Gumroad vs Payhip vs Lemon Squeezy (2026)
My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.
I sell on Gumroad. All my guides live there. For Medium, for Substack, others, also icon sets, and more. For years now.
I left once. In January 2023, when Gumroad switched to a flat 10 percent fee, I ran Payhip next to it for six months and moved most things over. During that time — and also as a recent trial for another shop outlet — I tried Lemon Squeezy. That’s why I thought another comparison of the 3 for 2026 would be cool.
So first, this is not really a neutral comparison. I use the one I like most. It's the one I'd give a friend who asks which of the three to pick in 2026.
But in essence the three platforms do the same things: upload a file, set a price, get paid, let someone else deal with taxes. The differences are in fees, in design, in email, and in AI, of course, AI.
Money
Gumroad takes 10 percent + 50 cents per sale. No monthly plan. But that fee is not cheap. Sales that come in through Gumroad's own marketplace, Discover, also cost 30 percent instead. Steep cut.
A $19 guide of mine shows a fee of $2.40.
Payhip has three plans. Free with 5 percent, Plus at $29 a month with 2 percent, Pro at $99 with 0. Stripe or PayPal processing comes on top on all three, roughly 2.9 percent + 30 cents.
Lemon Squeezy takes 5 percent + 50 cents, no monthly fee.
Quick math. A $20 product, 100 sales, $2,000 gross.
Gumroad keeps $250. You get $1,750. Payhip on the free plan keeps about $190 with processing. You get around $1,810. Lemon Squeezy keeps $150. You get $1,850.
Gumroad is the most expensive of the three. Has been since 2023.
One more money thing. Gumroad raised the minimum payout from $10 to $100 in March, from what I read, for accounts that haven't done the identity verification. Verified accounts stay at $10. Mine is verified, so I didn't notice. Many did.
Taxes
If you sell to anyone in the EU or the UK (yes, you don't have to live in those countries, your customers do), and you will at some point, someone has to collect VAT, file it, and pay it to the right country. That someone is called the merchant of record.
Gumroad has been the merchant of record on every sale since January 2025 and in a slightly different form even before that. Since 2025, they calculate the tax, add it at checkout, file it, and pay it. Worldwide. I get the net amount and I'm done.
Lemon Squeezy has always worked this way. It's their pitch and it’s a great system.
Payhip collects and remits EU and UK VAT automatically, their pricing page says so. For US sales tax or the rest of the world, you're on your own as far as I can tell. That's fine for many sellers. For me in Germany it means one less thing to think about.
I wrote about how bad it gets when nobody handles it, in the piece about selling through Stripe links on Substack. Short version: the savings from a cheaper platform can disappear in an accountant's invoice. Or worse, in legal consequences when you don’t do it at all. Which many do, because they don’t even know this. You sell to the EU or UK, you need VAT.
Design
Payhip wins here. Sort of. More on that in a second. Payhip has themes, pages, a homepage you can redesign, blocks you move around. It's a small website builder with a checkout attached. Pretty cool. You can actually use Payhip to build your entire website with a blog for free.
Gumroad had one theme: Gumroad. You could pick a font and shuffle products around. That was it. BUT...
That changed this summer. Gumroad's profile page and storefront pages can now run on custom HTML. You write the page, or let an agent write it, push it, done. Gumroad sanitizes it and runs it through content moderation before it goes live. So no, you can't build a link farm on a gumroad.com subdomain.
It goes through the command line or the Agent tab, not a drag-and-drop editor. So it's for people who can write HTML, or have Claude do it. That's a lot of us now. You can also add pages and some custom elements. So Gumroad has evolved a bit here.
Mine still looks like Gumroad. For now.
Lemon Squeezy sits in between. A clean hosted storefront, checkout overlays for your own site, little control over the rest.
