Key takeaways
- This guide compares the five places to sell digital products. Marketplaces, link-in-bio storefronts, digital product storefronts, course platforms and your own checkout, with what each one costs at $30,000 a month and who owns the buyer on each.
- Start on a marketplace, then move once you have your own buyers. Marketplaces like Etsy and Gumroad bring you new buyers but cost 10% to 12% of revenue. Past about $1,000 a month in sales, a platform with a flat monthly fee costs less.
- We priced 13 platforms on the same seller: $30,000 a month from 300 sales of a $100 product. The percentage-fee platforms cost $1,650 to $3,610 a month. The flat-fee platforms all cost $990 to $1,179, and $960 of that is card processing, so once you are on a flat fee, price barely separates them.
- Your data should decide the platform. Pick the one that lets you export every buyer’s email and sends each sale back to your ad account, so your ads keep finding buyers.
- If you sell worldwide, tax is the other deciding factor. Lemon Squeezy and Gumroad file sales tax and VAT for you. Most other platforms only collect it and leave the filing with you.
Where to sell digital products comes down to where your buyers come from. Use a marketplace like Etsy or Gumroad while you are still finding buyers. Once sales pass about $1,000 a month, switch to a flat-fee storefront, course platform or your own checkout. At $30,000 a month, the flat-fee platforms in this guide cost $990 to $1,179, and card processing is $960 of that. The percentage-fee platforms cost $1,650 to $3,610 for the same sales. Once the fee gap closes, choose on two things: whether you own the buyer’s email, and whether your ad account can see the sale.
If you sell $30,000 a month or more and buy traffic, your own checkout usually beats every hosted option, because the upsells, the tracking and the customer list are all yours. Profitable Media builds and maintains custom checkouts for clients at that size. See how we build funnels and checkouts.
Where should you sell digital products?
You can sell digital products through five channels, and each one trades traffic for control:
- Marketplaces. Etsy, Gumroad’s Discover section and Whop’s marketplace put a product in front of buyers who are already shopping. The marketplace keeps the buyer relationship and charges for the traffic.
- Link-in-bio storefronts. Stan Store and Beacons turn a social media bio link into a mobile shop. They sell to an audience you already have and bring no new buyers of their own.
- Digital product storefronts. Payhip, Lemon Squeezy, Sellfy, and Shopify with its free Digital Downloads app give you a branded store and checkout. Some of them file your sales tax as well.
- Course and membership platforms. Kajabi, Podia, Thinkific and Teachable host the product itself (lessons, communities, memberships) alongside the checkout and email.
- Your own checkout. A checkout on a site you control, built on a tool like SamCart or ThriveCart, a WordPress plugin like MemberMouse, or custom code. You own the most: the upsells, the tracking and every buyer’s data. It also takes the most work to set up and keep running.
Past about $20,000 a month, run two of these, not one. Keep a marketplace or storefront for discovery, and sell to people who already know you through a channel you control.
What does each channel cost at $30,000 a month?
At $30,000 a month from 300 sales of a $100 product, the flat-fee platforms cost 3.3% to 3.9% of revenue. The percentage-fee platforms cost 5.5% to 12%. The table uses monthly billing and domestic US cards. Prices and plan limits checked September 2026.
| Channel | Platform and plan | Plan cost | Platform and card fees | Total a month | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marketplace | Gumroad, direct sales | $0 | $2,650 Gumroad fee + $960 cards | $3,610 | 12.0% |
| Marketplace | Etsy | $0 | $1,950 transaction fee + $60 listing renewals + $975 payment processing | $2,985 plus Offsite Ads | 10.0% |
| Digital storefront | Lemon Squeezy | $0 | 5% + 50¢, cards and tax filing included | $1,650 | 5.5% |
| Course platform | Kajabi Growth | $249 | 2.8% + 30¢ on Kajabi Payments | $1,179 | 3.9% |
| Course platform | Thinkific Grow | $219 | 2.9% + 30¢ | $1,179 | 3.9% |
| Link-in-bio | Stan Store Creator Pro | $99 | 2.9% + 30¢ | $1,059 | 3.5% |
| Digital storefront | Payhip Pro | $99 | 2.9% + 30¢ | $1,059 | 3.5% |
| Course platform | Teachable Builder | $89 | 2.9% + 30¢ | $1,049 | 3.5% |
| Course platform | Podia Shaker | $84 | 2.9% + 30¢ | $1,044 | 3.5% |
| Own checkout | SamCart Core | $79 | 2.9% + 30¢ | $1,039 | 3.5% |
| Own checkout | ThriveCart Standard | $47 | 2.9% + 30¢ | $1,007 | 3.4% |
| Link-in-bio | Beacons Creator Plus | $30 | 2.9% + 30¢ | $990 | 3.3% |
| Marketplace | Whop, direct sales | $0 | 2.7% + 30¢ | $900, or $1,500 if Whop files your tax | 3.0% |
Three rows in that table change the decision.
