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Comment by thatguyknows | Hacker News Reader

Just here to post this is another reason to get off Gumroad when you get a chance. Do NOT use Gumroad. Using Stripe directly will save you so much money. Still bitter at those exploitive jerks jacking the payments price to a total of 12.9% (and something like 17% when through PayPal).

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Gumroads USP isn’t payment processing. Gumroads USP is that they handle international sales tax (also know as Merchant of Record), which, I’ve you’ve ever tried selling something on the Internet without committing tax fraud¹, will know that 12.9% is _cheap_.

¹) I’d estimate some 95% of all small online business are doing sales tax wrong. Hell, Basecamp just now cleaned up their act.

Anywhere to read about Basecamp and Sales Tax?

I heard it discussed on this episode (could’ve been in the follow up episode)

https://saas.transistor.fm/episodes/nobody-in-saas-wants-to-...

If you're a software dev, you shouldn't be using gumroad. You're not their target market. Gumroad explicitly states that they're for creators, and that software folks are better off just integrating Stripe.

You get a lot more on gumroad for that don’t you? I tried to find MoR services like Gumroad and there are a bunch, so you don’t need to use them. But it’s not that trivial to replace all they offer for that price; that depends of course on how much you sell. It becomes more interesting to move the more you make, but I would skip Stripe too and go to a ‘local’ acquirer which will tons cheaper than Stripe.

Gumroad should’ve gone about it another way; just do fixed price extra’s for instance. Ah well.

Stripe is not available in some countries yet, which Gumroads supports.

Ignoring the ~2.9% of Credit Card Processing Fees ( on average it would still be higher than 2.9% ), I dont see how they charge 10% for their services is exploitive jerks.

Changing the fee from 3%-5% total to 12.9% (17% on paypal!) total when you already have a large customer base there, meaning you'd have to painfully migrate them to another provider, is not a nice thing to do in my eyes.

And also why I'm working on completely migrating off.

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