Almost nobody leaves Gumroad because it stopped working. They leave because it kept working, and 10% of a growing number is a growing number.
Gumroad is a superb place to make your first sale and a poor place to make your ten-thousandth. This guide covers when that shift happens, then 12 alternatives grouped by what you actually sell, because a platform built for files is the wrong home for a course and a useless one for a hoodie.
Several of those alternatives double as link in bio tools, holding your products and audience on one page instead of behind a separate storefront. If your buyers come from social rather than search, that matters more than any fee comparison.
Key Takeaways
- Gumroad charges 10% plus $0.50 per sale, rising to 30% on sales the Gumroad marketplace sends you
- The crossover arrives at roughly $250 a month. Below it Gumroad is the cheapest option available; above it, almost anything else is
- At $2,000 a month Gumroad costs about $200 against $9 to $29 for most subscription alternatives
- You keep your customer list, which is genuinely rare and makes migrating far easier than leaving Patreon or Etsy
- What you lose is discovery and simplicity, and the marketplace traffic is worth more than creators expect until it is gone
- What you sell decides the platform. Files, courses, physical products, and software each point at a different set of options
- Nothing forces a single choice. Plenty of sellers keep Gumroad for discovery and sell the same products elsewhere at better margin
What Is Gumroad and How Does It Work?
Gumroad is a platform for selling digital products. You upload a file, set a price, and Gumroad gives you a link; a buyer pays through that link and receives the download immediately. There is no store to design, no hosting to arrange, and no checkout to configure.
Founded in 2011 by Sahil Lavingia, it was built around one idea: the distance between having something to sell and selling it should be about two minutes. That remains its genuine advantage over every platform in this article.
It supports one-off purchases, subscriptions, pay-what-you-want pricing, pre-orders, and licence keys, plus a discovery marketplace where buyers browse products across the platform.
| How Gumroad works | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Upload a file, set a price, share a link | Live in minutes with no setup |
| 10% + $0.50 taken per sale | Nothing owed until something sells |
| 30% on marketplace-attributed sales | Discovery costs three times as much as direct traffic |
| Gumroad-hosted product and checkout pages | Limited branding, and the URL is theirs |
| Customer emails available to you | You keep the audience if you leave |
| Instant file delivery and licence keys | No fulfillment work at all |
When 10% Starts Costing More Than a Subscription
Gumroad’s pricing is honest and unusual: you pay nothing until you sell something. That makes it the cheapest option in the world at low volume and the most expensive at high volume, and the switch happens at a specific and calculable point.
If you have not settled on a product yet, working out which digital products sell best changes this calculation more than any platform choice, since price point and repeat purchase decide how quickly you cross that line.
Below about $100 a month, Gumroad genuinely costs less than any subscription and you should stay. Between $100 and $500 the difference is real but small, perhaps $40 a month, which is not worth a migration on its own.
Above roughly $1,000 a month the gap becomes difficult to justify. At $2,000 a month you are paying Gumroad around $200 while a flat-fee platform charges $9 to $29 for the same transactions, and the difference compounds every month you postpone.
Take last month’s Gumroad sales, multiply by 0.10, and add fifty cents per order. Compare that against $9. If the answer is under $30 a month, staying is the right call and you can stop reading the pricing sections below.
What You Give Up by Leaving Gumroad
Articles comparing sites like Gumroad list what each one adds. Almost none mention what leaving costs, and there are two things worth counting before you move.
- Marketplace discovery. Gumroad’s discover feature genuinely sends buyers to products, and those sales cost 30% rather than 10%. Sellers who leave frequently discover that a portion of their revenue was never their own traffic at all.
- Radical simplicity. There is nothing to maintain, no theme to update, no checkout to test. Every alternative here asks more of you, and time spent configuring a store is time not spent making the next product.
Neither is a reason to stay at $3,000 a month. Both are reasons to check your Gumroad analytics before assuming the revenue moves with you: if a meaningful share is marketplace-attributed, that portion may not follow.
The good news, and it is a real advantage over most platforms, is that Gumroad gives you your customer email addresses. Leaving Patreon means every supporter must re-subscribe. Leaving Gumroad means you email a list you already own and tell them the new address.
