Starving Artists vs Pls Donate (2026) -- Which Robux Earner Wins?

By Money Lord — Founder & Editor | Updated: August 22, 2026 · 8 min read

Last checked: August 22, 2026

Pls Donate wins, and in August 2026 it is not close. When we sampled both games on August 22, 2026 between 10:05 and 10:06 UTC, Pls Donate was holding 3,641–3,665 concurrent players while Starving Artists was holding 18–19. That is not a quiet hour. Starving Artists' peak over the previous 30 days was 83 players. Both games only pay you when another human walks up and buys something, so a game with nineteen people in it worldwide cannot pay you, no matter how good your art is. Pick Starving Artists only if you want the drawing canvas as a toy — and go in expecting an empty gallery.

Starving Artists vs Pls Donate -- The Numbers (August 22, 2026)

Stats pulled live from the Roblox games, votes, badges and game-pass APIs on August 22, 2026; peak-player figures from Rolimon's game pages for both titles the same day.

How the Robux Actually Moves

Neither game creates Robux. In both, every Robux you receive left another player's balance, and Roblox takes a cut on the way through. The difference is which Roblox product you are selling, and that decides how much you keep.

Starving Artists gives you an in-game canvas. You paint something, then link a Classic Shirt, a Classic T-shirt, or a Pass that you own to the finished artwork and set a price. The buyer is really buying that linked asset. The game's own Roblox description points you at the T-shirt creation page to make one, and warns that "Robux can take up to a week to receive."

Pls Donate skips the creation step. You claim a booth, write your own text on it, and list Passes for other players to buy. Separately, the game exposes Roblox's native player-to-player Robux transfer, which is a platform feature rather than something the game itself operates.

Here is the part almost every guide gets wrong. According to Roblox's own marketplace fees and commissions documentation, checked August 22, 2026, the two routes are not taxed the same:

• Selling a Pass: Roblox takes 30% and you keep 70%.
• Selling an avatar item (a Classic shirt or T-shirt) inside a game: the creator receives 30%, the owner of the game it was bought in receives 40%, and Roblox keeps 30%.

That second line is the single most important fact on this page. If you link a T-shirt to your painting in Starving Artists, 40% of your sale goes to Double Bandit Studios. If you link a Pass to the exact same painting instead, you keep 70%. Same artwork, same price, more than double the take. Roblox's progressive revenue share — which climbs from 30% at an item's price floor up to 70% at six times the floor — applies only to purchases made on the Marketplace website, never to in-game purchases.

One more thing worth knowing before you count on the money: Roblox documents a 30-day escrow hold on avatar-item commissions. Starving Artists' in-game description promising Robux "within a week" is optimistic against Roblox's own published timeline.

Player Counts: One of These Games Has Collapsed

We sampled Starving Artists four times on August 22, 2026 between 10:05:06 and 10:05:50 UTC and got 18, 19, 19 and 19 concurrent players. Concurrent counts on Roblox routinely swing about twofold between the daily trough and peak, so a single low reading proves nothing — but this is not a trough reading. Rolimon's peak ladder for the game, read the same morning, shows a 24-hour peak of 58, a 7-day peak of 75 and a 30-day peak of 83, against an all-time peak of 42,792 set back on March 6, 2022. The busiest the game has been all month is 83 people.

Servers cap at 18 players. At its 30-day peak, the entire global population of Starving Artists fits in roughly five servers. The "browse a gallery of dozens of artworks and compare prices" experience the game was built around is arithmetically impossible now.

The game is genuinely still live, not delisted and not renamed. Its place URL redirects to the real Starving Artists slug, and we control-tested that check against both a game known to be running and a dead place ID, which behave differently. Its badge data tells the same story: the game has only three badges, and the "Welcome!" badge was still awarded 1,822 times in the past day — a real but tiny trickle of new arrivals, consistent with a 5.45-minute average session and a population of about nineteen. Both of its event badges, from a May 2024 Garfield tie-in and a September 2024 Coldplay event, awarded zero in the past day.

Two more signals date the decline. The last engine update landed on June 1, 2026. And the game's seasonal Art Pass ladder has frozen: Art Pass Season 8 went on sale July 1, 2023 and is still the current season more than three years later, while Seasons 1 through 5 sit off sale behind it.

Pls Donate is the mirror image. It was updated on August 16, 2026, and its "Claim A Booth" badge was awarded 105,645 times in the past day alone. Its 30-day peak of 5,356 is roughly 65 times Starving Artists' 83.

Earning Potential in 2026

Older comparisons, including an earlier version of this page, argued that Starving Artists had the higher earning ceiling because skill translates into price. That argument depended on a busy gallery full of buyers, and that gallery is gone. Your income in either game is capped by how many people are standing in front of your booth, and on August 22, 2026 that is roughly nineteen players spread across the planet in Starving Artists versus several thousand in Pls Donate.

