Redbubble vs Etsy comes down to one trade. Redbubble costs nothing and pays you a slice of a price it sets. Etsy costs money before your first sale, then pays you whatever is left of a price you set. I sell on both, I built both platforms’ tag rules into my own tool, and I pick Etsy for anyone who will treat it like a shop. If you have fewer than 20 finished designs, start on Redbubble for 90 days first. It is free, and it will tell you which designs deserve an Etsy listing fee.
Disclosure: This comparison mentions AutoKeyWorder, my own Chrome extension (marked (ad, own product)). There are no affiliate links to Redbubble, Etsy or any print provider, so no fee figure below is shaped by a commission.
Redbubble vs Etsy at a Glance
Verdict: pick Etsy with 20 or more designs. Pick Redbubble first with fewer.
| Redbubble | Etsy | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to open | $0 | Set-up fee up to $29, then $0.20 per listing |
| Who prints and ships | Redbubble | You, or a production partner such as Printify |
| Who sets the price | Redbubble sets the base, you add a markup | You |
| Platform cut | 50% of earnings (Standard), 20% (Premium), 0% (Pro) | 6.5% of the sale plus 3% + $0.25 processing |
| Tags | 15 tags, up to 50 characters each | 13 tags, up to 20 characters each |
| Buyer traffic | Far smaller | Roughly ten times Redbubble’s, by third-party estimates |
| Best first product | Stickers | Digital downloads, then POD shirts |
| Payout floor | $20 | None, Etsy pays out on a schedule you pick |
Both fee rows are current as of September 2026. Redbubble rewrote its fees in 2025, so most Redbubble vs Etsy pages still quote a monthly account fee that no longer exists. The fee section below uses Redbubble’s account fee page dated July 2026 and Etsy’s fee policy. If you only want Redbubble, my how to sell on Redbubble guide has the full setup.
What Does Each Platform Cost Before the First Sale?
Redbubble costs $0. The account, shop and uploads are all free, and Redbubble never bills you out of pocket. Every fee comes out of a sale that already happened.
Etsy charges before you sell anything. New shops pay a one-time set-up fee, which Etsy sets per country and which sat at up to $29 in the 2026 fee breakdowns I checked. After that, every listing costs $0.20 for four months or until it sells. Fifty designs on Etsy is $10 to list plus the set-up fee. Fifty designs on Redbubble is an afternoon.
That gap is why I tell people with a thin portfolio to start on Redbubble. Redbubble does not pay better. A listing fee on a design nobody wants is money gone, while Redbubble lets you find out which designs nobody wants for free.
The Redbubble half of that is what my extension does. AutoKeyWorder (ad, own product) is a Chrome extension that reads the image with AI vision and fills the title, main tag, fourteen supporting tags and description directly inside the Redbubble upload form, at roughly 5 seconds per image, with no CSV export and no re-import. AutoKeyWorder enforces the 15-tag, 50-character limit and strips Redbubble’s blocked product words before they reach the form. Install is free with 50 credits included: get AutoKeyWorder, or test one design with no install at autokeyworder.com/redbubble-tag-generator.
How Much Does Etsy Take From a $100 Sale?
On a $100 sale with free shipping, Etsy keeps about $9.95: a 6.5% transaction fee ($6.50), a 3% plus $0.25 payment processing fee ($3.25), and the $0.20 listing fee the sale uses up. Ship it with a $5 charge and the 6.5% applies to shipping too, pushing the cut to about $10.43. If the buyer came through Etsy’s Offsite Ads, add 12% to 15% of the order on top.
Shops under $10,000 in trailing sales pay 15% on any order that came through an Etsy ad and can opt out. Above $10,000 it drops to 12% and becomes mandatory. On a $100 shirt sale, that is $15 gone before your print partner gets paid.
What a $24 Shirt Actually Nets on Each Platform
Redbubble’s own example on its platform fee page is a Classic T-Shirt with a $20 base price shipping to the US. Set a 20% markup and the shirt lists at $24, leaving $4 as your margin before fees. This is what each tier keeps of that $4, from Redbubble’s account fee page:
| Account tier | Platform fee | You keep of $4 |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | 50% | $2.00 |
| Premium | 20% | $3.20 |
| Pro | 0% | $4.00 |
Push the markup to 30% on a Standard account and you still net $2.00, because the excess markup fee takes everything above the 20% line. So the Standard tier is the number that matters, and Redbubble says the tier is not based on sales. It is based on original work, clean files and honest tags, which means a beginner with five uploads can land in Premium. The tier rules are in my Redbubble guide.
