Gumroad fee calculator
Enter your price and your monthly sales. You get what you keep on Gumroad, both through your own link and through Discover, set against Payhip, Ko-fi, Lemon Squeezy and Etsy. Card processing is in the arithmetic. So are monthly plan fees, and the VAT each platform does or does not handle for you.
It works wherever you sell from. Eleven currencies, an editable exchange rate for the fixed fees that platforms price in US dollars, an editable processing rate because yours depends on your acquirer and your region, and a consumption-tax section that covers the EU and UK rules, US state sales tax nexus and the position of a seller established outside both.
Your product
The price the buyer pays, and how many of them there are in a month.
Gross, before any fee comes off.
Units, not orders. A two-unit order counts as two.
Card processing
Gumroad direct, Payhip and Ko-fi charge this on top of their platform cut. Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad Discover and Etsy have already priced it in, so changing these fields does not move those three.
2.9% is the standard US Stripe and PayPal rate. European cards on a European Stripe account are nearer 1.5%.
Per transaction, in the currency above. Roughly $0.30 in the US, €0.25 in the eurozone, 20p in the UK, and different again with a local acquirer elsewhere. Take yours off a recent payout statement.
Etsy Offsite Ads
Etsy bills an extra ad fee on orders that came from an advert it placed for you. It is not optional once you pass $10,000 in sales over the last 365 days.
Leave at 0 to compare base fees only.
15% below $10,000 of sales in a year, 12% above it. Set from the annual gross implied by your price and volume.
VAT you have to remit yourself
On Gumroad, Payhip, Lemon Squeezy and Etsy the platform deals with EU and UK VAT on digital sales. On Ko-fi it does not. If you owe VAT there, it comes out of the price you already set. Turn this on to see what that is worth.
EU rates run from 17% to 27%; the UK is 20%.
Everything is worked out in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere.
Every plan, side by side
Nine plans, all worked at the same price and the same volume. Take-home here means what lands in your bank account after the platform, the card processor, any monthly plan fee and any VAT you remit yourself have all been paid.
| Plan | Fee per sale | Fees per month | VAT you remit | Take-home / month | Take-home / year | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gumroad direct | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Gumroad Discover | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Payhip Free | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Payhip Plus | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Payhip Pro | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Ko-fi free | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Ko-fi Gold | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Lemon Squeezy | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Etsy | - | - | - | - | - | - |
The cheapest column is not the whole answer
Ko-fi Gold usually wins this table on arithmetic alone, because $12 a month buys a 0% platform fee. It does not buy a marketplace. Ko-fi is not a merchant of record either, so nobody else's VAT registration is standing behind your sales. Etsy charges a good deal more and puts the listing in front of people who were already searching for something like it. Gumroad's Discover fee hands you a customer you did not have, and that is the whole of what the 30% is for.
The fee table these numbers come from
Rates last reviewed 3 August 2026. Every row links to the platform's own pricing page, and that page is the authority, not this one. If a rate here has moved, the calculator above is wrong until we fix it. Tell us and we will.
| Plan | Platform cut | Card processing | Monthly | Handles EU/UK VAT | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gumroad direct | 10% + $0.50 | ~2.9% + $0.30, on top | - | Yes, merchant of record | gumroad.com/pricing |
| Gumroad Discover | 30% | Included | - | Yes, merchant of record | gumroad.com/pricing |
| Payhip Free | 5% | Your own, on top | $0 | Yes, for EU and UK digital VAT | payhip.com/pricing |
| Payhip Plus | 2% | Your own, on top | $29 | Yes, for EU and UK digital VAT | payhip.com/pricing |
| Payhip Pro | 0% | Your own, on top | $99 | Yes, for EU and UK digital VAT | payhip.com/pricing |
| Ko-fi free | 5% on Shop, memberships and commissions; 0% on tips | Your own, on top | $0 | No | ko-fi.com/gold |
| Ko-fi Gold | 0% | Your own, on top | $12 for new subscribers | No | ko-fi.com/gold |
| Lemon Squeezy | 5% + $0.50 | Included | - | Yes, merchant of record | lemonsqueezy.com/pricing |
| Etsy | $0.20 listing + 6.5% transaction | 3% + $0.25 (US rate), included | - | Yes, deemed supplier on digital items | etsy.com/legal/fees |
Rates this table deliberately simplifies
- Ko-fi Gold pricing is not uniform. $12 a month is the price for new subscribers; people who signed up earlier are grandfathered at $6 or $8. If you are already on Gold, use the price you actually pay.
