Gumroad price change is a huge disappointment for thousands of builders.

As a seller in the 3% tier I’m now paying around 750 USD per month in fees.

This is going to 3250 USD / month in February. Around 40K a year. I don’t know what they’re smoking.

Is it worth 30K to code a new backend connection to Paddle / Lemon Squeezy? Hell yes it is. I could even hire someone to do it for that money.

The most annoying thing is that they’ll take 13% of active subscriptions as well but you can’t raise the price of an active subscription so I’m going to have to try and move all my customers over somehow.

To announce all this on Twitter, on a Saturday, right before Christmas, ignoring every customer that isn’t in the 9% tier, is just reckless.

Gumroad has become one of the biggest disappointment of the last few years. After the awful redesign that forced everyone who “wear the same clothes” and have their brand everywhere, now this.
They fail with improving their discovery engine, they fail with having PPC (as Shopify did), and they also fail with expanding the review section and adding text reviews along with the star review.
It’s like they were on vacation i the last year or even more.

There are several alternatives but not all act as a merchant of record. I am documenting such platforms here:
https://nts.strzibny.name/gumroad-alternatives-eu-uk-vat/

Let this be a warning for those that rely on no-code platforms for their apps.

"not yo code, gonna feel the pain like @gumroad"

I've always sensed that Sahil was not genuine in his desire to build a small company without a billion $ valuation. He talks about it incessantly in his article when his previous startup went bust. However it's hard to bury that desire if that is what you want. My take is that gumroad isn't making any money and now that easy money has dried up he's forced to increase prices especially after hiring Twitter influencers that were costing him $10k/month.

Instead of spending my time with my family during xmas, I'm scrambling to evaluate a suitable alternative. I'm 90% sure that I'm going to go with Lemon Squeezy. I don't want to deal with sales and VAT taxes.

Folks, I have a question for all of you. Why the heck do you use them? Besides crappy pricing, Gumroad has an awful, disgusting design, is it worth it? Sorry, I just don't get it and can't believe there are no better solutions.

If sales for your digital product is low, gumroad might still be a better option just because of the brandname and recognizability within the creator economy. If you are a top 1% creator then finding a better alternative is probably better because you would be giving up a lot of money.

I feel the same way.

Looking for alternatives right now.

I'll have to re-write the whole Gumroad API integration regarding license validation, customer management, invoicing, refunds, etc.

But I prefer spending a month doing that (or hiring someone to do it) than increasing my payment from 2.9% to 13%.

It just doesn't make sense to me.

I'm happy in Gumroad; it makes my life easier, especially with taxes. But there are also things that I miss in Gumroad and that other platforms provide too. (Flexible pricing for subscriptions, parity pricing, currencies management, one-time subscription offers, payments through transfer... )

I can't see any huge improvement in Gumroad to justify such an increase in my spending.

The timing of the announcement is terrible too.
Not enough notice time and just before Christmas.

I decided today to start building an alternative,
we will have a 30cent + 2,5% fee for launch sellers, if anybody is interested to sell their digital goods, send me a msg
we are EU based, so will take care of all VAT hassle

Can we replace Gumroad with Webflow + Memberstack for subscription based businesses?

Hi! I work for MCG, which can be a very handy Gumroad alternative especially in terms of cost advantage. Here is more to read if you're interested: https://minicoursegenerator.com/blog/gumroad-vs-mcg/

And here is the YouTube video I filmed about the comparison of Mini Course Generator vs Gumroad: https://youtu.be/cdDSbvnfCXI

Would love to hear feedback from creators!

Well now they tell you they removed the 10% discover fee, sounds great right?
Well when you enable discover it will also enable the global affiliate program which can't be disabled when discover is active.
So in that case you will be charged an extra 10% for each affiliate purchase.
Gumroad should change their name to Greedy!

Consider trying us mobilzer.com
Here is how we compare to Gumroad https://www.mobilzer.com/mobilzer-vs-gumroad-best-platforms-for-selling-digital-products/

Bummer... I still like their website design tho!

Another (donation) option to add to your list is www.wishlist.fund

Here is a nice list of 40 alternatives to consider, if switching from Gumroad.

https://asifbasheer.com/best-gumroad-alternatives-to-switch-to/

that net rate looks really low ?!