Now take the same $24 shirt on Etsy through a print partner. Etsy does not set a base price, so the number depends on what your printer charges. I am using $12 for the blank plus print and $5 for shipping, the ballpark Printify shows for a standard cotton tee to the US. Treat those two figures as inputs, not facts, and plug in your own.
| Line | Etsy with a $12 print cost |
|---|---|
| Buyer pays | $24 + $5 shipping = $29 |
| Etsy transaction fee (6.5% of $29) | $1.89 |
| Payment processing (3% + $0.25) | $1.12 |
| Listing fee used up | $0.20 |
| Print partner (blank, print, shipping) | $17.00 |
| You keep | about $8.79 |
At the same sticker price, the shirt nets $2.00 on Redbubble Standard, $3.20 on Redbubble Premium, and roughly $8.79 on Etsy. Etsy pays roughly three to four times more per shirt. That is the honest headline of every Redbubble vs Etsy comparison.
That is only half the math. Redbubble’s $2.00 arrives with zero risk: no set-up fee, no listing fee, no customer service, no refund handling. Etsy’s $8.79 arrives after you paid to list, answered the buyer’s message about sizing, and ate the cost if the print came out wrong and your partner would not cover it.
Per shirt, Etsy wins. Per hour of your time, the gap is smaller than the table makes it look, and a shop with no sales still pays Etsy’s fees while it waits.
Do People Actually Make Money off Redbubble?
Yes, in tens of dollars a month for most shops, and I can show you mine. My Redbubble shop had 50 designs, 4,200 product views and 8 sales in its first 90 days, for $16 net. That is one sale for every 525 views. The designs that sold were the specific ones, a named dog breed and a named hobby. The generic motivational quotes sat at zero.
My Etsy number is not the same product, and I will not pretend it is. My Etsy shop sells digital bundles, not print on demand. It made 70 euros from 22 orders in the first quarter of 2026 without a single new upload that year. Those were residual sales on files I listed in 2025, the bundles from my Etsy digital art guide. So a digital listing on Etsy kept paying with no work, while print on demand on Redbubble paid a little for a lot of uploads. The fairest thing I can say for Redbubble is that it earned $16 from designs that cost me nothing to list.
Etsy rewards a listing that already found its buyer, for months. Redbubble rewards volume of decent specific designs, a little each. Neither pays rent from 50 designs.
Who Has the Buyers?
Etsy, by a wide margin. Third-party traffic estimates put Etsy at roughly ten times Redbubble’s monthly visits. None of those figures are audited, so treat the ratio as the fact, not any one number.
The more useful difference is who those visitors are. A Redbubble buyer arrived to browse designs, so a good design with good tags can sell to a stranger on day one. An Etsy buyer arrived to buy a thing, often with a gift in mind, and will compare your shirt against 40 others with reviews. New Etsy listings without reviews sit behind that wall for weeks. In my own Etsy shop a new listing took two to four weeks to show up in search at all. That is why the Etsy shop that pays you in month three is the one you listed in month one.
Can You Link Redbubble to Etsy?
No. There is no integration in either direction. Redbubble does not sync to Etsy, Etsy does not pull from Redbubble, and Etsy’s policy requires you to name your production partner, the company that prints and ships for you, on every print-on-demand listing. Redbubble is not a production partner you can name because Redbubble sells your product itself and never ships a blank order to your buyer.
If you want the same design on both, you upload it twice and write the tags twice under two different rule sets. I automated that part, and it is the next section.
Tags: 15 of 50 Characters vs 13 of 20
This difference never makes the comparison tables, yet it changes how you write a listing. I read both upload forms line by line when I built the Redbubble and Etsy modes of my tool, so the limits below are the ones the forms enforce today, not the ones in old guides.
Redbubble gives you one main tag and 14 supporting tags, each up to 50 characters, and reads title, tags and description with roughly equal weight. There is no category tree and no ad slot. If the buyer’s word is missing from those three fields, the design does not exist. Redbubble also treats tag spam as a Standard-tier signal, so “cute funny gift shirt sticker” in one tag costs you half your income for the whole shop, every listing included. Words like gift, sticker, t-shirt and best seller describe the product, not the design, and belong nowhere in the tags.
