BookFunnel alternatives

The alternatives

1. 1. Inkwharf — a shop you own, at 0% of every sale

   $0–19/mo, no cut

   Storefront, checkout and EPUB delivery in one subscription, on your own domain. Cards are charged on your own Stripe account and the money lands in your balance, so there’s no percentage to take: it never passes through here. Readers buy with an email address and no account, and every book comes with a real chapter sample, an in-browser reader and send-to-Kindle.

   The catch: ebooks only, no writing toolchain, and no marketplace sending you traffic. You bring the readers; it does everything after that.

   Side by side with BookFunnelPricing

2. 2. Payhip — a storefront for digital products

   5% cut

   Payhip sells anything digital and charges a percentage until you pay enough to stop it — 5% free, 2% at $29 a month, 0% at $99. Inkwharf sells ebooks only, takes nothing at any tier, and knows what an EPUB is. Below roughly $380 a month in sales their free plan is genuinely the cheaper deal, and we say so.

   Pick it for: Under about $380 a month in sales, their percentage costs less than $19 — the arithmetic is on this page rather than left for you to discover. Our free tier answers most of it by covering you to $500 a month at 0% with no subscription, but if your catalogue is broader than books, that window is real.

   Inkwharf vs Payhip

3. 3. Gumroad — a marketplace for digital products

   15% cut

   Gumroad is the fastest way to put a file behind a payment link and the most expensive way to leave it there. The headline is 10%, but it's 10% + 50¢ — 15% of a $9.99 book — and 30% if the buyer arrived through their marketplace. The crossover against $19 a month arrives at about $127 in monthly sales.

   Pick it for: Upload, price, share a link. No Stripe onboarding, no domain, no decisions. If the question is whether anyone will pay for the thing at all, that's a genuine advantage and 10% of a small experiment is a rounding error.

   Inkwharf vs Gumroad

4. 4. Curios — a creator marketplace with a storefront attached

   flat fee

   The same sentence as this product — sell direct, keep 100% — arranged the opposite way. Their fee is real and is charged to your reader at checkout, at 1–10% of the price plus the card fee; ours is charged to you, at $0 or $19 a month. Then the split widens: they're a marketplace with an app, an account and an NFT receipt, and this is a shop on your own domain handing over a file.

   Pick it for: A marketplace with 27,100+ creators and 259,000+ transactions puts your book in front of people who didn't come from your newsletter. This site deliberately lists nothing, so every visitor to your shop is one you brought. If discovery is what you're shopping for, that's the whole argument and it's theirs.

   Inkwharf vs Curios

5. 5. Leanpub — a publishing marketplace for technical books

   20% cut

   Leanpub is a writing toolchain with a bookstore attached. Inkwharf is a bookstore you own, with no toolchain. If you write in Markdown and want the book built for you, stay on Leanpub. If you already have an EPUB and an audience, there's no reason to hand over a fifth of every sale, plus a membership if you want the toolchain unthrottled.

   Pick it for: Leanpub turns a folder of Markdown into a formatted PDF and EPUB on every change. That's real engineering, and it's why people put up with the rest. Inkwharf takes an EPUB you have already made — by Vellum, Sigil, pandoc, Atticus, or Leanpub itself — and does nothing whatever to produce one. If writing-to-artefact is the problem you need solved, we don't solve it.

   Inkwharf vs Leanpub