Purple Garden is great if you want a polished app to put you in front of customers you've never met. It's less great when you try to find out what you'll actually be paid: the platform's published payment policy lists a commission fee, a connection fee, and a handling fee per session — without publishing the percentages. Its sister app Purple Ocean is more forthcoming: those help docs state advisors earn 36% of the order total. Advisors on Purple Garden report economics in the same neighborhood as the big psychic marketplaces, which is to say: the platform's share of your reading is bigger than yours.
Below are six alternatives ranked for working advisors in 2026 — with one honest caveat throughout. Most alternatives don't bring you customers the way Purple Garden's app does. If you have no audience of your own, a marketplace is still your best option. If you have a following anywhere — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube — you're likely leaving most of your revenue on the table.
What Purple Garden actually costs an advisor
Three things matter beyond the headline commission. First, opacity: as of 2026, Purple Garden does not publish advisor commission rates; you learn your real economics from your own statements. Second, payout friction: payments run through PayPal with a roughly two-week clearance on earned revenue, a $35 minimum withdrawal, and a $1 fee per PayPal payout. Third — and biggest — ownership: the customer belongs to the app. Reviews, rankings, badges, and the relationship itself live on Purple Garden, and its terms restrict taking those customers elsewhere. Leave, and you start from zero.
The 6 best Purple Garden alternatives, ranked
1. Cheddify — best if you have any audience of your own
Cheddify flips the model: instead of joining a catalog of advisors, you get one link for your bio. A client taps it, lands on your page alone, and pays as a guest — no account, no app download — to call you live per minute, book ahead, or send a paid DM. You set your per-minute rate, minimum duration, and optional fixed-price blocks. The fee is flat and public: 20% plus $2 per paid call, so you keep about 80% (a ~3% processing fee is billed to the buyer on top, not to you). Payouts go through Stripe — no $35 threshold, no payout fee ledger. Every client is yours: your list, your relationship, your rules. The honest trade-off: Cheddify brings you zero customers. It monetizes the audience you already have, which is why it's free to claim and works best run alongside marketplace income. See how it works.
2. Purple Garden — still the best if you have no audience at all
Fair is fair: Purple Garden's app is genuinely good at converting cold traffic, the video-reading format suits advisors with screen presence, and its badge system rewards consistency. If you can't yet generate your own bookings, an undisclosed commission on real customers beats a great rate on nobody. Treat it as paid distribution while you build a following you own.
3. Keen — the biggest marketplace, published (low) math
Keen has the deepest customer pool in the category and lets advisors set their listed per-minute rate. Its published earnings calculation, as of 2026, has advisors keeping roughly 46% after platform fees. Bigger pond, similar split. Full breakdown: Keen alternatives.
4. Kasamba — chat-first marketplace, advisors report 35–45%
Kasamba's strength is high-intent chat traffic around love and relationships. Industry write-ups report advisors keep roughly 35–45%, and the first three minutes with each new customer are free — unpaid reading time that's effectively your marketing spend. Details: Kasamba alternatives.
5. Etsy — for written and recorded readings
If you sell email readings, recorded pulls, or birth-chart write-ups, Etsy's search traffic is real and its fees (listing fee plus transaction percentage) are far gentler than any psychic marketplace. No live calls, so it complements rather than replaces a live-reading channel.
6. DIY: website + scheduler + Zoom
Highest theoretical keep, highest friction. A Squarespace page, Calendly, Zoom, and Stripe invoices can work for booked sessions — but there's no live per-minute meter, no guest checkout for impulse bookings from a TikTok viewer, and you chase payment yourself. The mechanics of doing this well are covered in how to charge for video calls.
Side-by-side comparison
| Platform | Advisor keeps | Who brings the clients | Sets own rate | Owns client list | Payout schedule |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cheddify | ~80% (20% + $2/call; buyer pays ~3% processing) | You (your bio link) | Yes | Yes | Stripe payouts |
| Purple Garden | Not published (sister app docs cite 36%) | Purple Garden | Within platform tiers | No | PayPal, ~2-week clearance, $35 min, $1 fee |
| Keen | ~46% after fees (published calc, as of 2026) | Keen | Yes (listed rate) | No | Per advisor payment terms |
| Kasamba | ~35–45% (advisors report) | Kasamba | Yes (listed rate) | No | Net of fees, per advisor terms |
| Etsy | ~90%+ minus fees (delivered readings only) | Etsy search + you | Yes | Partially | Etsy Payments schedule |
| DIY site + Zoom | ~97% minus tool costs | You | Yes | Yes | Your processor's schedule |
The payout math, worked
Take a video advisor charging $5.00/minute for a 15-minute reading. The customer pays $75.00.
- On a marketplace paying out 36% — the figure Purple Garden's sister app publishes, since Purple Garden itself doesn't — the advisor keeps about $27.00, then waits out a two-week clearance and a $35 withdrawal minimum.
- On Cheddify, the advisor keeps 80% of $75.00 ($60.00) minus the $2 call fee: $58.00, paid out via Stripe, with the buyer's ~3% processing fee billed on top of their total, not out of yours.
Same fifteen minutes, roughly $31 difference. Four such readings a week is over $6,400 a year — the cost of letting a marketplace own clients you could have reached from your own bio.
The migration play: run both, convert what's yours
- Keep your Purple Garden presence. Marketplace income is real income; nothing here requires quitting.
- Claim your free Cheddify link and put it in every bio — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, email signature. It costs nothing to exist.
- Convert your audience, not their customers. Purple Garden's terms restrict moving its customers off-platform, and you should respect that — those customers are the product Purple Garden's marketing paid for. Your followers are different: when someone who found you on social asks for a reading, send them to your link, where you keep ~80% and their contact info stays with you.
- Let the list compound. Every own-link reading adds a client you can rebook directly — the asset no marketplace will ever hand you.
Building your practice from scratch? Our sister site covers the craft side: how to become a psychic. Doing diligence on us? Read is Cheddify legit and Cheddify reviews.
Who should stay on Purple Garden
Advisors with no social presence, no client list, and no plan to build either — for them, Purple Garden's cold-traffic engine is worth its undisclosed price. Everyone else should at least know the number they're accepting. When a platform won't publish what you keep, that itself is information.