For me the only benefit of using gumroad is that they handle taxes for me. Otherwise for the platform features any decent developer can make a similar one person solution to sell his products in few hours and handle the payments via stripe, PayPal or paddle

This is one of those instances where I think (hope) they will catch wind of creator disappointment and roll back or reduce the fee, especially if creators move platforms.

As an operator of a competitor, I understand first hand the challenge of keeping platform fees low while still staying in business ourselves. I can confirm it's a hard problem to find the right balance, but believe it's easier when your team is small.

Has Gumroad become too big and requires too much to keep its operations going? To date we've been more focused on providing web3 and alternative payment support, but perhaps we should look at addressing Gumroad head on, especially given this news. (Would love to hear thoughts on this)

We chose to keep our team right-sized (all in we're under 10 people), so that we can do things like offer 0% fees. Could it be that this is one thing small business does better than a large corporation / platform?

If interested, Monetized (https://www.monetized.link) is technically an alternative for Gumroad, although we are going after the content creation part of the market as we're ex-content creators (background: Condé Nast, Fast Company, Indie publishing).

If anyone wants help migrating I'd be happy to lend a hand. 😀

It's becoming a trend these days. When i seen that google and apple will put 30% tax on in-app purchases then it blew my mind. Notice that they don't allow other payment processors than google pay or apple pay. And their own app youtube doesn't come under this rule.
I mean why the hell would i pay you 30% from my revenue for doing absolutely nothing for me?
I worked hard, put my sweat and money and tears to build an app business that can generate some revenue for me. And these suckers like google and apple wants 30% cut from my hard earned money? Why the hell are we even allowing this shit to happen. Government is sleeping. We are living in insane world.

What a terrible decision by Gumroad. Rather than elevating creators and putting them in a place they can succeed and build from, they just become greedy and ironically hurting the best/top users.

They offer nothing that can claim a 10% fee. There's already the standard 2.9% for payments, and more than 5%-7% total in fees for any platform is quite outrageous.
(don't get me wrong, an open 2.9% on CC charges is already a steal, it should be capped as well...)

It's probably not a big surprise, coming from Gumroad, but it's still weird these things can still happen.

When you use shady business models, it has to be super clear and transparent, and it must make sense. Taking a % of MRR or revenues from any individual or company should be the last resort. (It would be OK if they had a "free" plan that is based on rev-share or something like that, but once you have more sales, it should definitely be capped to $X per month...)

Would now be a good time to start working on a competitor product ? :) I personally never really understood why they charge per commission. If I owned a piece of land that I am renting out to a store I charge rent monthly and not per item sold by the store.

I don't see why it can't be the same way for Gumroad

Substack has a similar model, and largely people are ok with it. The creators with larger audiences usually move on to a self-hosted one to avoid not just fees but also the risk of getting banned for some stupid reason.

I read that they only make $50K profit a year. Looks like this is their way of squeezing as much revenue as possible. Could have been done significantly better by not alienating folks that rely on the service. 3% to 15% is ridiculous.

Great list of alternatives. Def a plug but I'd add reetail.store to the list:

1. Costs $0 + stripe fees
2. <2 mins setup
3. Is a full brandable store with cart

Thanks for making LemonSqueezy.com #1 — that means the world to us!

For recommendations, I'd add Paddle. It acts as a Merchant of Record, so they take care of VAT and they offer lower rates than Gumroad, which does not support help in taxing.

Thanks for the post about Ko-fi. It actually looks really good.

Does Gumroad have a post detailing the reason behind the price change?

If that was the case, we'd see people sharing where they've moved. Not where they'll move. I'd be surprised if they wouldn't attract more users.

Honestly, I think the way everyone is reacting is very surprising. This community worries about rising prices and for this reason. Will everyone leave? Will people stop signing up? And we've seen it time and time again, some people will leave, some people may not sign up but these are low-value customers.

Some people are acting like this is the end of Gumroad a platform that has won them chargeback disputes they wouldn't have otherwise won. They've made thousands of dollars through the site's marketplace discovery. Yet the mere mention that they charge more money so they can grow and what not they're off to a smaller product which would need to do the same thing eventually. I suspect, many people who jump ship will probably lose more money than they gain.