On an average evening, Suicide Sage spends an hour on her phone, scrolling through her DMs, scheduling content and checking to make sure that her subs have logged their daily tasks in the Obedience app she has them download.
Did they brush their teeth that morning? Did they get to work on time? Did they dress how she told them to?
Each of their responses inform punishments or rewards they could receive from her, in the form of paywalled content on the subscription platform OnlyFans.
Suicide Sage — the stage name she uses on digital platforms and at the State Line strip club where she works — is a Spokane-based dancer. When the stages at her club closed down due to COVID-19, Sage’s options to pay her bills and her tuition were extremely limited.
“I pretty much had no other option. I started OnlyFans as an emergency method of having money,” she told RANGE. “It was very hard to get hired for jobs during that time because everybody was out of work.”
(Sage did try to work as a bikini barista at Black Sheep Coffee Co., but like other strippers we’ve interviewed, she said she was turned away because she was a dancer.)
When the stages reopened, OnlyFans went from a lifeline to a side hustle: “I just kept doing it because once you get a paycheck — if you’re comfortable with the job — there’s no reason to stop.”
Three of the four other local OnlyFans creators RANGE interviewed for this story feel similarly, that selling sexually explicit content on the app was a critical tool for surviving the pandemic, but now serves as more of a safety net or way to earn discretionary income.
It’s also safer than other forms of sex work.
Though Washington is ostensibly a progressive state with constitutionally enshrined protections for marginalized groups of people, those protections frequently aren’t extended to sex workers. Prostitution is still illegal here, and until new legislation passed last year, state regulations governing strip clubs put dancers at increased risk of economic exploitation.
In recent years, even progressive bastions like Seattle have targeted sex workers with unsafe policies like reinstating the Stay Out of Area Prostitution (SOAP) zone, which criminalized “prostitution loitering.”
State regulations combined with the 2018 passage of the pair of federal laws known as FOSTA–SESTA, which severely limited the use of online platforms like Craigslist and Backpage for sex work, left those who used digital marketplaces to vet potential clients and safely arrange meet-ups at a higher risk of violence and sex trafficking.
Enter OnlyFans.
The App
Though it launched in 2016, the pandemic was the catalyst for the explosion of the 18+ subscription site OnlyFans.
In December 2019, 17 million people used the platform. By the end of 2020, that number had ballooned to almost 100 million users. The spike in the number of creators on OnlyFans was also dramatic, jumping from 348,000 in 2019 to 1,618,000 in 2020.
Since then, OnlyFans has dominated the digital marketplace as the tool for sex workers to create and sell content, with over 4 million creators reported at the end of 2023.
It’s unclear how many Washington or Spokane users and creators there are; OnlyFans told RANGE in a written statement that they “do not share breakdowns of creators by locations or earnings.” NewsWeek estimated Washington had about 7 creators per 100,000 residents, which would put Spokane at around 15 creators.
How it works
For those of you unfamiliar with the platform, here’s a quick primer on how it works (no judgement if you don’t need a tutorial).
Creators make an account, verifying their age and identity. Then, they can start posting content of most kinds — back in 2021, OnlyFans threatened policy changes that would have prohibited most explicit content but then quickly pivoted.
While OnlyFans is synonymous with “sexually explicit” for most people, there are users making more PG content like cooking videos, posting explicit historical art pieces or baiting subscribers with the allure of sex then under-delivering, like Disney channel celebrity Bella Thorne who allegedly became a millionaire in a single day by teasing explicit content.
In order to make money, creators have to really hustle for subscribers.
The app’s search function is severely limited, so to reach any kind of success, creators have to market their content on other platforms like “Not Safe For Work” groups on Reddit, Instagram and Twitter (we’re still not calling it X, sorry/not sorry, Elon) or get really good at Search Engine Optimization to boost their content to the top of Google search results.
The OnlyFans revenue model functions more like a subscription service or an app store than most other social media — which tends to generate revenue from advertising.
Before subscribing to a creator, then, users need to not only sign up for an account, verifying their age and identity. They also have to put in payment information.
The economics of OnlyFans
Once a creator has set up their account and found a few followers, there’s a few paths to making money.
The simplest option is to set a base subscription fee — anywhere between $4.99 and $50 a month — but creators can also separate subscriptions into different tiers, charging more for higher tiers with additional benefits, like discounts on custom content (photos or videos created upon specific request from subscribers) or priority messaging with the creator.