Be clear-eyed about both, though: neither is income. Both are player-to-player transfers dressed up as a game, the variance is enormous, and most players in both games earn nothing on most sessions.

There is also a hard rule that decides whether your Robux can ever become money. Roblox's support documentation states plainly that Robux received through a direct transfer is not eligible for the Developer Exchange program and can only be spent inside Roblox. Robux earned by selling a Pass is ordinary creator revenue and can go through DevEx if you meet the program's requirements. So if cashing out matters to you at all, sell a Pass and decline the transfer.

Game Passes: What Each Game Really Sells

We pulled both games' pass catalogues from the Roblox game-pass API on August 22, 2026 and filtered out the ones no longer for sale.

Starving Artists has 12 passes on sale: Frame Colors (99 Robux), Spray Paint (150), four booth skins — Galaxy, Cyber, Blossom and UFO Booth — at 199 each, Booth Radio! (199), Airbrush Mount (250), 2x Coins! (250), VIP (299), Donor Finder (299), and Art Pass Season 8 (399). Five earlier Art Passes, Seasons 1 through 5, are retired. It is worth noticing that the game sells a pass called Donor Finder for 299 Robux to help you locate buyers — at nineteen concurrent players, there is very little left to find.

Pls Donate has 7 on sale: Boombox Control (49 Robux), Donation Sign (99), Disguise Mask (299), Cloaking Device (399), Golf Cart (499), Booth Painter (699), and the Gigantic Donation Sign at 100,000 Robux — by far the most expensive item in either game. Spinning Wheel is off sale.

For the record, Pls Donate has never sold passes called "Bigger Booth", "Premium Location" or "Custom Effects". Those appear on a number of guide sites, including an earlier version of this page, and none of them exist. Its cheapest genuinely useful purchase is the 99-Robux Donation Sign. Our Pls Donate tier list ranks the passes that are actually worth the Robux.

What It Costs Before You Earn a Single Robux

Both games sit on top of Roblox platform rules that changed substantially in 2026, and the current rules are stricter than most guides admit. All of the following comes from Roblox's own Help Center, checked August 22, 2026:

• Roblox Plus replaced Premium. Roblox Plus launched globally on April 30, 2026, and Roblox Premium memberships can no longer be purchased.
• Sending Robux requires a subscription. Only Roblox Plus subscribers can send a Robux transfer. Receiving one does not require a subscription.
• Transfer limits. 500 Robux per day and 1,000 per month. Users in good standing with 2-Step Verification enabled get 5,000 per day and 10,000 per month.
• Age gates. Users 16 and over must complete Roblox's Age Check. Under-16s need a linked parent account, and a parent or caregiver must approve every transfer for users under 18.
• Transfers are final. They cannot be reversed or cancelled once sent. Roblox will never ask you to send Robux to verify an account — any in-game booth text claiming otherwise is a scam.
• Selling avatar items is itself gated. To publish and keep avatar assets on the Marketplace, Roblox requires a Roblox Plus subscription or a legacy Premium 1000/2200 membership — which means the Starving Artists T-shirt route now sits behind a paid subscription.
• Uploading needs ID. Uploading an avatar asset requires government-ID verification, either your own or through an ID-verified linked parent account. Classic shirts, T-shirts and pants each carry a 10-Robux refundable publishing advance.

Which Should YOU Play?

• You want anyone at all to see what you list: Pls Donate. This is the whole ballgame, and Starving Artists cannot compete at 18 players per server and 19 online.
• You just like drawing: Starving Artists still works fine as a pixel-art sketchpad, and you will have a server almost to yourself. Treat it as a toy, not a job.
• You want Robux you could eventually cash out: sell a Pass in either game. Never rely on the direct transfer feature, because transferred Robux is locked out of DevEx permanently.
• You want to keep the most per sale: link a Pass, not a T-shirt. In-game avatar-item sales hand 40% to the game's owner; passes do not.
• You are under 18 or not ID-verified: you cannot upload and sell avatar items at all. Passes on an experience you own are your only route, and transfers will need a parent's approval each time.
• You want codes: only Starving Artists has a code system, redeeming for Art Coins. See our Starving Artists codes list; Pls Donate has never had one, as our Pls Donate codes page explains.
• You want a busy social hub more than earnings: Pls Donate, comfortably. It is one of the most-visited experiences on Roblox at 5.21 billion lifetime visits.

More on Both Games

• Starving Artists hub — current status, updates and every guide we have.
• Starving Artists free Robux guide — how the art-linking and pricing actually work.
• Pls Donate hub — the game's live numbers and latest changes.
• Pls Donate free Robux guide — booth setup and pass pricing.
• Pls Donate vs Brookhaven RP and Starving Artists vs Build A Boat For Treasure — other pairings for these two.
• Complete 2026 free Robux guide — every legitimate method, ranked.