HonorBox

Lemon Squeezy vs Gumroad vs DIY (2026): fees compared

Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad, or doing it yourself on your own Stripe account: the three realistic ways to sell a digital product in 2026, with fees taken from each platform's live pricing page (checked July 19, 2026) and the per-sale math shown. Disclosure up front: we build HonorBox, one of the DIY routes. The numbers are real either way; recheck them against the linked pricing pages before deciding.

The choice underneath the logos

Both platforms are merchants of record: legally, they sell to your buyer and you invoice them. That's why they can handle VAT and sales tax for you, and why the fee is what it is. DIY means you are the merchant. You keep the platform's cut, and you inherit the platform's jobs: delivery and tax.

What each one charges (as published, July 19, 2026)

Gumroad (pricing) charges 10% + 50¢ per sale on your own traffic, and that does not include payment processing: Gumroad's fee page lists credit card processing (2.9% + 30¢) and PayPal fees separately, on top. Sales that come through Gumroad's Discover marketplace cost 30%, processing included. No monthly fee.

Lemon Squeezy (pricing) charges 5% + 50¢ per transaction, processing included. The fee schedule adds +1.5% for international (non-US) cards, +1.5% for PayPal, and +0.5% for subscription payments. Two prints most people miss: the fee is calculated on the tax-inclusive total (their own example: a $20 product with 20% VAT is charged at $24, and the fee comes out of $24), and payouts outside the US cost 1% via Stripe or 3% (capped at $30) via PayPal. No monthly fee. Owned by Stripe since 2024.

DIY on Stripe (pricing) costs Stripe's standard processing rate for your country and nothing else; for US domestic cards that's the familiar 2.9% + 30¢. No platform percentage and no monthly fee. Also no delivery, no tax handling, and nobody between you and your money.

The math on one sale

A $29 product, one-off purchase, US domestic card, your own traffic:

The 50¢ fixed fees bite hardest at low prices: on a $5 product Gumroad takes ~29%, Lemon Squeezy 15%, plain Stripe ~9%. On a $100 product the gap narrows to 13.7% vs 5.5% vs 3.2%. At 50 sales of a $29 product a month ($1,450), the totals are roughly $227 (Gumroad), $97 (Lemon Squeezy), $57 (DIY). Every month.

What the platform fee actually buys

Not nothing. Gumroad is the fastest possible start (upload a file, share a link) plus a marketplace that can find you buyers, at 30% for the ones it finds. Lemon Squeezy buys the merchant-of-record umbrella at half Gumroad's cut, with developer polish: license keys, checkout overlays, an API, real subscription support. If those jobs would otherwise eat your evenings, the fee is cheaper than your time.

When NOT to DIY

When DIY wins

Two reasons, and they are not the same reason. The first is arithmetic: you sell code, templates, courses, or tools to people who have GitHub accounts, at enough volume that keeping another 3 to 12 points of every sale (the spread in the table above, against Lemon Squeezy and against Gumroad) is worth doing your own tax. As the low-volume point above says, that is not 10 sales a month; it is the point where the percentage outgrows the paperwork. The second is ownership, and it holds at any volume: you sell on your own Stripe account, so the balance and the customer are yours, there is no platform account to be declined for or removed from, and nothing to migrate off if a platform changes its terms. Stripe can still act on your account, so it is one less intermediary rather than none.

The checkout half takes minutes with Stripe Payment Links; the delivery half is the actual gap. HonorBox fills it without a server: a static storefront on GitHub Pages and a scheduled GitHub Action that polls your Stripe account and invites each buyer to a private repo, through GitHub, done right. MIT, and open to read before you trust it. The costs are the ones listed above: GitHub accounts, minutes rather than seconds, and your own tax.