Start by Naming What You Sell
Gumroad treats every product the same way: a file behind a payment link. That works until what you are selling stops being a file, at which point the platform is not the constraint so much as the shape it forces on you.
So the fastest way to shorten this list is to say what you actually sell. Four answers cover almost everyone, and each points at a different group of Gumroad competitors.
The mistake worth avoiding is buying capability you will not use. A seller with three PDF templates does not need a course platform, and a seller running a genuine curriculum will keep losing customers to a zip file no matter how low the fee is.
Digital Storefronts: The Direct Gumroad Replacements
These Gumroad alternatives do exactly what Gumroad does, which is take a file and sell it. They differ mainly in what they charge and how much of the page you control.
1- brandIDBest overall Gumroad alternative
brandID is a creator storefront and the most direct of the Gumroad alternatives on this list: your products, links, subscriptions, and audience all live on one page. You connect your own Stripe or PayPal, so payments arrive in your account rather than being held and forwarded.
It is the best Gumroad alternative for most digital sellers because the free plan is genuinely free and permanent: one digital product, one subscription tier, one tipping jar, unlimited affiliate products, and a custom domain, with 5% taken on your own gateway.
What makes it unusual on this list is that the same page keeps working as the catalog grows. The $9 plan removes the transaction fee entirely and lifts the product limits, so scaling is a billing change rather than a migration.
- Digital storefront: sell digital products including downloads, video, audio, and documents with instant delivery
- 0% platform fee on your own payment gateway from $9 a month
- Subscriptions and tipping: recurring and one-off support alongside product sales
- Affiliate marketplace: over 5 million products from more than 2,000 brands, commission averaging up to 65%, with no approval step
- Email capture: your buyer list, owned and exportable, with selling digital products handled from the same page
- Custom domain and branding on paid plans
| ✓ brandID Pros | ✗ brandID Cons |
|---|---|
|
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brandID Pricing
- Free: one digital product, one subscription, one tipping jar, unlimited affiliate products, 5% on your own gateway
- Creator, $9/month: unlimited products, custom branding, 0% fee on your own gateway
- Turbo Creator, $15/month: unlimited subscribers, email and SMS marketing
Best For: Creators selling files who want to start free and never migrate again, particularly those whose buyers arrive from social rather than search.
2- PayhipFree with a lower percentage
Payhip is one of the free alternatives to Gumroad, a hosted storefront for digital products, courses, memberships, and coaching. You upload a product, set a price, and it generates a store page and handles checkout and delivery.
Its appeal against Gumroad is arithmetic: 5% per sale rather than 10%, with no monthly fee either way.
It also handles EU VAT calculation and remittance automatically, which removes genuine administrative work for anyone selling into Europe and is unusual on a free plan.
- Free plan with unlimited products
- 5% per sale rather than Gumroad’s 10% + $0.50
- Automatic EU VAT handling
- Courses and memberships supported
- Built-in affiliate programme
| ✓ Payhip Pros | ✗ Payhip Cons |
|---|---|
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Payhip Pricing
- Free: unlimited products, 5% per sale
- Plus: around $29/month with a reduced fee
- Pro: around $99/month with 0% transaction fee
Best For: Sellers who like Gumroad’s model but want half the fee, and anyone selling into the EU who does not want to handle VAT.
The Payhip review goes deeper on its VAT handling and where the paid tiers start paying for themselves.
3- Ko-fiFree, if support matters more than sales
Ko-fi is among the free Gumroad alternatives worth knowing, combining one-off tips, membership tiers, a digital shop, and commission requests on one creator support page. You claim a page name, connect PayPal or Stripe, and share the link.
It takes 0% on tips and one-off sales, which makes it cheaper than Gumroad for any seller whose audience would rather support them than shop from them.
Ko-fi Gold at $12 a month removes fees across everything, including memberships.
- 0% on tips and one-off shop sales
- Membership tiers for recurring income
- Commission request system for custom work
- Payments direct to your PayPal or Stripe
- Embeddable buttons and support pages
| ✓ Ko-fi Pros | ✗ Ko-fi Cons |
|---|---|
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Ko-fi Pricing
- Free: 0% on tips and one-off sales, 5% on memberships
- Ko-fi Gold: $12/month for 0% across everything
Best For: Artists, writers, and creators whose audience gives rather than shops, selling occasional files alongside tips.
