Gumroad vs Payhip vs Lemon Squeezy: real fee math for selling digital products

Quick verdict

For a seller starting today, Payhip's free plan is the safest default: it costs less per sale than Gumroad at every price point, and it is not in the middle of a corporate migration. Gumroad is the most expensive of the three on per-sale cost, and you pay that premium for merchant-of-record tax handling and built-in audience discovery. Lemon Squeezy has the lowest per-sale cost on mid- and high-priced products, but Stripe acquired it in 2024 and the team is now building toward Stripe Managed Payments, so committing a new store to it in 2026 means accepting migration risk.

What each platform charges, as of August 2026

The single most common mistake in comparisons of these three is treating the headline percentages as comparable. They are not, because Payhip's percentage sits on top of Stripe or PayPal processing, while Gumroad's and Lemon Squeezy's include it. Payhip's pricing page is explicit that "PayPal and Stripe will still charge at their standard rates" on every tier, including the $99 plan advertised as having no transaction fee.

Sources: Gumroad pricing, Payhip pricing, and Stripe pricing, all read in August 2026. Lemon Squeezy's 5% + $0.50 is widely reported and consistent across current sources, but its own pricing page blocked automated access when this page was written, so confirm it directly before you sign up. All three plans on Payhip include unlimited products and unlimited revenue.

Payhip's three tiers all carry the same feature set. You are not buying capability with the $29 or $99 plan — you are buying down the transaction percentage, which makes the decision pure arithmetic. That is covered in the tier section below.

What you actually keep on a $9, $27 and $97 sale

The table below applies each platform's fee to three common digital-product prices. For Payhip, it adds Stripe's standard US online card rate of 2.9% + 30¢. Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy figures need no processing added because they bundle it.

Payhip Plus and Pro figures exclude their $29 and $99 monthly fees, which are handled separately below. Stripe's standard US domestic online card rate is used; Stripe adds 1.5% for international cards and a further 1% for currency conversion, so cross-border sales cost more than shown on the Payhip rows.

Three things this math shows

• Payhip's free plan always beats Gumroad. This is not a close call that flips at some volume. Gumroad's 10% + $0.50 exceeds Payhip's 5% plus 2.9% + $0.30 at every price, so the advantage holds from a $3 template to a $500 course.
• The "5% vs 10%" framing overstates the gap. On a $27 sale, Payhip's free plan nets $24.57 against Gumroad's $23.80 — a difference of 77¢, or about 2.9% of the sale price, not the 5 points the headline numbers imply.
• Flat per-transaction fees punish cheap products. Gumroad's $0.50 is 5.6% of a $9 sale but 0.5% of a $97 one. If you sell low-priced templates, printables or presets, the fixed component matters more than the percentage.

If you are still deciding what to sell rather than where to sell it, start with digital planners built in Canva or the move from freelancing to digital asset sales.

The Lemon Squeezy question: good economics, uncertain future

Lemon Squeezy looks excellent on the numbers above. The complication is corporate, not financial. Stripe acquired Lemon Squeezy in July 2024, and in a January 2026 update the Lemon Squeezy team confirmed it has been building Stripe Managed Payments — Stripe's own merchant-of-record product — and that migration paths for existing Lemon Squeezy users are a priority.

To be clear about what has and has not been announced: no shutdown date exists, Lemon Squeezy was still operating and accepting new signups as of mid-2026, and pricing has not changed. But the same January 2026 update acknowledged slower support and fewer product updates, which is what you would expect from a team pointed at a successor product.

None of that makes Lemon Squeezy a bad platform today. It means that if you launch a store on it in 2026, you should assume a migration is coming and keep your customer list, product files and email platform outside the storefront so a move is an inconvenience rather than a rebuild. That is good practice regardless of platform — see building a newsletter list from scratch for why the list should never live only inside a storefront.

When Payhip's $29 and $99 plans start paying for themselves

Because Payhip's tiers differ only in transaction percentage, the break-even points are straightforward. Compare the monthly fee against the percentage it removes from your monthly sales volume.

The arithmetic: Plus beats Free when 3% of revenue exceeds $29, which is $967 a month. Pro beats Plus when 2% of revenue exceeds the $70 difference, which is $3,500 a month. Stripe's processing applies identically across all three tiers, so it cancels out of the comparison. Upgrade on the month your sales cross the line, not in anticipation of it.

Who handles your sales tax and VAT

This is where Payhip's fee advantage gets partly repaid in work, and it is the strongest argument for paying Gumroad more.

Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy both act as merchant of record. The platform is the legal seller, and it calculates, collects and remits sales tax, VAT and GST on your behalf. Gumroad announced its move to merchant of record in its own seller update, with the change reported as effective from January 2025.

Payhip is not a full merchant of record. It automates EU and UK VAT on digital goods, which covers a large share of cross-border sales for most small sellers, but obligations in other jurisdictions remain yours. Whether that matters depends entirely on where your buyers are: a seller whose audience is domestic plus EU/UK may never notice, while one selling broadly may find the compliance work costs more than the fee saved.

Price the difference honestly. If merchant-of-record coverage saves you an accountant's fee or hours of filing each quarter, Gumroad's extra 2 to 3 points of effective cost on a $27 sale is cheap. If your sales are concentrated in regions Payhip already covers, it is money spent on nothing.

Final recommendation

Start on Payhip's free plan unless you have a specific reason not to: it is the cheapest way to make your first sales, and there is no monthly fee to justify while volume is small. Move to Gumroad if global tax compliance is worth 2 to 3 points of margin to you. Consider Lemon Squeezy on economics if you are already comfortable with the platform, but do not build a new store on it in 2026 without a plan for the Stripe transition.

Verify every number here on the vendor's own pricing page on the day you sign up. Fees on these platforms have changed more than once, and this page is a snapshot of August 2026.

Related reads: comparison hub, Canva Pro digital planners for Etsy, write and self-publish an ebook on Amazon, print on demand with Canva and Printify, and passive income ideas.