Planning ahead for your Ko-fi account
Ko-fi Labs Limited account cannot be transferred and have no beneficiary option — here is what you can do while the account is active
Ko-fi Help Center (support hub)
Ko-fi Support (no dedicated estate team published; submit a request through the support hub)
Because Ko-fi Labs Limited reviews transfer requests on a case-by-case basis, there is no guarantee that account will be transferred after death. Lifetime planning reduces dependence on that outcome.
How to protect your Ko-fi account
7 lifetime planning steps for your Ko-fi account:
Family sharing
Ko-fi has no family-sharing, team, or account-pooling feature, and the Terms of Service say nothing about transferring or assigning an account. Income never passes through Ko-fi — it is collected in the creator's own connected PayPal and/or Stripe account — so any sharing of the money happens at the PayPal or Stripe layer, not within Ko-fi.
Should you save your passwords for your family?
Some people store account passwords so a family member can sign in later. The practice has three practical limits:
- Two-factor authentication often blocks it. Most accounts require a second factor — a code sent to a phone, an authenticator app, a passkey, or a physical key. A saved password alone frequently does not grant access, and the recovery codes that would are easy to lose or let go stale.
- It usually conflicts with the platform's terms. Most operators prohibit account sharing and signing in as another person, including after a death. Stored credentials are not the operator's recognized access path, and using them can violate the terms of service.
- Operators provide other paths. Where an operator offers a designation tool — Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, a beneficiary designation — that mechanism grants access the operator recognizes. A password manager's own emergency-access or legacy feature passes credentials through a controlled process. Digital assets named in a will or trust give a fiduciary authority under each state's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA).
Frequently asked questions
Record which payment processors your page pays into — PayPal, Stripe, or both — because that is where your income actually lands. Note your Ko-fi page name and account email for your executor, list your active memberships and what they fund, note that your own paid Ko-fi subscription must be cancelled separately, and export any posts, supporter list, or transaction history you want preserved, because deleting a Ko-fi account permanently removes all of it.
No. Ko-fi has no beneficiary designation, no legacy contact, and no inactive-account feature. The substitutes are practical ones: written instructions for your executor, a digital-assets consent clause in your estate documents, and planning the PayPal or Stripe account that actually holds the money.
Recording that a Ko-fi account exists, alongside other accounts, gives a fiduciary the information needed to reach the operator through its official process.
Ko-fi does not support beneficiary designations. Unlike financial accounts, there is no way to name a beneficiary on this type of account.
Sources
Data sourced from Ko-fi Labs Limited primary sources (7 pages reviewed). How we research.
Ko-fi Help Center (support hub)
Ko-fi Support (no dedicated estate team published; submit a request through the support hub)
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