The Ko-fi review covers where Gold overtakes the free tier.
4- Lemon SqueezyGlobal tax handled for you
Lemon Squeezy is the Gumroad alternative for sellers who want tax dealt with, acting as merchant of record so it is the legal seller of your product rather than you. It calculates, collects, and remits sales tax and VAT in every jurisdiction on your behalf.
For a seller crossing into consistent international sales, that removes a compliance problem that otherwise becomes an accountant’s bill.
It handles digital downloads, subscriptions, licence keys, and software, with a cleaner storefront than Gumroad and better email tooling.
- Merchant of record handling global tax compliance
- Digital products, subscriptions, and licence keys
- Built-in email marketing and automations
- Affiliate programme included
- Clean, modern checkout
| ✓ Lemon Squeezy Pros | ✗ Lemon Squeezy Cons |
|---|---|
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Lemon Squeezy Pricing
- Pricing: percentage plus a fixed fee per transaction, with no monthly cost
Best For: Sellers whose international sales have grown enough that tax compliance is becoming a real administrative burden.
5- SendOwlQuiet, reliable file delivery
SendOwl is the most stripped-back of the alternatives to Gumroad here, being a digital delivery service rather than a storefront. It handles the checkout, secure file delivery, licence keys, and drip content, and you embed its buy buttons wherever you already have an audience.
There is no store to design because it is not trying to be one. If you already have a website, a newsletter, or a following, SendOwl slots underneath it and does the transactional work.
Flat monthly pricing with no percentage means the cost stops mattering as sales grow.
- Secure file delivery with expiring links
- Licence key generation and management
- Drip content and subscription delivery
- Embeddable buy buttons for any site
- Flat pricing with no per-sale percentage
| ✓ SendOwl Pros | ✗ SendOwl Cons |
|---|---|
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SendOwl Pricing
- Plans: flat monthly tiers scaling with product count and storage
Best For: Sellers who already have traffic and want delivery infrastructure rather than another storefront to maintain.
Course Platforms: When the Product Outgrew the File
Plenty of Gumroad sellers are running a course delivered as a folder of videos. Moving it into a platform built for teaching usually raises both what you can charge and how many people finish it, because the product stops looking like a download and starts looking like a programme.
6- PodiaAdds courses and memberships
Podia is the Gumroad alternative for sellers whose catalog has grown past single files, covering courses, digital downloads, memberships, coaching, and webinars from a single site. You build pages inside Podia and it handles checkout, delivery, and access.
Where Gumroad sells files, Podia sells structured products. A course here has modules, lessons, and progress tracking rather than being a zip file with videos inside.
Email marketing and a website builder are included, which is usually the moment a seller realises they have been paying for both separately.
- Courses, downloads, memberships, coaching, webinars
- Website and landing page builder included
- Email marketing and automations built in
- Community features on higher plans
- No transaction fee on upper tiers
| ✓ Podia Pros | ✗ Podia Cons |
|---|---|
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Podia Pricing
- Entry: from $33/month plus a 5% transaction fee
- Higher tiers: remove the transaction fee
Best For: Sellers whose products have outgrown the file format and now need lessons, modules, or membership access.
The Podia review looks at whether its course builder is strong enough to justify moving a product out of a file.
7- ThinkificIf the product became a course
Thinkific is one of the best Gumroad alternatives for anyone teaching rather than selling files. You build lessons into modules, add quizzes and assignments, and students work through them while the platform tracks completion and issues certificates.
Plenty of Gumroad sellers are selling something that is really a course delivered as a zip file. Moving it into a course platform typically raises both the price it commands and the completion rate.
Paid plans charge no transaction fee, so a $36 subscription replaces a percentage that was costing considerably more.
- Drag-and-drop course builder with modules
- Quizzes, assignments, and certificates
- Student progress tracking and analytics
- Memberships and subscription pricing
- 0% transaction fee on paid plans
| ✓ Thinkific Pros | ✗ Thinkific Cons |
|---|---|
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Thinkific Pricing
- Plans: from $36/month with a 30-day trial
Best For: Sellers whose best-selling product is educational and currently being delivered as a folder of videos.
