Payhip alternatives
Payhip is a storefront for digital products. 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 Payhip is still the right answer
- 5% of nothing is nothing. 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.
- It sells more than books. Courses, memberships, software licences, coaching, physical goods. If your catalogue is mixed, one Payhip account beats a book shop plus something else.
- Coupons, bundles and affiliates are built in. Their marketing tooling is broader than ours. If an affiliate programme is central to how you sell, they have one and we do not.
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. 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.
3. 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.
4. Leanpub — a publishing marketplace for technical books
20% cutLeanpub 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 is no reason to hand over a fifth of every sale — and, if you want the toolchain unthrottled, a membership on top of it.
Pick it for: Leanpub turns a folder of Markdown into a formatted PDF and EPUB on every change. That is real engineering, and it is 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 do not solve it.
What staying costs you
Payhip takes 5% of every sale — 5% of a $9.99 book once any fixed fee is counted. At $2,000 a month that is $1,200 a year — against $228 for a subscription that does not grow when you do. Below $380 a month in sales the percentage is cheaper, and the free tier here covers that range at 0% anyway.
Run it on your own numbers