Whop Basics

You just saw how Stripe lets your app take payments. Whop comes at it from a totally different angle. Stripe hands you payment tools to wire into your own app, and Whop gives you a whole place to sell with payments already built in.

What Is Whop?#

Whop is a platform for selling things online. Whop's own docs describe its mission as "to deliver everyone a sustainable income." In plain English? You sign up, describe what you sell, set a price, and Whop gives you a checkout page people can pay at.

Here's the part that matters when you're brand new... Whop does a LOT for you. It hosts the product, runs the checkout, takes the payment and keeps track of who paid. It also handles who should have access to what. With Stripe you build most of those pieces yourself.

What You Can Sell on Whop#

Whop's Get Started page lists nine business models it supports. Here they are, summarized from Whop's own descriptions.

Business model	What it covers
Educational programs	Sell courses, workshops, and other educational programs
Agency services	Send invoices, chat with clients, and get paid
Coaching	Charge for your services and organize your clients in one spot
Newsletters	Publish long form writing and charge subscribers for exclusive content
Paid groups	Build a paid community where members connect
SaaS	Launch your app with built-in payments and user management
Events	Run paid masterminds and events, and give attendees one place to chat
DTC Ecommerce	Sell physical products online with a social layer built in
Brick and Mortar	Accept in-store payments and manage orders for a physical location

So Whop goes way past digital downloads. That list reaches into services, physical products and even in-store sales.

The Words Whop Uses#

Whop has a handful of words you'll see EVERYWHERE. Learn them once and the dashboard and the docs get much easier to read.

Step 1. Account (your business)#

This is your business on Whop. The developer docs call it an account and give it an ID that starts with biz_. It owns your products, your API keys and your money. Older parts of the API still say "company" for the same thing, so don't panic when you see both words.

Step 2. Product#

The thing you sell. A product holds the name, description, images and the pricing options a buyer can pick from.

Step 3. Plan (also called a variant)#

One way to buy a product, with its own price and billing. Say a product has a monthly option and a yearly option. Each one is a plan. The newer docs call these variants, but their IDs still start with plan_, and the API still uses the word plan in places (naming things is hard, apparently).

Step 4. Membership#

What a buyer gets when they pay. A membership ties a person to what they bought, and it has a status that says whether their access is valid right now.

Step 5. Experience#

A piece of content or an app inside what you sell, like a course or a chat. A product connects to one or more experiences, and a membership to that product is what lets someone in.

How Whop Differs From Stripe#

Whop and Stripe both get you paid online. They just start from opposite ends.

Stripe is a payments API. You build your own app with your own login, your own database and your own pages. Then you wire Stripe in to handle the card part. Stripe charges the card and tells your app what happened. Deciding who gets access is on you.

Whop is a place to sell with payments built in. You can sell without writing a single line of code. Whop gives you the product page, the checkout, the customer accounts and the access control. And if you're a developer, you can still hook Whop up to your own app through its API.

	Stripe	Whop
What it is	A payments API you add to your app	A selling platform with payments included
Do you need your own app?	Yes, usually	No, but you can connect one
Who hosts the checkout?	Stripe hosts it, or you build one with Stripe's tools	Whop hosts it, or you embed Whop's checkout on your site
Who tracks access?	You do, in your own database	Whop does, through memberships
Who tells your server about payments?	Stripe webhooks	Whop webhooks

When Whop Makes Sense#

Whop is a good fit when you want to start selling FAST and you'd rather not build a checkout, a member area and access control yourself. A course, a paid community or a newsletter can run on Whop without any code.

Stripe is a good fit when you already have your own app and want full control over how payments fit into it. You're trading speed for control.

Plenty of developers mix both ideas. They host the checkout on Whop, keep their own app, and use Whop's API and webhooks to find out who paid. The next two lessons show you both halves of that.

TL;DR#

• Whop is a platform for selling online with payments, checkout and access built in
• Whop's docs list nine business models, from courses and paid groups to SaaS, events and physical products
• Your business is an account, what you sell is a product, a plan or variant sets the price, and a membership is what a buyer gets
• Stripe is a payments API you wire into your own app, while Whop gives you the store and the checkout
• You can use Whop with no code, or use it for payment processing only and deliver your product somewhere else
• Check Whop's Fees page for current fees instead of trusting any number you read anywhere else

What's Next?#

Next up you'll set up a Whop business, create your first product, give it a price and get a checkout link you can share...