGATE+.
I · The diagnosis
The creator economy is seven products in a trench coat.
he average serious creator runs a newsletter on one platform, a store on a second, a Patreon-style page on a third, a Calendly on a fourth, a payment processor on a fifth, an email automation on a sixth, and a spreadsheet to make sense of any of it. Roughly thirty percent of every dollar earned never reaches them — it gets carved off by processors, SaaS fees, and the ambient cost of switching tabs.
The promise of the creator economy was leverage. The reality is bookkeeping. Most creators can't answer a basic question: which post paid me this week?
II · The principles
One ledger. One money page. One audience.
Every dollar a creator earns — subscriptions, tips, products, bookings, sponsorships, royalties — should land on the same line. Not in seven dashboards stitched together by exported CSVs and good intentions.
Every audience a creator builds should be theirs to own, theirs to export, theirs to bring along the day they outgrow us. Lock-in is not a business model. It's a tax on talent.
And every essay, every product, every membership tier should be composed in one place that respects the work. AI in the margins — not the centre. Drafts, not slop.
III · The operator-creator
Build like a SaaS founder. Write like a novelist.
The next decade of independent media will be defined by the operator-creator: the writer who reads their own P&L, the photographer who knows the LTV of a tier, the podcaster who runs bookings as a real revenue line.
These creators are not waiting for a platform to grow them. They own their domain, their audience, and their distribution. AGGREGATE+ is the back office for that operator — the part nobody wants to build, and everybody desperately needs.
IV · The promise
We work for you. Not the algorithm.
We'll never sell ads on your audience. We'll never lock your subscribers behind a wall you can't open. We'll never quietly raise your take rate.
1.9% on processed revenue, plus Stripe's passthrough. That's the deal. Free until you earn $500/month. Yours to leave any day.
V · The call
We built AGGREGATE+ for the operator-creator.
If you've been waiting for a serious back office for your independent media business — one ledger, one money page, every dollar accounted for — here it is.
— The AGGREGATE+ founders