Terminal
Gumroad is really working with AI now. In many aspects.
brew install antiwork/cli/gumroad, for example. You log in once, and the store lives in the terminal. Products, sales, payouts, licenses, offer codes, webhooks, upsells, emails, pages. Twenty-odd command groups. Every command that changes something has a dry-run flag. You can add this to Claude or Codex and have it analyze everything, push new products, create emails, etc.
There's also gumroad skill. It prints a file that teaches Claude Code or Codex how to use all of the above without breaking anything. Product covers, thumbnails, and descriptions get set from the terminal now. And the Agent tab in the app does the same thing in a chat window, for people who don't open terminals on purpose.
I wrote about the CLI and the agent when they landed in July. Since then there's been a new version every few days.
The company behind Gumroad goes by Antiwork, by the way. Their pitch is agents that run Gumroad. Funny name. Serious direction. I like it so far.
Neither Payhip nor Lemon Squeezy has anything like it, as far as I know. Lemon Squeezy has a good API. Payhip has… a dashboard.
Stripe
Stripe bought Lemon Squeezy in July 2024. In January, Lemon Squeezy called Stripe Managed Payments the first big milestone of that deal. Managed Payments is Stripe's own merchant-of-record product, built from what they bought.
Which is kind of weird… because this sounds to me like the beginning of actually replacing Lemon Squeezy… make of that what you will.
Lemon Squeezy is still running. Same 5 percent + 50 cents, still taking new signups. Managed Payments itself is by waitlist, mostly for US businesses from what I read. Stripe hasn't published a percentage on the product page. Third-party posts put it at 3.5 percent on top of normal Stripe fees. I haven't tried it.
So if you start on Lemon Squeezy today, you're starting on a product that's being folded into another one, I would say. That could turn out great. Stripe has the infrastructure Lemon Squeezy never had. But nobody can tell you what your fee looks like in a year. I'd want to know that before I move a shop.
Gumroad has email built in. And to me this is the killer feature. It replaced a true (expensive) email marketing tool like Kit or MailerLite for me.
Every buyer and every freebie downloader lands on a list, segmented by product. Broadcasts, and workflows: day 0 thank you, day 2 how to use it, day 5 here's another thing. I run a couple of newsletters on it and pay nothing for that (unless you count the fee percentage-wise here). Other tools charge a lot for this. Again, Kit, MailerLite, MailChimp, and such.
For me, this is the feature that matters most.
Lemon Squeezy has email marketing too, free up to 500 subscribers, then a monthly fee. Which also gets expensive for a larger list, quickly.
Payhip has none worth the name. Integrations with Kit, MailerLite, and the others, yes. Native automation, no, not really.
Downsides
Gumroad costs the most, and 10 percent plus 50 cents on a $15 guide is $2. On a thousand sales, that's $2,000. Payhip Pro at $99 a month beats it from roughly $2,000 in monthly sales on. If margin is your only metric, Gumroad loses by a wide margin. See what I did there… margin -> margin :-D
Design on Gumroad is now possible, not easy. No drag and drop. If you don't want to touch HTML or an agent, Payhip* is still the better storefront.
Payhip's backend looks a bit old school, the affiliate payouts are manual, and there's no native automation. But the customization is king.
Lemon Squeezy is mid-transition, and it's built for software first. Subscriptions, license keys, usage billing. For a PDF guide it's a bit more than you need. Not a problem, just a fit thing.
And all three are rented. A ban, a policy change, a Stripe roadmap, and your store is somewhere else. Keep your files and your customer list somewhere you control (more).
The Bottom Line
I stay on Gumroad. Simple, taxes handled, email included, and now a terminal. The fee stings. I know what I pay for, though. And I never had an issue with anything on Gumroad.
Payhip is great if design and margin matter more than automation. For some, they do.
Lemon Squeezy should be your pick if you sell software with subscriptions and don't mind watching what Stripe does with it.
Where do you sell?
*this is an affiliate link, I may earn a commission.
If you're not already, follow me on Medium.
点赞
收藏
点踩
分享