Etsy gives you exactly 13 tags of up to 20 characters, all lowercase, with no duplicates. Twenty characters forces phrases rather than single words: “corgi dad shirt” fits, “corgi dad birthday gift shirt” does not. Etsy’s own Handbook wants the title under 15 words and around 49 to 61 characters, even though the field allows 140, and Etsy search leans on the first words of that title. Etsy does have categories and attributes, so dropdowns do a chunk of the work Redbubble tags do.
The same design therefore gets two different keyword sets. On Redbubble: 15 single-concept words, subject first, audience last, no product words. On Etsy: 13 buyer phrases of 20 characters, with the strongest three repeated in the first 60 characters of the title.
For the Etsy half, the extension does not fill the Etsy form. The 13-tag, 20-character set comes from the separate Etsy listing page at autokeyworder.com/etsy, which researches the tags and writes the title to Etsy’s own length guidance. I keep the two apart on purpose. An Etsy tag pasted into Redbubble is too short and too phrasey, while a Redbubble tag pasted into Etsy gets cut at character 20.
Redbubble or Etsy for Stickers?
Redbubble, by a wide margin for a beginner. Redbubble’s pricing examples use a $2 base price for a US sticker, with a bulk discount once a buyer takes five or more, so buyers grab stickers in handfuls from artists they have never heard of. Stickers were the first thing to move in my shop.
Etsy stickers are a real market too, though the economics are different. A $4 sticker on Etsy carries the same $0.20 listing fee and $0.25 fixed processing fee as a $24 shirt, so fixed fees eat a bigger share of each sale. Etsy sticker shops that work sell packs, print at home or through a partner, and live on repeat buyers and reviews. That is shop work. If you want to upload stickers and walk away, Redbubble. If you want to build a sticker brand, Etsy, later.
Redbubble Pros and Cons vs Etsy Pros and Cons
| Redbubble | Etsy | |
|---|---|---|
| Pros | Free to open and list. Printing and shipping handled. Stickers sell to strangers. Premium tier depends on work quality, not sales. | You set the price and keep three to four times more per shirt. A listing that lands sells for months. You own the shop name and reviews. |
| What sucks | Standard tier is a 50% cut you cannot out-sell. Default 10% markup halves your margin. $20 payout floor. Redbubble owns the buyer. | You pay before you sell. Offsite Ads can take 15%. Production partner disclosure, messages and refunds are yours. Zero reviews against shops with 4,000. |
Both. Neither publishes a sales ranking, so every “best sellers” list you read is a guess. Both platforms also mark down tag spam.
What I Actually Do
I run a Redbubble shop, a TeePublic shop and an Etsy shop. The workflow is the same design pushed through three tag rule sets.
The design is a transparent PNG at 4500 x 5400 pixels. On Redbubble I open the Add New Work page, the extension fills the title, main tag, fourteen supporting tags and description, then I set the markup to 20% and publish. It takes about a minute per design, most of it checking the sticker preview. Before the tool, one Redbubble upload took me around 12 minutes, and 8 of those were tags.
Etsy gets the designs that already sold somewhere. If a design sells on Redbubble or TeePublic, it has proven it has a buyer. That is the one I spend $0.20 and a production partner setup on. The Etsy tags come from the Etsy page, 13 phrases of 20 characters, and the title gets rewritten to Etsy’s length. The design side of that, from prompt to transparent PNG, is in my AI t-shirt design for Etsy walkthrough. I do not list everything on Etsy. I list the winners.
That order is the real answer to Redbubble vs Etsy. Redbubble is the free test. Etsy is where the tested designs go to earn a margin worth the fees.
Which One Should You Start With?
Etsy, if you have 20 or more designs you believe in and two hours a week to run a shop. It pays three to four times more per shirt, buyers keep paying for months on a listing that lands, and nothing you build on Redbubble comes with you.
Redbubble, if you have fewer than 20 designs, or if the phrase “production partner” made you tired. It costs nothing, shows you which designs sell, and pays out from day one instead of after a listing fee. Set every markup to 20%, fill all 15 tags with words a buyer types, and expect stickers before shirts.
Then move the winners. It cost me $16 and 90 days to learn that.