Interesting. I've been a customer of theirs for ~2 years. It's been really great until a couple months ago. Then something seemed to change. Rather than just being a great payment provider, they seemed to change direction in order to become a "platform".

In emailing with Sahil about my concerns about Gumroad's new direction, he said "We want Gumroad to be the core channel for everything. We started with sales, and are moving into audience/list management."

He made it clear that they want me to import my audience lists to Gumroad and that they don't plan to support future integrations with CampaignMonitor, Mailchimp, etc. That makes sense, since those email platforms are now the competition I guess. It's bad news for me though - if I wanted to stay with Gumroad, I'd now have a project on my hands to move everything over to a (currently) much less powerful email platform.

I imagine this will work for many of their customers, but there are customers like myself that don't want to be pushed in this direction. I prefer to keep my audience management separate from my payment provider. I don't want my payment provider deciding that my customers are now their customers that they can now spam and upsell them in order to grow their platform. I'm not saying that that is Gumroad's plan - but I'm increasingly worried that it might be. Particularly if they get in a "desperate for growth" situation like this article hints at.

Again, they've been great for years and I really appreciate that. The new direction just seems too risky and not a good fit for folks like me who don't want their payment provider as the middle-man for communicating with their audience.

I guess there's an argument that they're not a payment provider, but a "sales platform" or something.

Currently I'm looking for a replacement payment provider (or whatever they should be called) to use. SendOwl looks promising. If you've used them, or have another provider you'd recommend, please let me know!