Gumroad vs Lemon Squeezy vs Payhip Fees: Net at 5 Prices

Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy and Payhip all advertise one simple percentage, and none of those percentages is what you actually keep. Fixed fees, processor charges and surcharges for foreign or PayPal buyers stack on top, and they bite hardest at the $5 to $29 prices most ebooks and templates sell for. Below is the net on one sale at five price points, calculated from each platform’s official pricing page on September 28, 2026. After that: who handles sales tax now, how long payouts take, and when a paid Payhip plan beats Lemon Squeezy.

This is not licensed financial or tax advice, and there are no affiliate links in this post. Fees change; the official pages are linked in the sources.

To check a price that is not in the tables, use the digital product fee calculator.

What you keep at $5, $10, $29, $99 and $299

The published rates as of September 2026: Gumroad takes 10% + $0.50 on direct sales and 30% on sales that come through its Discover marketplace. Its help center says that fee does not include credit card processing or PayPal fees. Lemon Squeezy charges 5% + $0.50, plus 1.5% for transactions outside the US, 1.5% for PayPal transactions and 0.5% on subscription payments. Payhip’s free plan takes 5%, Plus costs $29 a month with a 2% fee, and Pro costs $99 a month with none; Stripe and PayPal charge their standard rates on top on every plan. Payhip’s help center gives Stripe’s standard fee as 2.9% + $0.30, and PayPal’s US page lists 3.49% + $0.49 for PayPal Checkout.

A script turned those rates into the table below. Each cell is what you keep from one sale, with the effective fee in parentheses. Every fee component was rounded to the cent and then recomputed in integer cents as a check. Sales tax and VAT are left out because the merchant of record adds or carves them out separately.

The second Gumroad row is the one to plan with. Gumroad’s help center lists card processing at 2.9% + $0.30 on top of its own fee; PayPal payments carry PayPal’s fees instead. Once your paid sales pass $20,000 in a calendar month, new direct sales that month drop to 5% + $0.50, and the discount resets on the 1st.

For a US card sale, three things stand out.

Lemon Squeezy beats Gumroad at every price, because both charge the same 50 cents and Lemon Squeezy’s percentage is half, with processing already inside it.

Payhip’s free plan beats Lemon Squeezy only on very cheap items. Set the two formulas equal and the crossover is $6.90: below it Payhip Free leaves more, above it Lemon Squeezy does.

A buyer who picks PayPal on Payhip costs you more than the same buyer on Lemon Squeezy at any price above 50 cents. If your audience pays with PayPal, that alone can settle it.

Why the headline percentages mislead

“10% vs 5% vs 5%” hides three different fee shapes.

Gumroad’s number is a platform fee with processing on top. Lemon Squeezy’s number includes processing but grows with the buyer: a customer outside the US paying through PayPal turns 5% + $0.50 into 8% + $0.50. Payhip’s is a platform fee that shrinks as your plan price rises, on top of whatever Stripe or PayPal charges you directly.

The 50-cent fixed fee is the quiet one. On a $5 template it is 10% of the price before any percentage applies. Payhip has no platform fixed fee, only Stripe’s 30 cents, which is why it wins below $6.90.

Lemon Squeezy lists more add-ons that don’t show up in comparison tables: 5% on payments recovered through abandoned-cart emails and 3% on sales that come through affiliate referrals, charged to you as the merchant. Both are optional. Switch on cart recovery and every recovered $29 sale costs you an extra $1.45.

The fixed fee is also a pricing lever; how to price a digital product covers that side. If you’d rather put a raw processor behind your own page, Stripe vs PayPal for digital products runs the same five prices.

When a Payhip plan beats Lemon Squeezy

Payhip’s paid plans are a bet on volume, so the right comparison is sales per month, not a single sale.

Inside Payhip the math is simple because processing is the same on every plan. Plus beats Free once you sell more than $966.67 a month, since 3% of that revenue equals the $29 fee. Pro beats Plus above $3,500 a month and beats Free above $1,980.

Against Lemon Squeezy it depends on price, because Lemon Squeezy’s fixed 50 cents and Payhip’s 30-cent Stripe fee weigh differently at each price point. The table shows the monthly sales count at which each paid Payhip plan, including its subscription, costs less than Lemon Squeezy, for US card buyers as of September 2026.

Plus is a poor fit above $29. At $99 you would need almost $10,000 a month before it saved anything against Lemon Squeezy, and by then Pro has been cheaper for thousands of dollars. The same thresholds come out nearly identical when both sides have non-US card buyers, because Lemon Squeezy’s 1.5% surcharge and Stripe’s 1.5% international card fee cancel out.

The catch is tax. These rows compare fees only. Until this summer, choosing Payhip also meant owning US sales tax yourself, and that changed.

Who handles sales tax and VAT now

Gumroad says that since January 1, 2025 it handles sales tax collection and remittance worldwide as merchant of record, at no extra cost, collecting in regions where it has obligations. Lemon Squeezy is the merchant of record and says it is registered to file and pay taxes on your behalf.

