Stripe vs Lemon Squeezy vs Paddle vs Gumroad: which checkout for a digital product?

Stripe keeps the most of a $29 digital sale at $1.14, Iyzico takes about $1.25, Lemon Squeezy and Paddle take $1.95, and Gumroad takes $4.54 on a direct sale. That ranking is also the reverse of how much tax work each one removes, which is the part the fee tables leave out.

I learned that ordering the expensive way. The plan for this shop was Stripe for international cards and a local gateway for domestic ones. Then I found out that Stripe does not onboard businesses registered in Turkey, which is where mine is, and the cheapest row in the table stopped being available to me at all. So I built the checkout on Iyzico, shipped it, and switched it off a year later. This is the comparison I wanted before any of that.

Check availability before you compare anything

Stripe lets businesses open accounts only in the countries listed on its global availability page, and that list is about where your business is registered rather than where your buyers live. A merchant in Germany or the US can charge a card issued in Istanbul without trouble. A merchant in Istanbul cannot open the account at all.

This ordering matters because fee comparisons implicitly assume every option is open to you. For a large share of the world it is not, and the comparison that actually applies has fewer rows. Turkey is the case I know from the inside, so the routes below are the ones I priced:

Lemon Squeezy and Paddle each decide separately which payout countries they support, so check your own country with them before building on either.

What does each option cost?

Fees differ more in what they include than in the headline percentage. Stripe and Iyzico charge only for processing, so tax is your job. Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, and Paddle charge more because they are the merchant of record and file the tax. The table below prices a $29 digital product for a buyer paying by card.

Sources for every rate are listed at the end. Iyzico's 0.25 TL fixed fee is a few cents at current exchange rates, which is why its dollar figure is approximate.

Gumroad: the on-ramp that also files your tax

Gumroad is the fastest checkout for your first sales: about 20 minutes from signup to a live buy link. It takes 10% + $0.50 per direct sale, and card processing of 2.9% + $0.30 comes on top. Since January 1, 2025 it has been the merchant of record for its sellers, collecting and remitting sales tax and VAT worldwide.

What you get: a checkout that takes cards worldwide, sends receipts, hosts the file, handles tax, and generates license keys. What you give up: about 15.7% of a $29 sale, the customer relationship sitting in someone else's database, and most of your funnel data.

That last part cost me more than the fee. I wrote up the numbers in Is Gumroad worth it?, and the full fee breakdown is in Gumroad fees in 2026.

Stripe: the standard, if your country allows it

Stripe is the checkout most founders graduate to once buyers are real. It charges 2.9% + $0.30 per successful domestic card payment, plus 1.5% for international cards and 1% when currency conversion is needed, per Stripe's pricing page. Budget two full days for a first-time integration and a half-day of refund testing.

What you get: a hosted, PCI-compliant Checkout page, Apple Pay and Google Pay, webhooks that tell you exactly what happened, and a customer portal where buyers update payment methods and manage subscriptions. Stripe Tax adds 0.5% per transaction to calculate and collect tax where you are registered.

What you handle yourself: the webhook handler for checkout.session.completed, signature verification, idempotency for retries, the order row, the license key, and the email with the download link. None of it is hard. All of it has to be built.

For a Turkey-based seller, all of this is academic unless you set up a company elsewhere. Stripe Atlas incorporates a Delaware company for a $500 one-time fee, then $100 a year for the registered agent. That company can open Stripe, and it also brings US tax filings and bookkeeping, which is a real cost for a solo shop.

Iyzico: the gateway a Turkish business can open

Iyzico is the payment gateway a Turkey-based merchant can actually sign up for. Its published rate is 4.29% + 0.25 TL per successful transaction, with custom offers for corporate sellers. It supports taksit (installment) payments, which Turkish buyers expect on larger purchases, and each bank's term rate applies on top for installment sales.