Creators can also make subscriptions to their account free — a strategy some use to rapidly build a user base — and then work to convert those free members to paid subscribers once they’re hooked by offering better content behind a paywall.
Another tool is pay-per-view (PPV) content. These can be bundles of images, videos or even audio recordings. A creator might post a series of pictures in a bikini for free, then lock nude images from the same shoot behind a PPV. The most expensive form of PPV content is typically custom content, made specifically at the request of an individual user. These one-off transactions (as opposed to subscription fees) made up over 60% of spending on the site in 2024, according to media analyst Matthew Ball.
How profitable any of this is for creators oscillates wildly.
Representatives from OnlyFans like to highlight statistics that sell an image of opportunity, telling The New York Times in 2021 that over 300 creators had become millionaires from their work on the site and telling Variety that they’d paid out a total of $5.32 billion to creators in 2023.
But for most creators, the allure of millions is just an illusion — the app functions just like most other capitalistic systems, concentrating the wealth in the hands of the 1%: the owners of OnlyFans have made $1.1 billion in dividends, and most of the payouts are concentrated in the top 1% of creators, who made, on average, roughly $49,000 annually each.
The most famous OnlyFans creators can make millions of dollars a month, but the vast majority make pocket change.
In 2023, the average creator made just $1,300 a year, or $108 a month, and for many creators, the numbers shake out much worse. One creator we interviewed is in the top 71% percentile (meaning she makes more than 71% of all creators on the app) and she currently has just two active subscribers.
As with many platforms designed to facilitate sales, the app takes 20% of everything creators earn. Some content creators we talked to didn’t like the high percentage, but others said the cut “felt fair,” and was comparable to other platforms like Patreon, and in some cases was actually more generous than other options like camming sites that can take up to 50% of what a creator makes.
We interviewed five Spokane OnlyFans creators about their real, human experiences with the app to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the pros, cons and curiosities.
For Suicide Sage, the term “subs” has a double meaning. Right now she has about 35 people paying a monthly fee to subscribe to her OnlyFans account (though this number fluctuates frequently) and some of them pay her extra for her “gentle mommy domming” services, a sexual dynamic where the term “sub” describes a subservient who follows the orders of their “dom,” which stands for the dominant in the relationship.
Sage markets her digital niche with a header image of her dressed as bondage Catwoman with a leather whip, wrapped tightly from head to toe in metal-studded black latex.
She sets her monthly subscription fee low, at $7.99 a month, and makes the majority of her money on the app by posting custom content her subs request and pay extra for.
While the app helped her financially weather the pandemic, it’s now a way to earn “extra spending money.” Sage spends most of her time dancing, but still manages to turn the 3 or 4 hours a week she spends on OnlyFans into between $500 and $1,000 a month.
“I sell what I have energy for,” she told RANGE.
She approaches the work strategically, seeing where she can charge for a video from her backlog of already created content that fits a specific request in her DMs. Sometimes, when the timing is right, Sage will do photo or video shoots with other OnlyFans creators, a practice that can be particularly lucrative. Once, Sage made nearly $600 in one night for a video she filmed with someone else.
The standard etiquette for this practice is that each creator gets to post it on their own page and keep whatever they make, without comparing numbers, so no one’s feelings get hurt, Sage said.
Sage says she has noticed subtle cycles to the growth and churn of her subscriber base. The summer months are usually a little bit better, maybe “because you can only do so many photoshoots in the snow.”
For Sage, the app has mostly only had upsides — the taxes are easy, she can write-off travel expenses if she films with another creator during the trip and she can make passive income with whatever leftover energy she has after dancing — but there is one major drawback: creepy men in her DMs.
Since the app allows users to set an anonymous username, people can obscure their identity and send vulgar, inappropriate and threatening messages to creators. The app’s functionality allows creators to quickly block subscribers who message through the app from viewing their content again, but there isn’t an easy solution when those users message from different platforms, or approach you in real life.
This quirk of the app resulted in a nightmarish scenario for Sage: “I had an uncle admit to me that he was on there” — meaning he was subscribed to her content.
Because he messaged her through Facebook, it took her months to figure out which anonymous username he hid behind so she could block him.
