Money

Ko-fi vs. Etsy vs. Gumroad: Real Fee Comparison for Digital Sellers

By Steven Motes · 10 min read

This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you — it keeps the free guides coming.

If you're selling digital products — printables, ebooks, coloring books, guides — the platform you pick decides how much of every sale you actually keep. And here's the part nobody warns you about: platform fees never come as one neat number. They stack. A "small" fee plus a payment-processing fee plus a listing fee can quietly eat a third of a low-priced sale before you ever see the money.

I learned this the slow way, building my whole shop on a $0 budget. My Ko-fi shop, Patience Feather Supply, runs on Ko-fi's free plan, and I've read the fee pages of all three platforms side by side more times than I care to admit. So this is the honest breakdown — no affiliate spin, no sponsored ranking, just what each platform actually charges and what that means for your money.

One ground rule before we start: fees change. Everything below describes the structure of each platform's fees — not exact figures, because the day this post goes live, a platform could have changed them. Ko-fi's fee numbers were verified on Ko-fi's own fee page in September 2026; for Etsy and Gumroad, check each platform's current fee page before you decide. I won't quote a fee number I can't stand behind.

Also, for honesty: I have $0 in product sales so far. I'm sharing this as a fellow beginner who's done the homework, not as someone counting payouts. If you want the full story of how I'm building this from zero, that's the subject of my pillar post How I Started an Online Business With $0 (The Honest Version) — the piece this whole money vertical is built on.

How to Read Platform Fees (The 5 Layers)

Every platform's cost is really up to five different layers. Learn the layers once, and you can decode any fee page in minutes:

1. Platform/transaction fee — the percentage the platform itself takes from each sale. This is the number platforms advertise (or hide).
2. Payment-processing fee — what the payment processor (Stripe, PayPal, etc.) takes. This is separate from the platform fee on most platforms, and it usually includes a flat per-transaction amount (like ~$0.30) that hurts small sales disproportionately.
3. Listing/insertion fees — charged per product you list, sometimes on a schedule (Etsy's renewals are the famous example). Digital sellers listing dozens of products feel these hard.
4. Advertising/add-on fees — optional programs that take an extra cut when they "drive" a sale to you (Etsy's offsite ads are the classic).
5. Payout/withdrawal fees — charges for moving your money to your bank, or currency conversion fees if you sell internationally.

That flat ~$0.30 processing piece in layer 2 is the silent killer of low-priced digital products. On a $20 sale it's noise. On a $4.99 sale it's over 6% before the platform takes anything. Keep that in your head for the math examples below.

Ko-fi: The Fee Structure

Ko-fi is the platform I actually use, so I'll start here — and I'll be precise where I'm verified.

Ko-fi's free plan takes 5% on shop sales. That's the verified number — I confirmed it when setting up my shop, and it's the figure in my How I Started an Online Business With $0 post. The 0% you sometimes hear about is tips and donations only — shop sales are 5%. Don't mix those up.

Other Ko-fi details to know:

• No listing fees. You can list as many products as you want without paying per listing. For a beginner with dozens of small products, this matters a lot.
• Payment processing is on top of the 5%. Ko-fi uses Stripe/PayPal for payments, and the processor takes its own cut — check the processor's current rates on Ko-fi's fee page before you run exact numbers.
• Ko-fi Gold (paid plan) removes the platform fee — you pay a monthly subscription instead. Whether that math works depends on your monthly sales volume; check the current Gold price and do the break-even math for your own numbers before upgrading.

The honest take on Ko-fi: it's the cheapest way to start — $0 to open, $0 to list, and the fee only appears when money actually comes in. The tradeoff is traffic: Ko-fi doesn't have Etsy's built-in search marketplace, so your buyers have to find you through your own marketing (social media, blog posts, the quiz hub — my whole funnel strategy).

Etsy: The Fee Structure (Marketplace Traffic, Layered Costs)

Etsy is the giant. It has the most built-in buyer traffic of the three — millions of people go there searching for printables, planners, and digital downloads. That traffic is the product you're paying for, and the fee structure reflects it.