What it does better for the Turkish market:

• Taksit. Stripe's installment support runs through Mastercard Installments plus a short list of markets, per its installments docs. Turkish bank taksit is not on it.
• Local cards and 3D Secure. Iyzico's flow is built around Turkish-issued cards.
• Turkish lira pricing. The buyer sees TL, with no conversion math.
• E-invoice data. The merchant panel exports what your accountant needs for Turkish e-invoices.

Setup took me about as long as a Stripe build would. The pieces are the same: signature check, idempotency, order row, license key, confirmation email. In the ToolGenX codebase the Iyzico callback handler is 200 lines and the gateway adapter another 181.

Lemon Squeezy and Paddle: paying someone to file the tax

Lemon Squeezy and Paddle become the merchant of record, which means they collect and remit VAT and sales tax in every jurisdiction you sell into. You never file an EU One-Stop Shop (OSS) return yourself. Both charge 5% + $0.50 per sale with card processing included, per the Lemon Squeezy and Paddle pricing pages.

On a $29 sale that is $1.95, against $1.29 for Stripe plus Stripe Tax. The 66-cent difference buys you something Stripe Tax does not: Stripe Tax calculates and collects, but registering in each jurisdiction and filing the returns remain your job.

The case for a merchant-of-record platform:

• You sell into many tax jurisdictions and do not want to think about it.
• You are outside the EU, so cross-border VAT filings would be painful.
• You value time-to-market more than the fee.

The case against:

• You are willing to register and file, in which case Stripe with Stripe Tax costs less per sale.
• You want the customer relationship with your brand, not the platform.

What a sane setup looks like

A sane payment setup for a small digital shop selling across borders is one gateway you can legally open, one database, one callback handler, and one refund pathway. Outside Turkey that gateway is usually Stripe, with Iyzico added for Turkish buyers. Inside Turkey it is Iyzico, or a merchant-of-record platform until volume justifies your own checkout.

Here is what I built for ToolGenX. It has been switched off since September 2026 while sales run on Gumroad, but the design still holds:

• Iyzico Checkout Form as the only gateway, embedded in the checkout page rather than a redirect. It accepts the global card networks, and adds taksit, lira pricing and e-invoice data for buyers in Türkiye.
• One database (Supabase) holding orders, licences, and the consent and withdrawal evidence EU law requires.
• One callback handler writing to that database, with idempotency on the provider's payment ID.
• One refund pathway: the EU-mandated withdrawal button in the buyer's account, which checks eligibility and calls Iyzico's refund API.

If you are outside Turkey, add a Stripe handler next to it and the rest stays the same. If you want the build without writing it from scratch, the CodeForge skill pack runs the planning, TDD, and code review workflow I used for this checkout.

When should you leave Gumroad?

Leave Gumroad when its fee in a single month exceeds what your own checkout costs to run, including your time and your tax filings. For most solo sellers that point sits around $3,000 a month, where the fee gap passes $350. At $500 a month it is about $60, not worth a new checkout.

I built my own checkout well before the volume justified it, which is the common version of this mistake and the one I made. The fee was never the thing that hurt; the missing funnel data was, and a self-hosted checkout is only one of several ways to get that. So the checkout is switched off and sales run through Gumroad until the arithmetic changes. If you want to model your own break-even point, the AI CFO Toolkit has the unit-economics sheets for it.

When should you add Iyzico?

Add Iyzico the moment a Turkish customer asks for taksit, or when Turkish sales stall on card friction. If you are a Turkey-based founder who wants your own checkout, Iyzico is the starting point rather than an add-on, since Stripe will not onboard you.

What a checkout cannot fix

Payment infrastructure is plumbing. No gateway on this page fixes distribution, a wrong offer, or a site nobody has heard of. If your sales are flat, the answer is almost never "the wrong checkout". It is almost always the wrong channel or the wrong message.

Once buyers are showing up and dropping off at the checkout, though, fixing the checkout becomes the highest-leverage thing you can do that month.