Gumroad vs Payhip vs Etsy vs Ko-fi vs Lemon Squeezy: which is better for digital downloads?

Lemon Squeezy keeps the most of a standard $29 digital download, at $27.05, and Gumroad direct keeps the least at $24.46. The spread across these five platforms is $2.59 on a single sale, which is $259 a month at a hundred sales, and roughly a week of unpaid work a year if you price the difference in hours.

I sold on Gumroad for a year and wrote up what that year taught me. The other four I have priced out rather than sold on, and I say so because most comparison articles do not. Every number below comes from the same fee engine behind our platform fee comparison, rechecked on September 21, 2026.

Which platform keeps the most of a $29 sale?

Lemon Squeezy, among these five, for a US card buyer. It keeps $27.05 of a $29 sale because its 5% + $0.50 fee already includes card processing. Payhip's free plan and Ko-fi's free tier tie at $26.41, Etsy follows at $25.79, and Gumroad direct comes last of the standard sales at $24.46.

Net payout by sale price, US buyer paying by card:

Notice what happens down the $9 column. The spread narrows to $1.75 in absolute terms but widens as a share: Gumroad takes 21.8% of a $9 sale and 13.6% of a $119 one. Cheap products are where platform choice actually bites, and cheap products are what most first-time sellers list.

At what volume does a paid plan start paying for itself?

This is the table the comparison genre leaves out, and it is the only number that changes what you should do. Three of these platforms sell a subscription that lowers or removes the per-sale cut. Whether that is a discount or a tax depends entirely on how much you sell, and nobody publishes the threshold, so I generated it from the fee engine.

Monthly unit volume at which the paid plan first beats the free one:

Read one row and the pricing pages stop being abstract. Payhip Plus is a good deal for someone selling 20 copies a month of a $49 course and a bad deal for someone selling 20 copies of a $9 template, even though both sellers see the same "2% instead of 5%" on the pricing page. The percentage is the same. The fixed $29 is not.

Ko-fi Gold is the outlier: at $12 a month it clears at nine sales, which is low enough that most shops with any traction should be on it. That is a far more useful sentence than "Ko-fi charges 5%", and it took a grid to find.

What does each fee actually include?

Each platform splits its cut differently, and that is where most sellers misread the headline number. The fee engine uses these rates:

• Gumroad: 10% + $0.50 on a direct sale, with card processing of 2.9% + $0.30 on top. Discover sales pay a flat 30% instead (Gumroad pricing).
• Payhip: 5% on the free plan, 2% on Plus ($29 a month), 0% on Pro ($99 a month). Stripe or PayPal processing, about 2.9% + $0.30, applies on every plan (Payhip billing help).
• Etsy: $0.20 listing fee, 6.5% transaction fee, and 3% + $0.25 payment processing for US sellers. Offsite Ads add 15% on attributed sales, or 12% once a shop passes $10,000 a year (Etsy fees and payments policy).
• Ko-fi: 5% on shop sales on the free tier, 0% with a Ko-fi Gold subscription, which costs new creators $12 a month. The processor fee applies either way (Ko-fi Gold).
• Lemon Squeezy: 5% + $0.50, card processing included (Lemon Squeezy pricing). International cards and PayPal can add a small surcharge.

Only one of those five bundles processing into the headline. That single difference explains most of the confusion in this category, and it is why a "5% platform" and a "10% platform" can be three points apart in practice rather than five.

What the top results get wrong about Gumroad

Several articles ranking for this comparison describe a Gumroad subscription: usually $10 a month, dropping the commission to about 3.5%. I rechecked Gumroad's pricing page on September 21, 2026 and it says the opposite in one line, that Gumroad does not charge a monthly fee.

The tiers were real. Gumroad ran them for years and retired the last one in 2023 when every seller moved to the flat rate. What is circulating is pre-2023 pricing with a fresh year in the headline.

Worth knowing why this particular error is sticky: AI assistants learned this genre from these same articles, so asking a chatbot about cheaper Gumroad plans can return a fluent description of a tier that has not existed since 2023. When a number decides where you sell, open the pricing page. It takes less time than reading the article about the pricing page.