8- KajabiThe full business platform
Kajabi is the largest of the Gumroad alternatives here, running courses, coaching, sales funnels, email marketing, and a website from one system. You build everything inside it and it handles checkout, delivery, automation, and analytics end to end.
It is the most expensive option here at $143 a month, and it makes sense only when it is replacing several tools rather than one.
For a seller already paying for a course platform, an email tool, a landing page builder, and a checkout, it frequently costs less than the stack it consolidates.
- Courses, coaching, and membership delivery
- Sales funnels and email automation
- Website and landing page builder
- Integrated checkout with no platform fee
- Analytics across the whole funnel
| ✓ Kajabi Pros | ✗ Kajabi Cons |
|---|---|
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Kajabi Pricing
- Entry: from $143/month with a 30-day trial
Best For: Sellers running an education business with several products, an email list, and funnels doing real work.
Plenty of creators reach that price and immediately start comparing Kajabi alternatives, most of which split its features apart and charge less for each.
Full Ecommerce: When You Add Physical Products
Gumroad has no concept of stock, shipping, or fulfillment, so the moment a physical product enters the catalog it stops being the right tool. These alternatives to Gumroad handle both.
9- SellfyFor files and merch together
Sellfy is the Gumroad alternative for creators selling merchandise as well as files, handling digital downloads, physical goods, subscriptions, and print-on-demand from one dashboard. Products are added, the store generates itself, and buyers check out on your own subdomain or domain.
The print-on-demand is native rather than integrated, so merchandise is manufactured and shipped per order with no stock held and no third-party app connected.
For a creator whose audience would buy a shirt as readily as a preset pack, that removes an entire second platform.
- Digital, physical, subscription, and POD in one store
- Email campaigns, discounts, and cart recovery included
- PDF stamping and download limits for file protection
- Embeddable store and buy-now buttons
- Affiliate system with custom rates
| ✓ Sellfy Pros | ✗ Sellfy Cons |
|---|---|
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Sellfy Pricing
- Starter: $22/month billed annually
- Higher tiers: from $59/month
Best For: Creators selling downloads who want merchandise on the same storefront without connecting a print app.
10- ShopifyWhen digital sits beside physical
Shopify is the heaviest of the alternatives to Gumroad on this list, and the only true ecommerce platform among them. A monthly subscription buys you a storefront, checkout, hosting, and an admin panel, with an app store covering everything else.
It handles digital products through apps rather than natively, so it is the wrong answer for a purely digital seller. It becomes the right answer the moment you add physical products alongside the files.
The checkout converts better than almost anything else on the internet, which is worth real money at volume.
- Full ecommerce with physical and digital products
- Highest-converting checkout available
- 13,000+ apps for any requirement
- Multi-channel selling into social and marketplaces
- Handles inventory, shipping, and tax
| ✓ Shopify Pros | ✗ Shopify Cons |
|---|---|
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Shopify Pricing
- Basic: $39/month, plus apps
- Grow: $92/month
Best For: Sellers adding physical products to a digital catalog, where inventory and shipping become real requirements.
The wider Shopify alternatives comparison covers what a store actually costs once the app stack is counted.
11- WooCommerceOwn everything, pay no percentage
WooCommerce is the Gumroad alternative for sellers who want to own everything, being a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store. You install it on hosting you control, and it adds products, cart, checkout, and order management to a site you already own.
For digital products it handles downloadable files, licence keys through extensions, and subscriptions, with no platform fee at any revenue level.
The plugin is free and the operation is not: hosting, a theme, and extensions all cost money, and every update and outage is yours to handle.
- Free core plugin with thousands of extensions
- Complete control over code, data, and hosting
- Any payment gateway with no platform penalty
- Content and commerce on one WordPress install
- Enormous developer community
| ✓ WooCommerce Pros | ✗ WooCommerce Cons |
|---|---|
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WooCommerce Pricing
- Plugin: free
- Real cost: hosting from around $15/month, plus theme and extensions
Best For: Established sellers at revenue where percentage-free operation justifies taking on maintenance.
