WARNING: long post!

I use Gumroad and although I'm fairly happy with it, I feel like it's time to move. I've spent the last few weeks looking at other services. I ended up going through eight options in more detail than I planned, so here is the write-up in case it saves someone else the time.

What the numbers are. I took several thousand of my real 2026 sales (price, VAT / sales tax, buyer country, card or PayPal, affiliate or not) and replayed each one through every provider's published fee schedule.

To keep my own revenue out of it, everything below is expressed as fees per $1,000 of pre-tax sales, with every one of those real buyers "buying" a $10, $50 or $100 product instead of what they actually bought.

Note: fee pages were checked in August and September 2026. They can change over time. I am in the UK, which matters for a few rows (noted below). Absolutely none of this is tax advice, of course.

TL;DR

• Everything I looked at is cheaper than Gumroad (about 17% all-in for me).
• The flat per-sale fee matters more than the percentage for cheap products. At $10, Moonbase's €1 is 12% of the price on its own - at $100 it's only 1%.
• Moonbase is the most complete for plugins (licensing, PayPal, currencies, affiliates, migration) and the most expensive of the alternatives: about 12-15% depending on which currencies I set prices in. It's also the only one that charges per-payout fee (€5) and they have the highest fixed per-sale fee (€1).
• Stripe Managed Payments, Polar and Fungies all land around 7-9%. Stripe and Polar have no PayPal. Stripe is payments and tax only, not a store.
• Lemon Squeezy has the best feature match after Moonbase, but Stripe owns it now and its own CEO says the future is Stripe Managed Payments. It's no longer a contender.
• Payhip is the cheapest with a store attached (roughly 5-10% depending on plan and turnover), because it is not a merchant of record: you stay the seller and part of the tax problem stays yours.
• SoundSync has the friendliest fee shape for small sales (flat 10%, no per-sale fee) but is very new and I could not find the legal and tax basics on the site yet.

Costs

Fees on $1,000 of pre-tax sales, made up four different ways. The 'mixed basket' is 30 x $10 + 8 x $50 + 3 x $100.

The same figures as a percentage of pre-tax sales. The "not in the figure" notes above apply here too, and monthly plan fees are still on top. "My savings" is how much of the Gumroad fee bill each option would cut on the mixed basket, with Gumroad's fees as 100%.

How to read it:

• My buyer mix, which drives the surcharges: roughly a third UK, a quarter EU, a quarter US, the rest mostly Australia and Canada. About a third pay with PayPal, about 5% arrive through an affiliate link, and three quarters of sales have VAT or sales tax added (14% on top on average). That last one matters because most providers take their percentage on the tax-inclusive total, so "5%" is really 5.7% of what you priced. A US-heavy customer base will see lower numbers almost everywhere (less tax in the total), and especially on Polar and Lemon Squeezy, whose +1.5% is on every non-US card.
• Monthly plans only pay off above a certain turnover. Payhip Plus beats Free above about $1,000/month, Pro beats Plus above about $3,500/month. Polar Pro beats Starter above about $1,100/month at a $25 average sale.
• Moonbase charges 0% extra for EUR, +1% for USD and +3% for any other currency you set a price in. The "GBP + EUR + USD" row is my planned setup (GBP for UK buyers, fixed EUR and USD prices for everyone else, all surcharges absorbed by me). If you set a single price, use the row for its currency. One GBP price is the most expensive way to run it, because the +3% then lands on every sale and not only on the UK ones.
• Stripe rows use UK Stripe card rates (1.5% UK, 2.5% EEA, 3.15% international, + 20p). Under Managed Payments a Stripe entity becomes the seller and I could not confirm whether domestic rates still apply; if everything is charged as international the basket is $87. US sellers should redo this with 2.9% + 30¢.
• Payhip rows assume the store is priced in the currency of your own bank account. Payhip allows one currency per store, so if you price in USD and bank in GBP or EUR, Stripe (2%) and PayPal (3%) convert every sale: add about $24 per $1,000.
• Gumroad is measured from my actual fees, not modelled: 10% + 50¢, plus 2.9% + 30¢ for cards or PayPal's own cut (which averaged nearer 5% + 60¢ for me).
• Refunds, chargebacks and free downloads are not included. The model reproduces the worked examples on Polar's and Lemon Squeezy's fee pages to the cent.

Published fees, for reference

What about losing PayPal?

Stripe Managed Payments and Polar do not take PayPal, and SoundSync doesn't mention it either. A third of my buyers use it. I happen to have a natural experiment: Gumroad inexplicably switched PayPal off for four months in late 2024, when it was well over 40% of my sales. Revenue in those months, leaving out December, was about 4% below the four months before, which is inside my normal month-to-month noise. PayPal buyers mostly paid by card instead. This was just me, so treat it as a data point and not a law, but the cost was a lot smaller than I expected.