- Etsy payment processing varies by country. 3% + $0.25 is the United States rate. Germany is around 4% + €0.30, the United Kingdom around 4% + £0.20, and several countries add a regulatory operating fee of roughly 0.25% to 1.1% on top.
- Lemon Squeezy has surcharges. International cards, PayPal, subscription renewals and affiliate-referred sales each add between 0.5% and 3%. The 5% + $0.50 here is the base case.
- Gumroad's processing is a pass-through. 2.9% + $0.30 is the usual figure and what the calculator defaults to. The card network and the buyer's card set the real one, not you.
How this calculation works
No clever modelling, on purpose. Every platform charges some mix of four things, and the whole calculator is one line of arithmetic per plan:
Fee per sale = (price × percentage fee) + fixed fee + (price × processing percentage) + processing fixed fee
Multiply that by your monthly sales and add any plan cost. Take the lot off your gross revenue and what is left is your take-home. Published fee estimates go wrong by dropping one of the four terms. The maths was never the hard part. "Gumroad takes 10%" forgets the $0.50 and the card processing, and on a $5 product that is the difference between 10% and 29%.
What each input means
- Price per sale
- What the buyer is charged, before anything comes off. If you sell with VAT added on top by the platform, use your net-of-VAT price here, because that is the figure the fees are calculated on.
- Sales per month
- Units, not orders. Etsy's $0.20 listing fee and every processing fixed fee are charged per item sold, so two units in one order costs the fixed fee twice on most platforms.
- Currency and the exchange rate
- Every published fixed fee is set in US dollars: Gumroad's $0.50, Etsy's $0.20 and $0.25, Lemon Squeezy's $0.50. So is every monthly plan price. Switch currency and a rate field appears, so you can convert them at today's rate instead of a stale one baked into this page. Percentages are unaffected by currency.
- Card processing
- Payhip and Ko-fi connect to your own Stripe or PayPal account, so you pay your regional rate. Gumroad bills processing as a pass-through. Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad Discover and Etsy have processing baked into their headline number, so this field does not affect those three.
- Etsy Offsite Ads
- Etsy charges 15% of the order value on any sale attributed to an advert it bought for you, falling to 12% once you have made more than $10,000 in the previous 365 days. Below that threshold you can switch it off; above it you cannot. The field asks what share of your Etsy orders arrive that way.
- VAT you remit yourself
- Only relevant on platforms that are not handling it, which in this comparison means Ko-fi. The calculator assumes your listed price is VAT-inclusive, which is the normal position for consumer digital sales, so the VAT is extracted from the price rather than added to it: VAT = price × rate ÷ (1 + rate). At 21%, that is 17.36% of your price gone, which is larger than any platform fee in this table.
Merchant of record, and who actually owes the VAT
Almost every fee comparison skips this, and it is worth more money than the gap between 5% and 10%.
The merchant of record is the legal seller of the thing. Its name goes on the buyer's receipt and on the card statement, and the chargeback liability sits with it. It also owes the consumption tax on the sale, and that is the expensive part. Sell a digital download to a consumer in the EU and someone has to charge that consumer's national VAT rate, collect it and file a return. The only question is who.
Platform by platform
- Gumroad acts as merchant of record. It registers for EU VAT, applies the buyer's local rate at checkout, and files the returns. You are selling to Gumroad, in effect, and Gumroad sells to the customer.
- Lemon Squeezy is a merchant of record by design, which is largely what its 5% + $0.50 is for. It covers EU and UK VAT, US sales tax nexus and the rest of it.
- Etsy is treated as the deemed supplier for digital items under EU and UK rules: it collects and remits the VAT on those orders itself. You still remain the seller of the goods for every other purpose, including your own income tax, which is a distinction worth raising with your accountant rather than assuming either way.
- Payhip is the interesting middle case. It is registered for EU and UK VAT and handles digital VAT on those sales for you, but it is not a full merchant of record. Outside the EU and UK, compliance is yours. US state sales tax is the obvious example.
- Ko-fi does not do this for you. Your Shop price is the gross amount the buyer pays, and if VAT is due on that sale, it is due from you, out of that amount.
What changes if you are not VAT-registered
Being below your domestic VAT registration threshold does not exempt you from VAT on cross-border digital sales to EU consumers. For a business established outside the EU there is no threshold at all: VAT is due from the first euro. Sellers established inside the EU have a €10,000 annual cross-border threshold for distance sales of digital services, below which you can charge your home rate, and above which you must charge the buyer's rate and use the One Stop Shop return.
So a platform acting as merchant of record is doing something real for a small seller. It removes a registration and a quarterly filing, and with them a surface you can be audited on. Whether that is worth the extra percentage points is what the calculator above is for. None of this is tax advice. The answer moves with where you are established, and an hour with an accountant is cheaper than getting it wrong.