But Sage doesn’t linger on the negatives. The thousands of dollars she makes every year creating content helped her pay off her schooling.
“It’s been a bit of an ego boost,” Sage said.
Miss Ellie Fox has apps for her apps.
Like Sage, Fox also downloaded OnlyFans in 2020 as a way to make money from home during the pandemic. She immediately invested in classes from more experienced creators showing how to maximize search results for her profile, how to advertise and how to fit content creation into her schedule.
She’s a shrewd businesswoman who makes 100% of her income from professional performing gigs — a combination of burlesque dancing, mermaiding, cosplay and OnlyFans — but she’s also a stay-at-home mom. Minimizing effort and maximizing profit is key to balancing her responsibilities, allowing her to film and post content in the short windows of time between mom duties.
Fox takes advantage of tech to analyze social media performance and make photoshoots easier. Right now, she’s running an Instagram analytics test where she posts different kinds of content each week to look at engagement on highly edited photos versus more natural shots with minimal filters.
Over coffee, she demonstrated LensBuddy, an app on her phone that takes hundreds of photos in one session with a brief pause in between for you to switch poses.
It shouts encouragement at you, like “You go, Glenn Coco!”
Then, at the end of the timer, the app makes it easy for Fox to pull the best shots into other photo editing apps like Canva to tweak, touch up or make collages out of before posting them to Instagram, OnlyFans or both.
On Instagram, she might post a picture in her bedazzled lingerie and flowy robes that she often wears for burlesque routines. For $10 a month, fans of Fox can see her stripped down to her pasties (decorated nipple covers), “naked on mountain Spokane,” or topless in front of major landmarks — photos she takes during roadtrips she routinely makes to get from burlesque gig to burlesque gig, performing across the Pacific Northwest from Spokane to Seattle to Nelson, B.C.
Most of Fox’s income comes from her burlesque dancing now, and she’s supported by a loving husband, but like other creators we interviewed, her family’s economic stability during the worst of the pandemic was reliant on OnlyFans and shooting live video on camming sites. She also used it to keep connecting with fans of her dancing, posting full burlesque acts behind the monthly subscription paywall.
“My mom was going through kidney failure during the pandemic. She had her groceries delivered and then left them outside for two hours to make sure there were no germs on it,” Fox said. “So whenever we were broadcasting our burlesque shows [on OnlyFans], she would watch them from home and send me money to tip [Fox and her costars].”
And though OnlyFans has taken a backseat for Fox now — she’s mostly quit posting on her more x-rated account — by posting just when she has time or fulfilling special requests from subscribers if they land in her DMs, Fox is able to “squirrel away” a little money she can use on special things, like a summer vacation for the family. And even if it’s not her main priority or sole job, Fox said she’ll keep doing it as long as it fits in her life.
“ I enjoy the benefits of it, from the pay and the attention. I have gotten so much out of it just confidence-wise, that I’ll keep doing it,” Fox said. “I’m gonna look back at that in 25 years and be like: I was hot.”
Allison Bossanova loves her husband. She also loves having sex with her husband, on camera.
She says it’s “a very sacred thing,” for her — almost a spiritual experience. It’s also something she can sell and make money from on OnlyFans.
It’s sort of an ideal set up for her: during the day, Bossanova works a typical job. At night, she makes extra cash by posting explicit videos of her and her husband.
“I’m just a whore, and I’m going to make and record videos anyway with my partner, with my loved ones,” Bossanova said (she also has a girlfriend she’s considering shooting content with). “I’m pretty much just doing what I would already be doing and then making something out of it.”
When Bossanova first downloaded OnlyFans, it wasn’t the casual, supplementary thing it is now for her.
Like Sage, she’d been dancing at the State Line strip club, paying her way through college on a few hours a week of dancing. For both of them, that income went away overnight during the pandemic.
“OnlyFans just seemed like the right choice,” she said. “I needed another way to make money while in school.”
Bossanova survived the pandemic by posting regularly on the app, but after a year and a half of using it, she took a break, realizing she’d been pushing some of her own boundaries and doing things she didn’t feel comfortable with.
In 2023, Bossanova decided to try OnlyFans again, this time more for fun. Because she isn’t reliant on the income from her labor, it’s less stressful. Like the others, her subscriber count also fluctuates earning her between $100 to $300 a month.
