Free to start. $19 a month when you outgrow it. Never a cut.
Store and delivery in one subscription, where selling direct usually takes two. Free up to $500 a month in sales, so nobody pays before they've earned something.
Free
$0
A real shop, not a trial. We take nothing from what you sell.
- Our cut
- 0%
- Sales ceiling
- $500 a month
At that ceiling a 5% platform takes $25.00 a month. We take nothing.
One big month over the ceiling never pauses your checkout.
- Up to $500 a month in sales
- Unlimited books, unlimited downloads
- Card checkout, and bitcoin if you want it
- Every copy watermarked to its buyer
- Free samples, in-browser reader, send-to-Kindle
- Your own domain, or a free address, with the certificate handled
Plus
Most authors$190 / year
or $19 a month
For authors with readers already arriving.
- Our cut
- 0%
- Sales ceiling
- $2,500 a month
At that ceiling a 5% platform takes $125.00 a month. We take $19.
One big month over the ceiling never pauses your checkout.
- Everything in Free
- Up to $2,500 a month in sales
- No Inkwharf name on your shop or inside the books you sell
- Still 0% of every sale. A take rate here would be $125
Pro
$490 / year
or $49 a month
For a shop that has outgrown a ceiling.
- Our cut
- 0%
- Sales ceiling
- No cap
- Everything in Plus
- No cap on what you sell
- Priority support
Yearly is ten months, so two are free. Payment processing is charged separately and never marked up: Stripe's usual rate on a card (about 2.9% + 30¢), and 1% on bitcoin sales (Blockonomics) if you switch bitcoin on. Either way it's billed to your own account, because the account is yours.
No plan takes a cut of a sale, not even the free one. That's how it's built, not a promotion: you connect your own Stripe account and readers pay you. We build the shop and open the checkout, and the money never lands anywhere we could take a share of it. Paid tiers buy a higher ceiling, not a smaller percentage, because there is no percentage.
So it gets cheaper the better you do. A cut grows with you forever and a flat fee doesn't. At every sales level, we cost less than a 5% platform: free below $500, where 5% would already have taken $25, then a small flat fee above it instead of a share that keeps climbing. Where a rival charges more than 5%, the comparison pages show the volume below which a percentage still wins.
Questions
- Really 0%? What's the catch?
- There isn't one. We have no way to take a cut, which is a stronger guarantee than a promise. You connect your own Stripe account and, if you want, your own bitcoin wallet. The money is charged there, never here. We bill for the shop on a flat monthly plan, and paid tiers buy a higher sales ceiling, not a smaller percentage, because there's no percentage to shrink.
- What does Stripe charge on top?
- Their usual processing fee, around 2.9% + 30¢ in the US and a bit different elsewhere. It's billed to your account, because that's where the charge is created. We never see it or mark it up. A $10 card sale nets you about $9.41 on every plan.
- And on a bitcoin sale?
- Blockonomics charges 1% on their side, with no fixed fee. A $10 bitcoin sale nets about $9.90, minus the network fee when you move the coins.
- Should I offer bitcoin as well?
- Only if it suits your readers. Most buyers pay by card, so a shop that never turns bitcoin on is a perfectly normal shop here. It only changes the maths on a cheap book: the fixed 30¢ on a card is 8.9% of a $4.99 ebook, where 1% is 5¢. The studio shows both numbers against your own price, and leaving bitcoin off costs you nothing.
- What counts toward the ceiling?
- Gross sales through your shop in a calendar month, card and bitcoin together, counted when the money arrives. Downloads don't count. Neither do re-downloads, free samples or reading in the browser. A reader coming back on a new device three years later is the product working, not something you should be billed for.
- What happens if I go over the ceiling?
- One big month never pauses anything. A launch, a BookBub feature or a free series can push a normally small month way over, and that's the worst time to interrupt your checkout. So a first month over is a heads-up, not a penalty. Only a second month far over the ceiling pauses new orders. Your readers always get their books, on every plan, over the ceiling or not.
- Who holds the money, and who is liable for the sale?
- You are, on both counts. You're the merchant of record: card money lands in your own Stripe balance, bitcoin in your own wallet, and the only money that ever reaches Inkwharf is your subscription, if you have one. Refunds, chargebacks and tax are yours to handle for the same reason. There's no middleman of ours to hand them to.
- Who owes the VAT or sales tax on a sale?
- You do. You're the merchant of record, which is the flip side of the money never passing through us. Registering where you cross a threshold is something no platform that leaves you as merchant of record can do for you.
- How do I collect it?
- Switch Stripe Tax on in Shop settings. Card checkouts then ask for a billing address, apply the right rate for a digital book wherever the buyer is, and collect it as part of the payment. Stripe files and remits where you're registered. Bitcoin sales aren't covered, because nothing sits between the buyer and your wallet to add a tax line. We record the buyer's country against the order and the rest is yours.
- Are prices tax-inclusive?
- Yes. A reader anywhere pays the price on your book page. What changes by country is how much of it is tax and how much is yours. Adding tax at the last step is common for software, but it isn't allowed for consumer sales in the EU or UK, where the displayed price has to be the price paid.
- What happens if I cancel?
- You drop to Free at the end of the period and keep everything: your shop, your books, your links, your buyers' download pages. Your ceiling goes back to $500 of sales a month, your custom domain keeps working, and the small Inkwharf line comes back to your shop. Watermarking is on every plan, so your copies stay traceable. New ones just carry the Inkwharf name again, as they do on Free. Nothing you've already sold is affected.
- Is there a listing fee or a contract?
- No, and no exclusivity either. Sell the same book on Amazon, Kobo and your own site on the same day if you like.
- Can I sell paperbacks or special editions?
- No. We sell EPUB files and nothing else: no print, no print-on-demand, no shipping, no audio. If your launch is built around a signed paperback or a sprayed-edge hardback, you want Shopify or Books.by, and we'd rather say so than take a subscription for half the job. Most indie authors sell print somewhere, so most shops here sit alongside a print store rather than replacing one. What we do is the ebook half properly: a sample that's a real chapter, a reader in the browser, send-to-Kindle, and a permanent link that serves a corrected file to someone who bought two years ago.