Which is better, Gumroad or Payhip?

Payhip, if fees are the deciding factor. Its free plan nets $1.95 more than Gumroad on every $29 sale, and its paid plans cut the fee further once you clear the volumes in the crossover table above.

Gumroad earns its higher fee in two places. Discover can send you buyers you did not find yourself, at 30%. And Gumroad handles your tax as merchant of record, covered below. If you already have an audience and you are comfortable with tax filing, Payhip keeps more of the money.

Which is better, Gumroad or Etsy?

Etsy, if your product is something shoppers browse for. Printables and planners sell on Etsy because buyers search Etsy for them, which is a kind of demand the other four platforms simply do not have. A standard Etsy sale also nets more than a Gumroad direct sale: $25.79 against $24.46 on $29.

Watch the Offsite Ads line. When Etsy attributes a sale to its own advertising, 15% comes off the top and the same $29 sale nets $21.44. Shops under $10,000 a year can opt out. Above that, the fee drops to 12% and becomes mandatory.

Which is better, Gumroad or Ko-fi?

Ko-fi, for creators who already have an audience that supports them. Its free tier takes 5% on shop sales, matching Payhip's free plan at $26.41 on a $29 sale, and Ko-fi Gold removes that 5% from nine sales a month upward. Gumroad is the better storefront if you want a marketplace and tax handled for you.

Which is better, Gumroad or Lemon Squeezy?

Lemon Squeezy, if you sell to an audience you already have. Its 5% + $0.50 fee includes card processing, so it keeps $2.59 more than Gumroad on every $29 sale, and both platforms handle sales tax as merchant of record. Gumroad is worth its higher fee only if Discover actually sends you buyers.

That "if" is worth measuring rather than assuming. Gumroad shows which sales came through Discover. If that share stays near zero for three months, you are paying marketplace pricing for a checkout page.

Is Lemon Squeezy owned by Stripe?

Yes. Stripe acquired Lemon Squeezy on July 26, 2024. It still runs as its own product: a merchant of record for software and digital products at 5% + $0.50 per sale. That makes it the cheapest option in this comparison that also takes tax off your hands.

Who handles sales tax and VAT?

Two of the five do it by default. Lemon Squeezy is a merchant of record, so it works out what tax is due on each sale, charges it, and files it. Gumroad became a merchant of record at the start of 2025 and does the same inside its 10% fee.

The other three handle some taxes in some regions, and the details change with where you and your buyers live. Read their tax pages before you assume you are covered.

For a seller outside the US and EU this line can outweigh every fee on this page. I know the shape of that work because I built EU consent logging and withdrawal handling into this site's own checkout before switching it off, and the tax question was the part that never stopped being work. Two points of fee against not filing VAT in a jurisdiction you have never visited is not a close call.

The comparison that actually decides this

Every table above answers "which platform is cheapest". Almost no first-time seller should be asking that.

A platform fee is a percentage of revenue you have. Distribution is what determines whether you have any. Etsy is the most expensive standard sale in this comparison and it is still the right answer for a seller with no list and no audience, because the other four are storefronts waiting for traffic you have to supply. Optimizing a 3-point fee gap on zero sales returns exactly zero.

So the order is: figure out where your first hundred buyers come from, then pick the platform that sits closest to them, then look at the fee. If the answer to the first question is "I do not know yet", that is the real problem, and the Startup Launch Arsenal is the pack I built around it, covering the pricing and launch sequence rather than the checkout page.

How should you choose?

Start from what you already have, not from the fee table:

1. No audience yet, product people browse for: Etsy. The marketplace traffic is worth the fees.
2. An audience, and you want zero tax work: Lemon Squeezy, or Gumroad if you also want Discover.
3. An audience, low prices, comfortable with tax: Payhip's free plan, then Plus past the crossover above.
4. Supporters who already follow you: Ko-fi, especially if you also take tips.

Run your own price through the platform fee comparison before you move anything. The full breakdown for the platform I use is in Gumroad fees in 2026. If the price itself is the open question, the digital product pricing calculator matters more than any fee on this page.