Features

Money / Currencies / Payouts

Payhip and tax. Payhip is not a merchant of record and does not claim to be. It acts as reseller for EU and UK VAT, as marketplace facilitator for US and Canadian sales tax (since July 2026), and does nothing for the rest of the world, which was 15% of my sales across 48 countries. Refunds and disputes are yours. If you are a UK seller, ask an accountant how the reseller arrangement with a UK company affects your own VAT position before going near it. I have not had that answer yet.

Who is behind each one

Trustpilot figures are as of September 2026. Review sites over-sample angry people, but with a merchant of record the provider holds your money, so held payouts and silent support are exactly what I was looking for.

• Moonbase - Oslo, founded 2023, audio software only. Named customers include Black Salt Audio, Nextmidi and The Audio Programmer. It comes up as a recommendation in the KVR and JUCE forum threads on this subject.
• Stripe Managed Payments - Stripe's own merchant-of-record product, generally available since early 2026. Digital products only. Stripe can refund a buyer without asking you if you do not answer an escalation within 48 hours.
• Polar - Delaware company run from Stockholm, founded 2022, $10M seed led by Accel in 2025, open source. Trustpilot 2.0 from 17 reviews, mostly accounts rejected or closed by automated review and payouts held. Raised its fees in May 2026 and now markets itself mainly as usage billing for AI products, with digital downloads as a side feature.
• Fungies - Delaware company with a team in Warsaw, founded 2023, $850k pre-seed, four or five people. Trustpilot 3.1 from 32 reviews, just over half of them one-star, mostly about withheld funds and unanswered support. There were KVR and JUCE forum threads in August 2026 about its sales reps spamming plugin developers.
• Lemon Squeezy - bought by Stripe in July 2024. Its team built Stripe Managed Payments, and the CEO's January 2026 update says support is slower, updates are fewer and the goal is a migration path to Managed Payments. No changelog entry since August 2025. Trustpilot 1.2 from 178 reviews: rejected stores, held payouts, unanswered tickets. My reading is that it is being wound down, though nobody has said so.
• Payhip - London, trading since 2011, bootstrapped, about ten people, mostly ebook and course sellers. Trustpilot 4.5 from 539 reviews; the complaints are about stores closed without warning. It never holds your money, so a closure costs you the store and not a balance.
• SoundSync - built by one developer (Aaron, who is on this forum) and live since mid-2026. The flat 10% is on the pre-tax price after discounts, which he confirmed to me. When I last checked on 30 September the site named no company or jurisdiction, the terms page had headings but no text, the tax / merchant-of-record docs were explicitly cautious about what is covered, and refunds could not be issued by the seller. Those are things I need settled from whoever holds my money and owes my customers' VAT. The fee shape is the best here for cheap products and I will look again when they are in place.

Things I couldn't pin down

• Whether Polar, Fungies and Lemon Squeezy charge their 50¢ on a free ($0) download. None of them says. If you give away a lot of free products, ask first.
• Which card rates apply under Stripe Managed Payments once a Stripe entity is the seller.
• Whether Fungies takes its 5% before or after tax, and whether Stripe's conversion fee lands on payouts in another currency.
• Moonbase's help centre says +3% for prices set in currencies other than EUR and USD, while my account settings show a single 1% line.

Where I've landed

Not decided, but it has come down to three rather than eight:

1. Moonbase - it's the most expensive below Gumroad, but everything is included and it's built for plugins. You certainly pay for it, mostly through the €1 per sale, so it suits $50+ products far better than $10 ones.
2. SoundSync - the fee structure is much better, and cheaper, than Moonbase for a similar feature spread, but it's a very young setup with some missing vital documentation.
3. Stripe Managed Payments - around half the cost with full tax cover. Downsides: no PayPal and it means building my own delivery and licensing.

User experience

The next step for me is to examine the user-facing side of each of these. The Moonbase system I know quite well after buying plugins from Jungle Audio and ZAK Sound. I need to see SoundSync in real use and figure out what my own user system would look like if I went with Stripe Managed Payments.

What do I want to build?

Here's the thing: Moonbase, SoundSync and some of the others have all the features I want, but at varying cost above the basic Stripe Managed Payments fees. So how much work am I willing to do (with AI, of course) to build my own cart, checkout, fulfilment, licensing, user accounts, discounts, refunds and email marketing?

Basically: do I want to build web app and marketing tech, or do I want to build plugins?

By the way, email marketing is an important factor. Gumroad includes it in the fee, and so do a couple of the others, but some don't and for large lists it can get expensive using Mailchimp, Klavyio, etc.

Merchant of Record

I definitely want to go with a Merchant of Record system, because no amount of time invested or AI-assistance is better than having someone else taking care of all the sales tax for me.

Parting thought

If Moonbase added support for GBP-holding, halved the fixed per-sale fee, the €5 payout fee and consolidated some of the other fees, they would be a no-brainer.

Corrections welcome, especially from anyone actually selling through one of these.