Gumroad’s discount does not close the gap. Gumroad charges 10% plus 50 cents on direct sales, and the rate falls to 5% once a month’s sales pass $20,000. Card processing at 2.9% plus 30 cents comes on top. Even with the discount, Gumroad costs more than three times a $99 flat plan at this volume.
Etsy’s real rate depends on its ads. Once a shop passes $10,000 in sales over a year, Etsy’s Offsite Ads become mandatory. Etsy then takes 12% of any order that follows an ad click within 30 days, capped at $100 an order, and Etsy decides which orders qualify. If a third of your orders come through Offsite Ads, that adds about $1,200 a month at this volume.
Sellfy is missing because it cannot hold this business. Its top self-serve plan, Premium, caps sales at $200,000 a year. A $30,000-a-month seller does $360,000.
The switch point comes early. On a $100 product, Gumroad takes $10.50 a sale before card fees, so about ten sales a month pay for a $99 flat plan. That is roughly $1,000 a month in revenue. Lemon Squeezy costs $2.30 more per $100 sale than paying Stripe directly. A $99 plan beats it past about $4,300 a month, unless you need the tax filing it includes.
Who owns the customer on each channel?
On a marketplace, the buyer came through the marketplace’s own search, so the marketplace keeps the relationship. Your next sale to that buyer usually goes back through the marketplace, and pays its fee again. Storefronts, course platforms and your own checkout give you the buyer’s email, and that is what makes a second sale cheaper than the first.
Test the export before you commit to a platform. Kajabi and Podia both export contacts to a CSV from the contacts screen. Gumroad lets you download a CSV of sales, with each buyer’s email, for any date range. Beacons lists audience imports and exports on every plan, including the free one.
Tax splits the field more than most sellers expect. The platforms fall into four groups:
- Merchant of Record. Lemon Squeezy files sales tax and VAT for you, and so does Gumroad, which took on the role in January 2025.
- Optional filing. Whop files your sales tax and VAT for 2% of each sale, in the US, EU and UK.
- Partial filing. Thinkific collects and remits US and Canadian sales tax for 0.5% of each taxed sale. Payhip remits EU and UK VAT. Etsy collects and remits US sales tax in most states.
- You file. Kajabi calculates and collects sales tax but does not file or remit it.
On any platform outside the first three groups, open its tax page and look for the word “remit”. If the page only says “collect”, the filing is still yours.
At $30,000 a month, Lemon Squeezy costs about $590 more than a $99 plan. If your buyers live in dozens of countries, that premium buys you out of registering for VAT in each one. If your buyers are mostly in the US, a flat plan and an accountant usually cost less.
Why does ad tracking decide the channel once you buy traffic?
If you pay for Meta or TikTok ads, the platform you sell on decides whether the ad account can see your sales. A platform that only fires a browser pixel loses some of those sales to ad blockers and browser privacy settings. The ad account then optimises on a partial picture of who bought.
Here is where each platform stands:
- Server-side, through Meta’s Conversions API: Kajabi sends Purchase and Lead events through the Conversions API. SamCart connects to it with a Pixel ID and access token.
- Browser pixel only: Gumroad supports GA4, the Meta Pixel and the TikTok Pixel, and its help center says it does not support the Conversions API. Stan Store supports Meta, Google, TikTok and Pinterest pixels on the $99 Creator Pro plan only, with no server-side option. Our Stan Store review covers what that means for a seller running ads.
- Pixel plus API access: Podia connects a Meta Pixel for page views and purchases. Thinkific connects GA and the Meta Pixel on every plan, but its API and webhooks, which you need to push sales into anything else, start on the Grow plan. Our Thinkific review breaks that down tier by tier.
A seller at $5,000 a month and a seller at $50,000 a month should not pick on the same terms. The first one mostly sells to an audience they built for free. The second one buys traffic, and every sale the ad account misses makes the next one more expensive to find. Our guide to GA4 tracking and server-side tagging explains how server-side delivery changes that.
Where can you sell digital products for free?
Gumroad, Payhip’s Free plan, Lemon Squeezy, Whop and Beacons’ Free plan all let you sell digital products with no monthly fee. Etsy has no monthly fee but charges $0.20 to list each product. On the free options, the platform takes a bigger share of each sale instead:
| Platform | Monthly fee | Cut of each sale, before card fees |
|---|---|---|
| Whop | $0 | None. Card processing is 2.7% + 30¢ |
| Payhip Free | $0 | 5% |
| Lemon Squeezy | $0 | 5% + 50¢, card processing included |
| Beacons Free | $0 | 9% |
| Gumroad | $0 | 10% + 50¢, or 30% on Discover sales |
| Etsy | $0.20 per listing | 6.5%, plus 3% + 25¢ payment processing |
Start free while you test whether anyone will buy, and plan the switch early. Payhip’s own plans show when. Its Free plan’s 5% costs more than the $29 Plus plan (2%) once you sell about $1,000 a month. Plus costs more than the $99 Pro plan (no fee) past about $3,500.
Which channel fits you?
The right channel depends less on what you sell and more on where your buyers come from.