Merchant of Record: For Software and International Sales
A merchant of record is the legal seller of your product, which means it calculates, collects, and remits sales tax and VAT in every jurisdiction on your behalf. For anyone selling software or selling into dozens of countries, that removes a compliance function you would otherwise hire for.
12- PaddleMerchant of record for software sellers
Paddle is the Gumroad alternative built for software rather than creators, acting as merchant of record for SaaS and licensed products. It handles checkout, subscription billing, global tax compliance, fraud, and chargebacks as the legal seller of your product.
That distinction matters at scale: you receive one payout and Paddle deals with tax authorities in every jurisdiction, which for a business selling into forty countries is a compliance function you would otherwise hire for.
It is not a storefront and not for creators selling ebooks. It is infrastructure for products with real revenue.
- Merchant of record covering global tax
- Subscription billing and dunning management
- Fraud and chargeback handling
- Checkout that localizes by market
- Detailed revenue analytics
| ✓ Paddle Pros | ✗ Paddle Cons |
|---|---|
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Paddle Pricing
- Pricing: percentage of revenue plus a fixed fee, quote-based at volume
Best For: Software and SaaS businesses at scale where international tax compliance has become a genuine cost centre.
12 Gumroad Alternatives Compared
| Platform | Type | Best for | Cost model |
|---|---|---|---|
| brandID | Digital storefront | Creators who want 0% fees and a page they own | Free, or $9/month for 0% |
| Payhip | Digital storefront | Half Gumroad’s fee at no monthly cost | Free with 5%, or from $29 |
| Ko-fi | Digital storefront | Tip-led creators selling occasional files | Free with 0% on tips, or $12 |
| Lemon Squeezy | Merchant of record | Sellers who want tax handled for them | Percentage per sale |
| SendOwl | Delivery service | Existing audiences needing only checkout | Flat monthly tiers |
| Podia | Course platform | Courses, memberships, and downloads together | From $33/month |
| Thinkific | Course platform | Products that are really courses | From $36/month |
| Kajabi | Course platform | Consolidating a whole tool stack | From $143/month |
| Sellfy | Full ecommerce | Files plus print-on-demand merchandise | From $22/month |
| Shopify | Full ecommerce | Digital alongside physical products | From $39/month plus apps |
| WooCommerce | Full ecommerce | Full ownership and no platform fee | Hosting only |
| Paddle | Merchant of record | Software and SaaS at international scale | Percentage, quote-based |
Why You Might Keep Gumroad Anyway
This is the option nobody presents, and for a lot of sellers it is the right one.
Gumroad’s marketplace sends buyers to products. Those sales cost 30%, which is expensive, but 30% of a sale you would not otherwise have made is infinitely better than 100% of nothing. Meanwhile your own audience, arriving from your newsletter, your social accounts, and your site, has no reason to go through Gumroad at all.
So the arrangement that suits a lot of sellers is to run both: keep the Gumroad listing for discovery, and send every buyer you generate yourself to a storefront charging 0%.
| Traffic source | Where to send it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Gumroad marketplace | Gumroad | You did not generate it, so 30% is a genuine acquisition cost |
| Your email list | Your own storefront | You built this. Paying 10% for it is a donation |
| Your social bio link | Your own storefront | Same reasoning, and the branding matters more here |
| Search traffic to your site | Your own storefront | You earned the ranking; keep the margin |
| Affiliates and partners | Your own storefront | You are already paying a commission on these |
The split lives in whichever link your audience actually taps, which is why a bio page you control makes this practical. The Linktree alternatives comparison covers the pages that can hold a storefront rather than only a list of links.
How to Move Off Gumroad
This is considerably easier than leaving a membership or marketplace platform, because you own the customer list and nothing has to be re-subscribed.
- 1- Export your customers and sales data. Gumroad provides both as CSV. Do it before you cancel anything.
- 2- Rebuild the products elsewhere and test a purchase with a real card, checking that the file actually delivers.
- 3- Redirect or update every link you control. Your bio, your site, your newsletter footer, and any embedded buy buttons.
- 4- Email your existing buyers. They already paid you once; a short note about the new home converts well, particularly with an offer attached.