By taking the pressure off, Bossanova says her attitude has shifted. “It’s like making money as a benefit of something I’d pretty much already be doing. She doesn’t withdraw her earnings from the app until she has something big she wants or needs, like a car bill or a dance costume.
Her next big purchase?
“Vampire fangs,” Bossanova said. “ If I want a nice new thing, I’ll use my OnlyFans to pay for that.”
His day job as an accountant might be standard, but Saint Valor’s side hustle is anything but.
Unlike the other creators we interviewed, Valor is new to OnlyFans, having just started about eight months ago, and his account is free to subscribe to. Every Thursday, he posts solo videos or audio pornography free for any OnlyFans account holders to watch or listen to. His hope is that consumers of his content get hooked, and transition to paying customers who will buy custom content from him.
Valor also makes money off explicit content filmed with other OnlyFans creators, and by selling “genital ratings,” where he’ll rate the appearance of a subscriber’s nether regions: $10 for a text rating, $20 for a video and $30 for a video where Valor himself is nude.
Because he has a full time job, Valor takes advantage of OnlyFans’ scheduling tools. He’ll “sit down for an hour or two, set everything up and then not have to worry about it,” for a week.
Then, because he’s still actively growing his audience, Valor moves on to marketing his profile. Twitter and Reddit are the platforms where he gets the most traction right now, especially, posting videos to NSFW subreddits.
While Sage, Bossanova and Fox all told RANGE that they had met many of their subscribers in real life, Valor’s audience is mostly anonymous, choosing to go by randomized screen names.
For the most part, his interaction with the app and with his audience is positive, but some of the DMs he gets are “very aggressive and creepy,” Valor said. “They don’t realize it’s an actual person behind the computer that they’re messaging.”
He hopes that people who do use OnlyFans take the time to remember that creators are people who deserve respect too.
While Valor hasn’t even hit his one-year anniversary on the platform yet, he’s building his following in the hope that one day, he’ll make more from performing than from accounting.
That doesn’t mean his inner number-cruncher doesn’t also see the benefit. On OnlyFans, “all the money goes to me,” Valor said. “There’s no exploitation, it cuts out the middleman.”
Bunny Delux was working for the Spokane Public School District in 2020, a steady job she paired with ten hours a week of caregiving. COVID left Delux, a single mom of two, underemployed at both jobs.
The caregiving work was “not enough for three people to live on,” so she looked for other options to pay her mortgage.
“I had thousands of nudes on my phone,” Delux said, so she signed up for OnlyFans. It was a natural fit: “nudes behind a paywall.”
She advertised on her personal Facebook and Instagram, a strategy that paid off with an immediate influx of subscribers — “all the dudes that had always wanted to see me naked, but never had the audacity to ask.”
The $600 Delux made each month from the app in those early days, paired with 10 hours a week caregiving, was usually enough to survive. During a few particularly unstable months, though, Delux turned to other options, like finding a sugar daddy on the app Seeking Arrangements.
“I’m not opposed to full-service sex work,” Delux said. “It’s just the risks outweigh the benefits at this point.”
Once restrictions lifted, Delux’s situation changed. For a while, she worked at a dispensary, now she’s doing full-time caregiving. OnlyFans and other sex work like sugar-babying has taken a backseat.
“I got in an argument with my sugar-daddy about Joe Rogan on the way home from vacation,” she said. “I just have run out of patience with old men for now.”
Still, Delux isn’t ready to delete the app altogether. She has a connective tissue disorder she described as a “dynamic disability.”
“It’s literally a roll of the dice how disabled I’m gonna be any day,” she said. Having a menu of options of sex work she can turn to is a critical safety net for her — if she had to take a week off of her day job, she could be active on OnlyFans from bed, posting from her backlog of content and marketing on other social media platforms.
She still posts photos on the app occasionally, making about $20 a month — a small sum that still puts Delux in the top 29% of creators on the app.
”It’s my personal little amusement,” Delux said. “At this point, I have two subscribers. I know exactly who both of them are, bless their hearts. I love them.”
Whether she’s posting on OnlyFans, performing at local burlesque shows or taking on other, more full-service sex work like sugar-babying, Delux lives her life by one motto.
“ Ask not what you can do for the patriarchy, but what the patriarchy can do for you,” she said. “I’m going to work the system I live in.”
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