Worked examples
Nine scenarios at the defaults: 2.9% + $0.30 processing, no Offsite Ads, VAT handled by the platform. Watch the winner move as price and volume change. The Gumroad column never wins one.
| Price | Sales / mo | Gross | Cheapest overall | Cheapest with VAT handled | Gumroad direct |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $5 | 10 | $50.00 | Payhip Free / Ko-fi free $43.05 | Payhip Free $43.05 | $35.55 |
| $5 | 100 | $500.00 | Ko-fi Gold $443.50 | Payhip Free $430.50 | $355.50 |
| $5 | 500 | $2,500.00 | Ko-fi Gold $2,265.50 | Payhip Plus $2,198.50 | $1,777.50 |
| $25 | 10 | $250.00 | Lemon Squeezy $232.50 | Lemon Squeezy $232.50 | $209.75 |
| $25 | 100 | $2,500.00 | Ko-fi Gold $2,385.50 | Lemon Squeezy $2,325.00 | $2,097.50 |
| $25 | 500 | $12,500.00 | Ko-fi Gold $11,975.50 | Payhip Pro $11,888.50 | $10,487.50 |
| $100 | 10 | $1,000.00 | Ko-fi Gold $956.00 | Lemon Squeezy $945.00 | $863.00 |
| $100 | 100 | $10,000.00 | Ko-fi Gold $9,668.00 | Payhip Pro $9,581.00 | $8,630.00 |
| $100 | 500 | $50,000.00 | Ko-fi Gold $48,388.00 | Payhip Pro $48,301.00 | $43,150.00 |
Reading the table
Sit with the $5 row. At ten sales a month you keep 86% of a $5 product on Payhip and 71% on Gumroad, because $0.80 of fixed fees on a $5 price is 16% before anybody's percentage lands. Fixed fees are a tax on cheap products. They are also the strongest argument going for bundling three $5 items into one $15 one.
Then look at $25 at ten sales a month. Lemon Squeezy takes that row, and it is the only winner anywhere in the table that is a full merchant of record. Monthly plan fees have nothing to spread themselves over at that volume, so the row goes to a plan with no monthly cost and a modest percentage.
The crossover points nobody publishes
Most of these platforms sell you a monthly plan to lower a percentage. Whether the trade is worth taking is one division. The answers are stable enough to be worth remembering, and the figures below are monthly gross revenue at list prices in US dollars.
- Payhip Free → Plus at $967 a month. Plus costs $29 and saves you 3 percentage points, so it pays for itself at $29 ÷ 0.03.
- Payhip Plus → Pro at $3,500 a month. Pro costs $70 more than Plus and saves the remaining 2 points: $70 ÷ 0.02. Note that Pro beats the free plan from $1,980, so between $1,980 and $3,500 people often upgrade to Pro when Plus would have been cheaper.
- Ko-fi free → Gold at $240 a month. $12 to remove a 5% fee. This is the lowest break-even of any plan here by a wide margin.
- Gumroad Discover is cheaper than direct below $4.68 a product. Counter-intuitive but arithmetic: Discover's 30% is all-in, while a direct sale carries 12.9% plus $0.80 of fixed fees. Below $4.68 the fixed fees win the argument.
- Lemon Squeezy overtakes Payhip Free above $6.90 a product. Lemon Squeezy is 5% + $0.50 all-in; Payhip Free is 5% plus your 2.9% + $0.30. The $0.20 of extra fixed fee is repaid by the 2.9% once the price passes $6.90.
The calculator redoes all five for the processing rate and currency you entered. On European card rates they move, and the panel above shows your version of them instead of these.
Costs that do not show up in a fee table
- Gumroad's payout minimum. The standard threshold is $100 before a payout is released, with lower minimums for verified accounts in some countries, and a holding period on each sale before it becomes eligible. If you make $40 a month, you are lending Gumroad your money for a quarter at a time. Your first payout is also subject to a review.
- Payhip pays out through your own processor. There is no Payhip payout threshold to clear, because the money never sits with Payhip. Stripe or PayPal pays you on its own schedule and Payhip invoices its cut. For a small seller this is the single most underrated difference in this comparison.
- Etsy's Offsite Ads lock-in. Once your shop passes $10,000 in sales in 365 days, Offsite Ads becomes mandatory and permanent. The rate drops from 15% to 12%, which sounds like a reward and is in fact the point at which you lose the ability to opt out.