- 5- Decide what happens to the Gumroad listings. Keeping them for marketplace discovery is a legitimate strategy. Deleting them removes a revenue source.
- 6- Watch which products stop selling. Anything that dies after the move was marketplace-driven, which is useful information about where your revenue actually came from.
Because you keep the buyer list, the traffic you own moves cleanly. What does not move is anything Gumroad was sending you, which is exactly why step six matters.
That list is the asset worth protecting from here on. You can build an email list without a website in an afternoon, and personal branding is what turns buyers who came for one file into an audience that buys the next one.
Conclusion
Gumroad is not a platform to escape. It is a platform to outgrow, and the difference matters because it changes when you should act rather than whether.
Under $250 a month, stay. The fee is smaller than any subscription and the simplicity is worth more than the margin. Above $1,000 a month, the percentage is the largest cost in the business and a flat-fee platform pays for itself inside a month.
Between those two numbers, let the product decide rather than the fee. If you are selling files, a digital storefront at 0% is the obvious move. If the product has quietly become a course, or a physical item has appeared in the catalog, the platform matters more than the percentage.
And whatever you sell, check the marketplace share of your sales before assuming all of it follows you. The revenue Gumroad generates is the part that does not.
What Is the Best Alternative to Gumroad?
It depends on what you sell. brandID and Payhip are the closest direct replacements for digital files, Podia and Thinkific suit products that have become courses, Shopify and Sellfy handle physical products alongside downloads, and Lemon Squeezy or Paddle suit software sellers who want tax handled. Under $250 a month in sales, staying on Gumroad is usually cheapest regardless.
How Much Does Gumroad Charge?
10% plus $0.50 per sale on transactions through your own links, rising to 30% on sales attributed to the Gumroad discovery marketplace. There is no monthly fee, which makes it the cheapest option at low volume and one of the most expensive once sales grow.
At What Point Does Gumroad Become Too Expensive?
The crossover against a $9 flat-fee platform arrives at roughly $100 a month in sales, though the difference is too small to act on until around $500. At $2,000 a month Gumroad costs about $200 while flat-fee alternatives charge $9 to $29, at which point migrating pays for itself immediately.
Are There Free Gumroad Alternatives?
Yes. brandID has a permanent free plan covering one digital product plus subscriptions and tipping, Payhip is free with a 5% fee rather than Gumroad’s 10%, and Ko-fi takes 0% on tips and one-off sales. All three cost nothing monthly.
Can I Sell Courses Instead of Files?
Yes, and it usually raises what you can charge. Gumroad delivers a course as a downloadable folder, while Podia, Thinkific, and Kajabi give it modules, lessons, progress tracking, and certificates. Sellers who move an existing course into a proper platform typically report both higher prices and better completion rates.
Will I Lose Sales by Leaving Gumroad?
Possibly, and it depends on how much of your revenue comes from Gumroad’s discovery marketplace rather than your own traffic. Check that split in your analytics before moving. Sales you generate through your email list, social accounts, or site will follow you; marketplace-attributed sales generally will not.
Is It Easy to Migrate Away From Gumroad?
Easier than most platforms, because Gumroad gives you your customer email addresses. There are no subscriptions to transfer and no supporters to re-enrol, so you export the customer and sales CSVs, rebuild the products elsewhere, update your links, and email the buyers you already own.
Can I Use Gumroad and Another Platform at the Same Time?
Yes, and for many sellers it is the best arrangement. Keep Gumroad listed for marketplace discovery, where 30% is a fair acquisition cost on a buyer you did not find, and send your own email, social, and search traffic to a storefront charging 0%. The products stay identical; only the link changes.
What Is the Best Gumroad Alternative for Selling Software?
Lemon Squeezy or Paddle, because both act as merchant of record and handle global tax compliance as the legal seller. Both also support licence keys and subscription billing properly, which matters for software in a way it does not for ebooks or templates.
Does Gumroad Give You Customer Email Addresses?
Yes, which is genuinely unusual and one of its better features. You can export customer and sales data as CSV at any time, which is why leaving Gumroad is considerably less risky than leaving a platform where the audience relationship belongs to the platform.
