Sell Photo Bundles on Gumroad or Payhip? The Fee Math, and the Thing Neither One Gives You

TL;DR: Gumroad and Payhip are checkout-and-delivery tools, not marketplaces. On their published rates a Payhip free-plan sale keeps more of a bundle price than a Gumroad direct sale, and the gap grows with the price. But the fee comparison is the smaller half of the decision, because neither platform supplies buyers. If you already have an audience, either works and the cheaper one wins. If you do not, the platform choice is not your problem.

What do Gumroad and Payhip charge?#

Both publish their rates, and both bill in a different shape, so the comparison needs a worked example rather than a percentage.

Gumroad's pricing page states 10 percent plus 50 cents per transaction on a direct sale — your own link, your own profile — and 30 percent when a new customer finds you through Gumroad's marketplace. There is no monthly fee.

Payhip publishes three tiers: a free-forever plan at 5 percent per sale, a Plus plan at 29 dollars a month with the fee cut to 2 percent, and a Pro plan at 99 dollars a month with no transaction fee. All tiers carry the full feature set.

Payment processing is separate on both. Card rates are typically in the region of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents in the US, charged by Stripe or PayPal rather than by the platform, and they apply to your sale regardless of which of these two you pick. Because processing hits both sides equally, it does not change the comparison, but it does change the number you actually keep, so include it in your own arithmetic.

What does that mean on a real bundle price?#

Take a 40 dollar photo bundle, sold direct, on the free tiers. Platform fee only, processing excluded so the platform difference is visible.

At one sale a month, Payhip Free wins and Plus is a loss. The monthly plan only turns positive once the fee you are avoiding exceeds the subscription, which on a 40 dollar bundle at a 3 percent saving takes roughly 25 sales a month. That is the real shape of every "upgrade to remove fees" offer: it is a bet on your volume, and taking it before the volume exists costs you money every month.

Two notes on the Gumroad side. The flat 50 cents matters most on cheap items — on a 5 dollar single photo it is 10 percent again, doubling the effective rate — which is an argument for bundling rather than for a platform. And the 30 percent marketplace rate is not a penalty; it is the price of Gumroad finding you a buyer you did not have. Whether that is expensive depends entirely on whether you had one.

Which one has the better fit for photo files?#

Both deliver files fine. The differences worth caring about are around the edges.

• File size and delivery. Photo bundles are large, and both platforms host files, which is already a meaningful advantage over marketplaces with tight per-file caps. Etsy, for comparison, documents five files at 20MB each, which forces a ZIP-per-family structure on any real bundle. We worked through that constraint in what size to sell digital prints.
• Pricing freedom. Both let you set the price outright, including pay-what-you-want. Neither dictates retail the way a print-on-demand platform does.
• Your own storefront. Payhip leans harder into being a store, with more built-in shop and marketing tooling on every tier. Gumroad leans into being a link you paste anywhere.
• The licence. On either platform you are the seller of record for a licensed file, so the terms are yours to write. That is the document that prevents most support messages, and we covered the wording in personal versus commercial licence wording for digital downloads.

What does neither platform give you?#

Buyers.

This is the finding that matters more than the fee table, and it is the one the comparison articles skip because they are written for creators who already have a mailing list. A storefront converts demand; it does not create it. Gumroad's marketplace is the exception and it is priced as one at 30 percent.

That reframes the question. Etsy charges more in total than either of these, and in exchange puts your listing in front of people typing "coastal photography digital download" into a search box. A Payhip page charges you 5 percent and puts your listing in front of nobody at all until you send someone there.

So the sequence that makes sense for most photographers is not "which is cheaper" but:

1. If you have an audience — a newsletter, a following, a client list — a storefront is the right tool and the cheaper of the two wins. That is Payhip on published rates.
2. If you do not, start where search demand already exists. Our end-to-end Etsy digital downloads setup covers that path, and pricing a digital photo download works through Etsy's fee stack the same way this post works through these two.
3. Then run both. They are not exclusive, and the storefront is where you send the audience the marketplace earns you, at a lower fee.

The cost nobody puts in the comparison#

Step three has a price that is not a percentage: every platform wants the listing built again. Different title field, different description format, different tag rules, different file limits, different image requirements. Doing that twice per bundle is the reason most photographers who intend to sell in three places end up selling in one.

That per-listing cost, rather than the two or three percentage points between two checkout tools, is what actually determines how many channels you end up on. Worth measuring before you plan around it.

Fees change, and both platforms revise their plans. Check gumroad.com/pricing and payhip.com/pricing yourself before you commit to a number — the rates above are what those pages published in September 2026.