- Ko-fi has no VAT machinery at all. Buyers are never asked for a VAT registration, your invoices do not carry yours, and nothing falls out at the end of the quarter that you could file an OSS return from. For an EU or UK seller that is real, unpriced work, and the calculator's VAT toggle shows you roughly what it is worth.
- Refunds are not symmetrical. Several platforms keep their platform fee on a refunded order even though you return the full amount to the buyer, so a refund costs you more than the sale earned. Chargebacks add a fixed penalty on top.
- Currency conversion. If you list in one currency and are paid out in another, expect roughly 2% to 2.5% to disappear in conversion on most platforms. That is invisible in every fee comparison, including the table above, and it is often larger than the difference you are agonising over.
Common mistakes this calculator is designed to catch
- Quoting a platform's percentage as its cost. "Gumroad takes 10%" is true and useless. With the $0.50 and processing, the honest figure at $25 is 16.1%, and at $5 it is 28.9%.
- Comparing an all-in rate against a platform-only rate. Lemon Squeezy's 5% + $0.50 includes processing. Payhip's 5% does not. Putting those two numbers side by side without adjusting is the most common error in published comparisons.
- Forgetting that fixed fees scale with units, not orders. Ten $3 products sold individually cost ten fixed fees. One $30 bundle costs one.
- Buying the plan before the revenue. Payhip Pro at $99 a month on $500 of sales costs you more than the free plan by a factor of two.
- Treating the fee as the only cost of a platform. A marketplace fee is partly an advertising cost. Zero fees and zero traffic is not a win.
- Assuming last year's rates. Gumroad's fee structure has been rewritten twice in three years. Check the date on any fee table you read, including this one.
Fee changelog
Every change we know about, with the date we last read the source page. It is here so you can tell whether the numbers above are maintained or quietly rotting.
| Date | Platform | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 3 Aug 2026 | All | Page published. All nine plans reviewed against the platforms' published pricing. |
| 2026 | Ko-fi | Ko-fi Gold listed at $12 a month for new subscribers, up from $6. Existing subscribers are grandfathered at the price they signed up on. |
| 2026 | Gumroad | Standard payout minimum reported at $100, with lower minimums for verified accounts in some countries. |
| 2023 | Gumroad | Tiered subscription pricing replaced by a flat 10% platform fee, later published as 10% + $0.50, with Discover sales at 30%. |
| 2022 | Etsy | Transaction fee raised from 5% to 6.5%. |
Questions
How much does Gumroad take from a sale?
On a sale through your own link or Gumroad profile, Gumroad's platform fee is 10% + $0.50. Card processing of about 2.9% + $0.30 sits on top of that, so the realistic all-in cost is 12.9% of the price plus $0.80. On a $25 product that is $4.03, leaving you $20.98. If the buyer found you through Gumroad Discover, the fee is 30% of the price with processing included, so the same $25 sale leaves you $17.50.
Does Gumroad's 10% + $0.50 include payment processing?
No. The 10% + $0.50 is Gumroad's own cut. Card processing is charged separately, at roughly 2.9% + $0.30 for a standard card. The one exception is Gumroad Discover, where the 30% is all-in and no separate processing fee is deducted.
Is Gumroad Discover worth 30%?
It depends entirely on whether the sale was incremental. Discover only applies to buyers Gumroad found for you, so 70% of a sale you would never have made is better than 100% of nothing. The comparison that matters is not Discover versus direct, it is Discover versus your cost of finding that customer some other way. One counter-intuitive detail: below roughly $4.70 a Discover sale is actually cheaper than a direct one, because 30% of a small price is less than 12.9% plus the $0.80 of fixed fees.
Which platform has the lowest fees for digital products?
On raw fees, Ko-fi Gold usually wins above about $240 a month in sales: $12 a month buys a 0% platform fee, so you pay only your own Stripe or PayPal processing. Below that, Payhip's free plan and Ko-fi's free plan tie at 5% plus processing. But the lowest fee is not automatically the best deal: Ko-fi does not act as merchant of record, so EU and UK VAT is entirely your problem, and that admin can cost more than the fee difference.
Payhip vs Gumroad fees: which is cheaper?
Payhip is cheaper at every price point. Payhip's free plan takes 5% plus your own Stripe or PayPal processing; Gumroad takes 10% + $0.50 plus processing. On a $25 sale that is $2.28 with Payhip against $4.03 with Gumroad, a difference of $1.75 per sale, or $175 a month at 100 sales. Gumroad's counter-argument is Discover, its built-in marketplace; Payhip has no comparable traffic source.
When is Payhip Pro at $99 a month worth it?
