Summary. Metafy is a marketplace where the best players in games like Pokemon and Clash Royale coach paying students, founded by Josh Fabian. It has paid $10 million to coaches, and every payout, from identity verification to tax reporting to next-day ACH, runs through Whop. If your software pays people rather than charging them, this is the story to read.
What Metafy was doing before Whop
The problem predates the company. Josh, who grew up in a small farm town in Pennsylvania, watched a Pokemon world champion charge $20 an hour for coaching while working in a warehouse. “$20 an hour. I was charging $100 an hour to coach Clash Royale and I wasn’t even the best player in the world. This guy was the world champion.”
Coaches who tried to sell on their own had to assemble a stack. In his words: “Four different platforms, four different logins, four different fee structures. And then you’ve gotta string them all together. That’s what the hell we’re fixing.” Linktree, Fiverr, Udemy, Patreon.
What changed on Whop
Metafy owns the marketplace, the booking and the student. Whop owns getting the coach paid. A coach verifies identity through Whop, the tax reporting is handled, and money moves by next-day ACH or an instant transfer.
That split matters. Payouts are where a marketplace drowns in compliance: identity checks in many countries, tax forms, failed bank transfers, fraud. Outsourcing that rail is what lets a small team pay thousands of coaches.
Metafy charges coaches a 15% platform fee, or 0% on Metafy Pro at $99 a month or $69 a month billed annually. That is Metafy’s pricing to its coaches, not Whop’s.
The numbers
Whop reports $10 million in total payouts to coaches, some partners earning $200,000 to $300,000 a year, and as much as $10,000 for a single two-hour group session. It does not report Metafy’s revenue, coach count or payout volume per month.
The article cites industry context: 2.69 billion gamers, 99.93% of streamers not earning a living wage, and a $138,000 average pro-gamer salary in 2025, up 25% year over year. Those are the market, not Metafy.
What I would tell a marketplace founder to copy
Separate what you must own from what you can rent. Metafy owns discovery, trust and the session. It rents the payout rail. If you are building a marketplace and writing your own KYC, stop and price the alternative.
Let the supply side tell the story. A world champion who went from $20 an hour in a warehouse to real coaching income is a better page than any feature list. Name the coach, show the rate, show the bookings.
Measure the two funnels separately. Students convert on one path, coaches onboard on another. Google Analytics 4 with Tag Manager, and a conversion event for each, is the minimum before you spend on either side.
Then put a Dollar-a-Day boost behind the coach clip that already got comments. Josh’s point that a coach does not need a massive audience to make real money applies to the founder too.
Who this is not for
Whop here is a payout, verification and tax layer, not the marketplace itself; you still build the product. The base rate is 2.7% + 30¢, 20 basis points under Stripe’s 2.9% + 30¢, and the optional layers, managed tax at 2%, orchestration at 0.8% and billing at 0.5%, can push the stack above Stripe. Financing requires $30,000 processed from 10 or more customers in 90 days and a dispute rate under 2%, and it is unavailable to gambling, sports betting, trading signals, credit offers and adult categories. Payout-only integrations are priced differently from checkout, so ask for the payout fee schedule before you compare it with a checkout stack.
If you were going to use Whop anyway
If you were going to sign up for Whop anyway, sign up through my link, dennisyu.com/go/whop, or send me your business name and email and I will submit the referral. Whop pays me a share of its profit on your account; your rate is the same 2.7% + 30¢ either way. In return my team at Local Service Spotlight sets up the AI agents that audit your public reputation, fix what they find, and keep it maintained: a personal brand analysis, Google Analytics 4, Tag Manager and Search Console with conversion events that actually fire, a Content Factory that turns one recording into a definitive article, clips and posts, and a weekly Metrics, Analysis, Action report. That is the work we normally charge software businesses for.
Source and disclosure
This story is retold from Whop’s own write-up, Metafy pays the world’s best gamers what they’re worth: and Whop powers every payout (2026-05-22, modified 2026-08-03), which you should read in full. I am a Whop partner and earn a share of Whop’s profit from businesses that sign up through my link. Whop did not pay for or review this article. See Whop for software and SaaS for the other software stories and my full notes on what Whop costs, and my main Whop page for the partner program.