Compared August 2026
Gumroad is a marketplace for digital products.
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 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.
10% + 50¢ on your own traffic, 30% on sales from their Discover marketplace, against a subscription that does not move. Every figure below is worked at $9.99 a copy, because the fixed fee per sale means their headline percentage and the share you actually pay are different numbers — 10% + 50¢ is 15% of a $9.99 book. Payment processing is left out of both columns — it is charged on your own Stripe account here and folded into the headline rate elsewhere, so including it would compare two different things.
| You sell | Gumroad keeps | Inkwharf keeps | You keep instead |
|---|---|---|---|
| $500/mo | $900 | $0 | $900 |
| $2,000/mo | $3,601 | $228 | $3,373 |
| $5,000/mo | $9,003 | $228 | $8,775 |
Read it the other way too: below $127 a month in sales, 10% + 50¢ is the cheaper deal — which is what the free tier here is for, since it runs to $500 a month at 0% and costs nothing at all. Figures last checked August 2026. Run your own at the take-rate calculator.
| Inkwharf | Gumroad | |
|---|---|---|
| Cut of each sale | Nothing, on every plan including free | 10% + 50¢ — 15% of a $9.99 book |
| If the buyer came from their marketplace | There is no marketplace to come from | 30% |
| Break-even against $19/mo | — | About $127 a month in sales |
| Who holds the money | Your own Stripe account. We never hold a cent | Gumroad collects and pays out on a schedule |
| Merchant of record | You are the merchant of record | Gumroad, which takes the tax problem off you |
| Time to first sale | About five minutes, after Stripe onboarding | Minutes, with no onboarding at all |
| Storefront | A shop on your own domain | A Gumroad profile page |
| Discovery | None. Your shop is not listed anywhere on this site | Some, from Gumroad's own audience |
| Understands EPUB | Spec-checked uploads, real chapter samples | A file with a price on it |
| In-browser reader | In-browser reader and send-to-Kindle on every book | Download only |
| Watermarking | DRM-free EPUB, watermarked to the buyer | Stamping on PDFs only |
| Bitcoin | Straight to your own wallet | Not offered |
A dot marks the side a row genuinely favours. Rows without one are a draw, and the ones marked against us are why the rest is worth reading.
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.
Gumroad's own audience and its recommendation surface do send buyers. It is not a bookstore and it will not find you romance readers, but it is more than nothing, which is what a shop of your own starts with.
Presets, templates, software, memberships. A mixed catalogue belongs somewhere generic.
The 50¢ per sale is the part that does not fit in a headline: on a $9.99 book the real cut is 15%, and on a $4.99 one it is 20%. About $127 a month in sales is where a flat $19 becomes the cheaper option, and every dollar past that widens the gap — at $5,000 a month their cut is roughly $9,000 a year against $228.
If a buyer finds you through Gumroad's own marketplace rather than your link, the rate triples. That is the trade for discovery and it is a defensible one — but it means the number you are quoted and the number you pay depend on where your readers came from, which is not true of a subscription.
Your shop, your domain, your list, and every buyer's email address. A checkout that asks a reader to make an account somewhere is a checkout that loses readers.
Spec-checked EPUB uploads, samples cut from real chapters, an in-browser reader, send-to-Kindle, and every copy watermarked to its buyer without a byte of DRM on it.
There is no payout schedule here because there is no payout. A card charge settles into your own Stripe balance the moment it clears.