Compare against the plan below it, not the free plan. Payhip Plus costs $29 a month for a 2% fee and beats the free plan's 5% once you pass about $967 a month in gross sales. Pro costs $99 a month for 0% and beats Plus once you pass $3,500 a month. Going straight from Free to Pro breaks even at $1,980 a month, but Plus is cheaper than both between $967 and $3,500.
Is Ko-fi Gold worth it?
On fees alone, yes, very early. Ko-fi's free plan charges 5% on Shop sales, memberships and commissions; Gold charges 0% for $12 a month for new subscribers. The break-even is $240 a month in Shop revenue, which is a low bar. Card processing through your own Stripe or PayPal account is charged either way.
Etsy vs Payhip fees for digital downloads
Payhip is cheaper on every order. Etsy charges a $0.20 listing fee, 6.5% transaction fee and 3% + $0.25 payment processing for US sellers, which is 9.5% plus $0.45 per sale. Payhip's free plan is 5% plus 2.9% + $0.30 of processing, or 7.9% plus $0.30. On a $25 sale that is $2.83 on Etsy against $2.28 on Payhip. Etsy's fees buy you a marketplace with buyers already in it; Payhip's do not.
What is a merchant of record and why does it matter?
The merchant of record is the business that legally sells to the customer. It appears on the receipt, it is liable for chargebacks, and crucially it is the party that owes the consumption tax. When Gumroad or Lemon Squeezy is merchant of record, they register for EU VAT, charge the buyer's local rate, and file the returns. When you are merchant of record, all of that is yours to do, from the first sale, with no small-seller threshold for non-EU businesses selling into the EU.
Who pays EU VAT on my digital product?
It depends on the platform. Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy act as merchant of record and handle EU and UK VAT for you. Etsy is treated as the deemed supplier for digital items and collects and remits the VAT itself. Payhip registers for EU and UK VAT and handles digital VAT on those sales even though it is not a full merchant of record. Ko-fi does not do this for you: your Shop price is the gross amount, and any VAT due comes out of it.
Do I need to register for VAT if I sell on Ko-fi?
If you sell digital products to consumers in the EU or UK and no platform is handling the VAT for you, then yes, you are the one who owes it, and for a non-EU seller there is no registration threshold. The usual route is the Non-Union One Stop Shop, which lets you register once and file one return covering all EU member states. This is not tax advice and the answer changes with where you are established, so ask an accountant before you act on it.
Why is the cheapest platform not always the right one?
Because fees buy different things. Etsy's 9.5% buys you a marketplace with millions of buyers searching in it. Gumroad's Discover 30% buys you a customer you did not have. Lemon Squeezy's 5% + $0.50 buys you global tax compliance you would otherwise pay an accountant for. Ko-fi Gold's 0% buys you nothing except a low fee. Work out what you are actually buying before optimising the number down.
Does this calculator include refunds and chargebacks?
No, and that is a deliberate limit. It prices a completed sale. Refunds make the real figure worse on most platforms, because several of them keep their fee on a refunded order, and a chargeback typically costs a fixed penalty on top. If you want refunds, expenses and actual payouts folded in, you need a running log rather than a calculator.
How current are these fee rates?
Every rate on this page was last reviewed on 3 August 2026 against the platforms' published pricing, and each row of the fee table links to the page it came from. Changes are recorded in the changelog with the date they took effect. Fee pages move without notice, so if you find something out of date, email support@vendwright.com and it will be corrected and re-dated.
Do you sell on these platforms yourselves?
Yes. Vendwright sells its own spreadsheet templates on Payhip, Gumroad and Etsy, so the fee and payout behaviour described here comes partly from our own statements. We are not affiliated with any of these companies and there are no affiliate links on this page. We also give away a free spreadsheet that does more than this calculator does, and we would like you to have it, which is a reason to check our arithmetic rather than take it on trust. You can: every rate is linked to its source.
This calculator answers "which platform". It cannot answer "what did I actually make".
A calculator prices one hypothetical sale. Once you are selling on two or three platforms that stops being the useful question. The thing that answers it is a running log of real orders, each row carrying its own platform's fee chain, with payouts matched against what you were owed and refunds and expenses taken out. That is the Digital Product Sales Tracker: the same fee table as this page, built into a spreadsheet with 1,000 sale rows, payout reconciliation and a dashboard.
It is free, and the first link below is the file itself. We do not ask for your email address for it, there is no list to join, and nothing on this page is held back to push you towards it.
Disclosure: Vendwright sells its own spreadsheet templates on Payhip, Gumroad and Etsy. That is where the first-hand knowledge of payout behaviour on this page comes from, and it is also a reason to be sceptical of us, so every rate above is linked to its source and every calculation is shown. There are no affiliate links on this page and no platform has paid for or seen it.