Compared August 2026
Leanpub is a publishing marketplace for technical books.
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 is no reason to hand over a fifth of every sale — and, if you want the toolchain unthrottled, a membership on top of it.
80% royalty at $7.99 and up; 80% minus 50¢ below it, against a subscription that does not move. 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 | Leanpub keeps | Inkwharf keeps | You keep instead |
|---|---|---|---|
| $500/mo | $1,200 | $0 | $1,200 |
| $2,000/mo | $4,800 | $228 | $4,572 |
| $5,000/mo | $12,000 | $228 | $11,772 |
Read it the other way too: below $95 a month in sales, 20% 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.
Printed because a headline rate is not the whole bill, and because what a competitor charges for is the clearest statement of what it thinks it is selling.
| Inkwharf | Leanpub | |
|---|---|---|
| Cut of each sale | Nothing, on every plan including free | 20% at $7.99 and up; 20% plus 50¢ below it |
| Subscription on top | $0 or $19/mo, and that is the whole bill | Free tier capped at 20 previews a month; the toolchain is $12.99–$99/mo |
| Who holds the money | Your own Stripe account. We never hold a cent | Leanpub collects, then pays a royalty |
| Merchant of record | You are the merchant of record | Leanpub, which takes the tax problem off you |
| Where your shop lives | Your own domain, or a free subdomain | A page on leanpub.com |
| Buyer account required | None. An email address and a card | A Leanpub account |
| Who owns the buyer | Every buyer's email address is yours | The marketplace |
| Writing toolchain | None. Bring a finished EPUB | Markdown to PDF and EPUB, rebuilt on every change |
| In-progress publishing | Updated files reach past buyers | Built around it, and marketed as such |
| Discovery | None. Your shop is not listed anywhere on this site | A browsable store with real technical traffic |
| Reading experience | In-browser reader and send-to-Kindle on every book | PDF and EPUB downloads |
| Free sample | First chapters cut into a real EPUB the buyer can read | A sample the platform generates |
| DRM | DRM-free EPUB, watermarked to the buyer | DRM-free |
| Exclusivity | None. Keep selling everywhere else the same day | None |
| Works outside tech | Any. Fiction, non-fiction, technical, cookbooks | In principle yes; in practice a software audience |
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.
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.
Selling an unfinished book and shipping chapters to existing buyers works, and Leanpub built the whole product around it. Updated files reach past buyers here on the same permanent link, which covers the mechanics — but nothing on this site markets an in-progress book the way their storefront does.
A DevOps title on Leanpub gets found by DevOps readers browsing Leanpub. That is worth something real, and it is worth precisely nothing to a novelist. If you have no list and your topic sits squarely in their niche, discovery you did not pay for is the strongest argument there is against going direct.
A royalty is a percentage with better manners. At $2,000 a month of sales, 20% is $400 a month — $4,800 a year — against $228 for a subscription that does not move when you have a good year. The crossover is low and it only goes one way. Price a book under $7.99 and it is worse than 20%: the royalty becomes 80% minus 50¢, which on a $4.99 title is a 30% cut.
Publishing on Leanpub is free, but the free tier caps you at 20 previews a month — and previewing is how you find out what the book looks like. Unlimited previews, custom themes and print-ready PDF start at $12.99 a month, and the tier with GitHub sync and API access is $17.99. So the honest comparison for an author who actually uses the toolchain is 20% of revenue plus about $216 a year, against $228 a year and no percentage at all.
Leanpub books live on leanpub.com under Leanpub's chrome, Leanpub's URL and Leanpub's search results. A shop here resolves at your own domain, and this site's sitemap deliberately does not list author storefronts — the platform does not compete with its own sellers for their own titles.
A sign-up wall between a fan and their book is where direct sales die. Checkout here is an email address and a card. No password, no library account, no confirmation step standing in front of the money.
Every book gets an in-browser EPUB reader that follows the site theme, send-to-Kindle in one tap, and a free sample that is a genuine trimmed EPUB rather than a preview pane. The rest of the book is physically not inside the sample file.
Leanpub's model is bound to its marketplace, and its marketplace is engineers. Because there is no marketplace here, genre is irrelevant to the architecture — a romance backlist and a Kubernetes manual are the same product to this system.