Curios alternatives
Curios is a creator marketplace with a storefront attached. Here is everything worth moving to if it is not working for you, what each one takes, and — first, since it is the part most of these lists skip — when the answer is to stay put.
When Curios is still the right answer
- They have readers and we have none. A marketplace with 27,100+ creators and 259,000+ transactions puts your book in front of people who did not come from your newsletter. This site deliberately lists nothing, so every visitor to your shop is one you brought. If discovery is what you are shopping for, that is the whole argument and it is theirs.
- The fee does not come out of your money. Their platform fee and the card fee are added to the buyer's total, so a $9.99 book pays you $9.99. Set against a subscription that is due whether or not you sell anything, that is genuinely better for a small or seasonal catalogue — and it is why their free tier can exist at all.
- Cheaper on the sticker. $9 a month against $19. If you are comparing rate cards and nothing else, Lite wins and it is worth saying so before the rest of this page argues about where the money actually comes from.
- An app, and audio. iOS and Android apps, and any format rather than EPUB only — audiobooks included. If you sell audio, this product cannot help you at any price.
- They will handle a reader who cannot open a file. Content lives inside their account and app, so a reader who changed phones is their support problem rather than yours. A file you hand over is a file you may have to explain.
We make this page and we sell one of the options on it. If the three paragraphs above describe you, none of the rest is an upgrade.
The alternatives
1. Inkwharf — a shop you own, at 0% of every sale
$0–19/mo, no cutStorefront, checkout and EPUB delivery in one subscription, on your own domain. Cards are charged on your own Stripe account and the funds land in your balance, so nothing takes a percentage — there is no percentage, because the money 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.
2. Payhip — a storefront for digital products
5% cutPayhip 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.
3. Books.by — a direct-sales bookstore with print-on-demand
flat feeThe closest thing to this product that exists, and the honest split is by format: they print, we do not. Ebooks sit behind their $299 tier while their $99 one is print-only — but they take the payment and pay you out, which is the one thing here that is arranged differently on purpose.
Pick it for: Paperback print-on-demand with free ISBNs, printing and shipping handled, sold from the same page as the ebook. 97% of indie authors sell paperbacks. If a physical book is any part of what you sell, that is not a feature gap here — it is the whole product, and this one does not have it.
4. Gumroad — a marketplace for digital products
15% cutGumroad 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 is 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 is a genuine advantage and 10% of a small experiment is a rounding error.
5. BookFunnel — ebook delivery for indie authors
flat feeBookFunnel is delivery without a checkout, so selling direct with it means pairing it with a store and paying two bills. Inkwharf is both halves in one subscription. BookFunnel still wins outright on ARCs and group promos, which are not selling at all.
Pick it for: A large share of what BookFunnel moves was never sold: advance copies, newsletter magnets, cross-author promo swaps. Their tooling for handing a file to a list of people who did not pay is better than ours, and it is most of the reason authors keep them.
Sources
Every figure quoted above, and the page it was read from. Each platform carries the date it was last checked. These pages are re-read against those claims rather than trusted — if one of them changes, this comparison is wrong until it is updated, and you should be able to tell that for yourself.
Curios · checked September 7, 2026
- Free, then 15% + 25¢ after 25 sales; Lite $9, Plus $29, Pro $69 a month studio.curios.com
- The platform fee and the card fee are both billed to the buyer, at 1–10% of the listing price content.curios.com
Payhip · checked August 28, 2026
- Free 5%, Plus $29/mo at 2%, Pro $99/mo at 0% help.payhip.com
- Payhip subscribes buyers to a mailing list automatically, Mailchimp among the providers help.payhip.com
- Payhip collects and remits EU/UK VAT on digital sales help.payhip.com
Books.by · checked September 7, 2026
- $99 Core and $299 Pro a year; ebooks are a Pro feature; card fee 2.9% + 30¢ books.by
Gumroad · checked August 26, 2026
- 10% + 50¢ per sale, 30% via Discover, no monthly fee gumroad.com
BookFunnel · checked August 28, 2026
- $30/$200/$300 a year; 500/5,000/unlimited downloads; 1/4/6 pen names bookfunnel.com