Payhip is the one most comparisons have wrong. From July 1, 2026 its help center says it collects and pays US sales tax as a marketplace facilitator, and it charges nothing for that. The same date brought Canadian GST/HST and PST, with Quebec’s QST registration still in progress. EU and UK VAT on digital products is handled by default, with an opt-out if you’d rather do it yourself.

Tax responsibility by platform, from the official help pages as of September 28, 2026:

The “rest of the world” row is where Lemon Squeezy and Gumroad still earn their premium. Payhip’s sales tax section contains three articles, one each for the US, Canada, and EU/UK. If you sell to Australia or Japan in meaningful numbers, ask Payhip in writing who owes that tax before you switch.

None of the three takes over your income tax. Lemon Squeezy’s own docs say you may still owe income tax on the payouts, and the IRS is plain that you report all income from selling goods or services whether or not a Form 1099-K arrives. Our money ops guides cover the income side.

Tax-inclusive pricing quietly lowers your cut

Payhip’s help center has a worked example for a $10 product sold to a buyer in France at 20% VAT on the free plan. With VAT added on top, the buyer pays $12 and you keep $9.50 before PayPal’s fee. With VAT included in the $10 price, you keep $7.91.

That is about a 17% pay cut on EU sales from one checkbox. Lemon Squeezy offers the same store-wide tax-inclusive setting. Round prices like $10 look better with tax included, so decide deliberately which you want instead of accepting the default.

How fast the money reaches your bank

Payout rules as published by each platform, as of September 2026:

Sources: Gumroad’s payout-delays article; Lemon Squeezy’s getting-paid and fees docs; Payhip’s pricing page and Stripe article; Stripe’s payout docs.

Payhip’s speed comes from its structure. Buyers pay into your own Stripe or PayPal account, so the money is yours as soon as the processor releases it.

Lemon Squeezy’s schedule is the slow one, and it compounds. Read literally, a sale made on September 3 clears its 13-day hold on September 16 and just misses the payout created on the 15th. It joins the payout created on October 1, which is distributed on October 14 and can take up to five more days to reach the bank. Roughly six weeks from sale to spendable money. If you’re launching with ad spend on a card, plan the float.

Non-US sellers should also price in the payout fee. Taking $2,000 out through PayPal to a non-US account costs the $30 cap each time, and Lemon Squeezy’s bank payouts are made in US dollars, so a conversion happens at your bank if your account isn’t in USD.

Lemon Squeezy after the Stripe acquisition

Stripe bought Lemon Squeezy in July 2024, and the announcement promised the same product would continue. On January 28, 2026, CEO JR Farr posted that the team had been building Stripe’s merchant of record product, Stripe Managed Payments, and that the goal is an easy way for Lemon Squeezy users to migrate to it. The post gives no fee change and no end date. As of September 28, 2026, Lemon Squeezy’s pricing page still shows 5% + 50¢ and links to that update.

Managed Payments itself is now documented on Stripe’s own pricing page at 3.5% per successful transaction on top of normal Stripe fees as of September 2026. Stripe says it handles sales tax, VAT and GST compliance in more than 80 countries. Eligible sellers must be based in a supported location, which includes the US and Canada, pass an eligibility review, and sell fully automated digital products such as e-books, courses and software; live coaching doesn’t qualify.

Priced out with the same script, a $29 sale nets $26.84 on Managed Payments with a US card and $26.41 with an international card, against $27.05 and $26.61 on Lemon Squeezy. That is 20 to 21 cents a sale in Lemon Squeezy’s favor today. If the migration happens on those terms, current Lemon Squeezy sellers of mid-priced products would pay a little more, not a lot more.

My read: starting on Lemon Squeezy now is reasonable. Keep your files and customer list exportable so a forced move takes an afternoon. Lemon Squeezy’s refund policy also lets it refund buyers within 60 days of purchase to head off chargebacks, whatever your stated policy says, so factor that into any “no refunds” promise.

Which one I’d pick at each price

I sold an ebook for a while and shut it down when sales stopped the moment I stopped paying for ads. The checkout fee was never what decided whether it made money; the cost of getting each buyer was. So I’d pick the platform on tax and cash flow first, then let fees break the tie. If demand is your real problem, selling an ebook without ads and why an ebook stops selling are the better reads.

Under $7 with mostly US card buyers: Payhip Free. It keeps a few cents more per sale and pays out immediately.

From $7 to about $30, under roughly 120 sales a month, or with a lot of PayPal buyers: Lemon Squeezy. It wins per sale and takes the most tax work off your plate. Budget for the six-week first payout.

Past about $3,500 a month in steady sales with mostly US, Canadian, EU and UK buyers: Payhip Pro. The July 2026 tax change removed the main reason not to.

Gumroad: only if its built-in audience matters to you, and remember that every buyer who finds you through Discover costs 30%.

Take your real price and your honest monthly sales count, find the matching row in the break-even table above, and sign up for the platform it points to this week.