Gumroad fee calculator
Enter your price and your monthly sales. This works out what you keep on Gumroad — direct and through Discover — and puts it next to Payhip, Ko-fi, Lemon Squeezy and Etsy, with the card processing, the monthly plan fees and the VAT each platform does or does not handle for you.
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
Charged on top of the platform cut by Gumroad direct, Payhip and Ko-fi. Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad Discover and Etsy price it in already, so changing these 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. $0.30 in the US, €0.25 in the eurozone, 20p in the UK.
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 — so if you owe VAT, 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
Same price, same volume, nine plans. Take-home is what lands in your bank account after the platform, the card processor, any monthly plan fee and any VAT you remit yourself.
| 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. What it does not buy is a marketplace, a merchant-of-record service, or anyone else's VAT registration. Etsy's higher fee buys buyers who were already searching. Gumroad's Discover fee buys a customer you did not have. Read the take-home column next to what each platform is actually doing for you.
The fee table these numbers come from
Rates last reviewed 3 August 2026. Every row links to the platform's own pricing page — that page, not this one, is the authority. If a rate here has moved, the calculator above is wrong until it is corrected, so tell us and it gets fixed and re-dated.
| 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, but it is set by the card network and the buyer's card, not by you.
How this calculation works
There is no clever modelling here, and that is 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, add any monthly plan cost, subtract the lot from your gross revenue, and you have your take-home. The reason so many published fee estimates are wrong is not the maths — it is that they drop one of the four terms. A "Gumroad takes 10%" answer forgets the $0.50 and the card processing, and on a $5 product that omission 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
- All the published fixed fees — Gumroad's $0.50, Etsy's $0.20 and $0.25, Lemon Squeezy's $0.50 — and every monthly plan price are set in US dollars. Switch currency and a rate field appears so you can convert them yourself rather than having a stale rate baked in. 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 — in this comparison, 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
This is the part almost every fee comparison skips, and it is worth more money than the difference between 5% and 10%.
The merchant of record is the legal seller of the thing. It is the name on the buyer's receipt and the card statement, it carries the chargeback liability, and — the bit that matters here — it is the party that owes consumption tax on the sale. Selling a digital download to a consumer in the EU means 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 — that 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 — US state sales tax, for example — compliance is yours.
- 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.
The practical consequence is that a platform acting as merchant of record is doing something genuinely valuable for a small seller: it removes a registration, a quarterly filing and an audit surface. Whether that is worth the extra percentage points is exactly the calculation this page exists to let you make. It is not tax advice, it changes 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. Notice how the winner moves as the price and the volume change, and how the Gumroad column never wins.
| 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
The $5 row is the one to sit with. 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 is applied. Fixed fees are a tax on cheap products, and they are the single strongest argument for bundling three $5 items into one $15 one.
The $25 and ten-sales row is the other instructive one: Lemon Squeezy wins it, and Lemon Squeezy is also the only winner in the table that is a full merchant of record. At low volume the monthly plan fees have nothing to spread themselves over, so a plan with no monthly cost and a small percentage takes it.
The crossover points nobody publishes
Most of these platforms sell you a monthly plan to lower a percentage. Whether that trade is worth taking is a single division, and the answers are stable enough to memorise. All figures 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 recalculates all five for the processing rate and currency you entered, so if you are on European card rates the numbers shift and the panel shows yours rather than 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. No VAT registration collected from buyers, no invoices with your VAT number, no OSS-ready report. For an EU or UK seller this 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
What has changed, when, and when we checked it. This exists so you can see whether the numbers above are being 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, there are no affiliate links on this page, and we also sell a paid spreadsheet that does more than this free calculator does. Take the comparison on its arithmetic, which you can check yourself.
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 it stops being the useful question — what you need then is a running log of real orders, with each platform's fee chain applied per row, payouts matched against what you were owed, refunds taken out and expenses deducted. That is what the Digital Product Sales Tracker is: a €12 spreadsheet with the same fee table as this page built into it, 1,000 sale rows, payout reconciliation and a dashboard. One file, no subscription. Nothing on this page is limited to push you towards it — the calculator above is complete.
See the tracker — €12Disclosure: 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.