Gumroad 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 GumroadPricing

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. 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

4. 4. BookFunnel — ebook delivery for indie authors

   flat fee

   BookFunnel 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 aren't 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 didn't pay is better than ours, and it's most of the reason authors keep them.

   Inkwharf vs BookFunnel

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

6. 6. Shopify — a general ecommerce platform

   flat fee

   Shopify is a store for physical goods that can be made to deliver a file. It bills $19 a month before the first sale, adds 2% to every sale taken through a provider that isn't Shopify Payments, and knows nothing about EPUB — no spec check, no chapter sample, no reader, no send-to-Kindle, no watermark. Inkwharf is free until you're selling $500 a month and is built around the file. The moment you sell anything physical, Shopify wins outright and this doesn't compete.

   Pick it for: Signed paperbacks, a print run, box sets, merch at a convention table. Inventory, shipping rates, and a card reader that shares a catalogue with the website. Nothing here touches a physical object, and an author whose direct sales are half print shouldn't be reading this page for a verdict.

   Inkwharf vs Shopify

7. 7. WooCommerce — a self-hosted store plugin for WordPress

   flat fee

   WooCommerce is free software attached to a real bill: no licence fee and no cut, then hosting, updates, backups and your own hours. It sells downloadable products natively, so it will deliver an EPUB — as a file in a folder, with no spec check, no chapter sample, no reader, no send-to-Kindle and no watermark. Inkwharf is $0 to $19 a month with nothing to maintain. If you already run WordPress and like running it, Woo is cheaper and you should stay.

   Pick it for: The code runs on your server, the database is yours, and no plan, cap or change of terms can reach it. That's a stronger ownership claim than this product makes — a shop here lives on infrastructure you don't control, and a custom domain is the most that can be said about it.

   Inkwharf vs WooCommerce