Enter your price and monthly volume. This compares the real take-home across 14 platforms creators use to sell digital work — including the subscription tiers that only pay off above a certain volume.
| Platform | Fees / mo | You keep | Take-home |
|---|
Assumptions: US processing rates, direct traffic (not marketplace discovery — Gumroad Discover is 30%, Etsy Offsite Ads adds 12–15%), digital delivery, no refunds/chargebacks, no VAT/sales-tax handling except where the platform is merchant of record. Subscription costs are amortised into the month shown. Rounded to the nearest dollar.
Most “which platform is cheapest” advice ignores that the answer flips with volume. Paid tiers trade a monthly fee for a lower percentage, so each one has an exact monthly gross where it starts winning. These are solved from the same cited fee models the calculator above uses.
Ko-fi Free takes 5% on Shop and Membership sales; Gold takes 0% and you just pay processing. You are trading 5% of gross for $12/mo, so Gold wins above $240/mo gross — about 24 sales of a $10 file. Below that, stay on Free. (Tips are 0% on both tiers.)
Payhip Free is 5%, Plus is 2% for $29/mo, Pro is 0% for $99/mo. Plus beats Free above $967/mo gross. Pro beats Free above $1,980/mo, and beats Plus above $3,500/mo. Almost every hobbyist seller should be on Free — the paid tiers only pay off once you are running a real shop.
Sellfy charges 0% transaction fee from $29/mo, so against Payhip Free’s 5% you break even at $580/mo gross. Above that the subscription is cheaper; below it you are paying for a storefront you have not outgrown.
Gumroad is 10% + $0.50 with processing included. Payhip Free is 5% + Stripe’s 2.9% + $0.30, so 7.9% + $0.30 all in. Payhip is cheaper at every price point in this comparison — on 50 sales of a $10 file that is about $100/mo versus $54/mo in fees. The catch is discovery: if buyers find you through Gumroad Discover, Gumroad takes 30% instead, and Payhip has no equivalent marketplace at all. Direct traffic favours Payhip; borrowed traffic can still make Gumroad worth it.
Bandcamp is 15% on digital plus processing — higher than most on this list. It is also the only one here with a built-in audience that pays for music, plus Bandcamp Fridays where the cut is waived. Fee rate and take-home are not the same question as where the buyers are.
$1.50 — you keep $8.50 (85%). Gumroad is 10% plus $0.50 per sale, with card processing already included. On a $5 sale the same formula costs $1.00, so you keep $4.00 (80%). If the buyer found you through Gumroad Discover instead of your own link, the cut is 30% and a $10 sale nets you $7.00.
Yes — at every single price point. Ko-fi's free tier and Payhip's free tier both cost 5% plus Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30, which is 7.9% + $0.30. Gumroad is 10% + $0.50. Solve 0.079p + 0.30 < 0.10p + 0.50 and it holds for every positive price, so there is no crossover — the free tiers of Ko-fi and Payhip beat Gumroad per sale whether you charge $3 or $300. On $10 that is $1.09 versus $1.50; on $50 it is $4.25 versus $5.50. Gumroad's real argument is Discover traffic, not its fee.
About $2.15 — you keep roughly $7.85. That is 15% on digital ($1.50) plus payment processing of about 3.5% + $0.30 ($0.65). Bandcamp is the most expensive per-sale option on this list, and musicians still use it because it has buyers who arrive intending to pay, and because Bandcamp Fridays waive the 15%.
About $2.35 — you keep roughly $17.65. That is a 6.5% transaction fee ($1.30), a $0.20 listing fee, and US payment processing of 3% + $0.25 ($0.85). If Offsite Ads triggers on that sale, Etsy adds 12–15% of the order value on top, which turns $2.35 into roughly $5.35–$6.35 on a $20 item.
Whatever you tell it to. itch.io lets the creator set the platform's cut, defaulting to 10%, and 0% is a legitimate choice. At the 10% default plus 2.9% + $0.30 processing, a $10 sale costs $1.59 and you keep $8.41. At 0%, the same sale costs $0.59 and you keep $9.41 — the cheapest hosted option in this comparison.
Selling from your own page with Stripe direct at 2.9% + $0.30, because there is no platform cut at all — a $10 sale costs $0.59. The catch is the part no fee table shows you: you also own the tax handling, the file delivery and, above all, the traffic. A platform's percentage is the price of its audience. If you have no audience of your own, the 7.9% + $0.30 free tiers are usually the honest starting point, and you move to a paid tier only once you cross the break-even volumes solved above.
This calculator covers the 14 platforms where a per-sale comparison is meaningful. The report covers 18, including the ones you can't model this way — YouTube, Twitch, DistroKid, TuneCore, SoundCloud, Substack — plus payout minimums and methods.
One-time payment, no account, no subscription. August 2026 edition.
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smeltworks.com/creatorfees/thanks.html.
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