Start on a marketplace if you have no audience yet, you sell templates, printables or design assets that people browse for, and you want to learn what sells before you build anything. Etsy and Gumroad’s Discover section bring buyers you would not reach alone.
Move to a link-in-bio storefront if your buyers come from Instagram or TikTok, you sell a handful of products, and most sales happen on a phone. Stan Store and Beacons do this well.
Move to a course or membership platform if the product is a course, a cohort or a community that people log in to. Kajabi, Podia, Thinkific and Teachable host the content, not just the checkout.
Build your own checkout if you run paid traffic, you sell upsells and order bumps, or you want sales data flowing into your CRM and ad accounts. SamCart and ThriveCart handle the checkout. A WordPress plugin like MemberMouse keeps member data in your own database, as our MemberMouse review explains. The hard part is not picking the tool. It is connecting the checkout to your payment processor, CRM and ad accounts, then keeping it working through every launch and platform update. That is the work we build and maintain for clients who sell this way.
Not a fit, at any size:
- A marketplace for a seller who already has an email list. You pay a marketplace fee to reach buyers you already own.
- Stan Store for a seller with serious ad spend. Its tracking is browser pixels only.
- Your own checkout for a seller with no first sale yet. You end up building a system for traffic that does not exist.
When a platform falls short on data, the fix is usually a connection, not a migration. Some checkouts send webhooks but no server-side conversions. For those, we connect the webhooks to Meta’s Conversions API and to the CRM, so the ad account and the email platform both record the same sale. That is the kind of build our custom integrations work covers.
What to do this week
Four checks tell you whether your current channel still fits:
- Work out your real fee. Add last month’s platform fees, card fees and marketplace ad fees, then divide by revenue. If the result is above 5%, price a flat plan against it.
- Export your buyer list. Run the export today, even if you are not moving. If you cannot get every buyer’s email into a CSV, you do not own your customers.
- Compare sales to your ad account. Pull last month’s purchases from your platform and from Meta Ads Manager. A large gap means the ad account optimises on sales it cannot see.
- Check who files your tax. Open your platform’s tax page and look for “remit”. If it only says “collect”, the filing is yours.
The rule: pay a percentage for traffic, pay a flat fee for everything else
A marketplace fee is fair when the marketplace finds the buyer. When you find the buyer yourself, that fee pays for nothing. Once you sell about $1,000 a month to your own audience, move those sales to a flat-fee channel and keep the marketplace for discovery. Then choose the flat-fee platform by what it does with your data, because the price gap between them is under 1% of revenue. Once you buy traffic at $30,000 a month or more, move the sales that matter most onto your own checkout, where the upsells, the tracking and the buyer list are all yours.
If you sell $30,000 a month or more and want your own checkout, book a 30-minute call with Profitable Media. Bring your current platform, last month’s revenue and your ad spend. You leave with a plan for the checkout: what it runs on, what it connects to, what it costs to build, and what we maintain after launch.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Etsy worth it for digital products?
Etsy is worth it if you have no audience and sell things people browse for, like printables, templates and planners. It brings buyers you could not reach alone. At scale it gets expensive: a 6.5% transaction fee, 3% plus 25 cents for payment processing, $0.20 each time a listing sells, and a mandatory 12% Offsite Ads fee on attributed orders once you pass $10,000 a year. Use Etsy for discovery and sell to your own audience somewhere cheaper.
Is Gumroad still worth it in 2026?
Gumroad is worth it for a first product, and for sellers who want someone else to file sales tax and VAT. It became a Merchant of Record in January 2025. It stops being worth it on volume. At 10% plus 50 cents a sale plus card fees, Gumroad costs more than a $99 flat plan once you pass about $1,000 a month. Its help center also says it does not support Meta’s Conversions API, a problem if you run ads.
Can I sell digital products on more than one platform?
Yes, and past about $20,000 a month it is usually the better setup. Use a marketplace for discovery and a flat-fee storefront, course platform or checkout for sales to your own audience. The cost of two platforms is a split customer list and split reporting. Send buyers from both into one email platform or CRM, or you end up with two partial pictures of one business.
Do I have to handle sales tax on digital products myself?
It depends on the platform. Lemon Squeezy and Gumroad act as the Merchant of Record and file sales tax and VAT for you. Whop does it for 2% of each sale. Thinkific remits US and Canadian sales tax, and Payhip remits EU and UK VAT. Kajabi collects tax but leaves the filing with you. The rules depend on where your buyers live, so confirm your obligations with an accountant before you pick.
Will moving to a different platform increase my sales?
Usually not on its own. A new platform changes what you pay and what data you keep. It does not change your offer or your traffic. Two moves are the exception. A checkout with order bumps and upsells can raise your average order, and a platform with server-side tracking can lower what you pay per sale on ads. If neither applies, fix the offer before you move.
Author
Dylan Jones is Operations Manager at Profitable Media, where he works on the operator’s side of the marketing stack: which platforms clients choose, what they cost at scale, what breaks in a migration, and when to stop paying for one. LinkedIn
Sources
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- Etsy, “Etsy Payments Policy”, Etsy. Payment processing rates.
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