Etsy charges in more layers than the other two:

• Listing fee: a flat fee per product listing, in USD, charged when you create (or renew) a listing — check Etsy's current fee page for the exact amount. Listings auto-renew on a schedule, so a listing you forgot about can quietly bill you again.
• Transaction fee: a percentage taken on the sale price including shipping (for digital products there's no shipping, but the rule is the same) — check Etsy's current fee page for the current percentage.
• Payment-processing fee: a separate percentage plus a flat per-transaction amount, varying by country — check Etsy's current payments page for your country's rates.
• Offsite ads fee: if Etsy shows your product in ads off Etsy and the sale comes from it, an additional percentage applies — and for sellers over a certain revenue threshold, this program is mandatory, not optional — check Etsy's current offsite-ads terms for the percentage and the threshold.

The honest take on Etsy: do the math for your price point before listing anything. Take a $4.99 printable. Layer the listing fee, the transaction percentage, the processing percentage, and that flat per-transaction processing amount — check Etsy's current fee page for every one of these — and you'll see the effective cut is much bigger than any single advertised number. Etsy can absolutely be worth it for digital sellers, but only if your volume and pricing survive the fee stack. My $0-budget rule: don't pay listing fees before you've proven something sells.

Gumroad: The Fee Structure

Gumroad sits between the two — a simple hosted storefront like Ko-fi, but with a built-in "Discover" marketplace element that Ko-fi lacks.

• Per-sale fee: Gumroad charges a flat per-sale fee — a fixed amount plus a percentage of each sale — check Gumroad's current pricing page for the exact figures. No monthly fee on the basic plan, no listing fees.
• Payment processing: included in or alongside the per-sale fee depending on the plan — check the current pricing page so you're not double-counting.
• Payout schedule and fees: Gumroad pays out on a schedule (not instantly), and payouts can carry fees depending on method and currency — check Gumroad's current payout terms.

The honest take on Gumroad: the fee math is simple to understand, which is genuinely nice — no listing fees, no renewal surprises. But the per-sale flat fee hits small products the same way processing fees do: on a cheap printable, it takes a bigger bite proportionally than on a $50 ebook. And Gumroad's marketplace traffic is real but much smaller than Etsy's, so don't count on "Discover" to replace your own marketing.

Side-by-Side: What Actually Matters

Here's the comparison stripped to the decisions that matter for a beginner selling digital products:

The one-sentence version: Ko-fi is cheapest to start, Etsy charges the most but brings the most shoppers, and Gumroad is the simplest middle ground.

The Hidden Costs Nobody Puts on the Fee Page

Fee pages never list these, but they cost you real money:

• Your time. Setting up 44 products (my live count on Ko-fi) took days. That's fine on a platform with no listing fees; on Etsy, every one of those listings would have cost a listing fee up front. Time + fees is the real budget.
• Payout delays. None of these platforms put money in your bank the same day. Scheduled payouts mean the cash from this week's sales might not arrive for days or weeks — plan your cash flow accordingly — check each platform's payout schedule.
• Taxes and reporting. Platforms report seller income to tax authorities over certain thresholds. That's not a fee, but it's a real obligation — set aside a portion of revenue and talk to a tax professional, because "digital download" doesn't mean "invisible to the IRS."
• Currency conversion. Selling internationally can add conversion fees on top of everything else (check current rates).

My Actual Recommendation (As a Beginner, Not a Guru)

Here's what I'd tell a friend, honestly:

If you have $0 and no audience yet: start on Ko-fi's free plan. You pay nothing until something sells, there are no listing fees punishing you for experimenting, and the 5% shop fee is easy to do the math on. That's what I did. Your job then is traffic — and my traffic plan is exactly this blog, free printables, and the Quiz Hub.

If you have proven products and want search traffic: Etsy is the marketplace play. List there once you know something sells, price with the full fee stack baked in, and treat the listing fees as a marketing expense with a real expected return — not a gamble.

If you want simplicity and a clean checkout: Gumroad is a solid storefront. The per-sale fee is easy to understand, and there's no listing-fee anxiety.

The rule I run my whole operation on: never pay a platform before a sale has proven the product. Fees are a cost of selling, and costs should trail revenue, not lead it.

FAQ

Related reading: my pillar post How I Started an Online Business With $0 (The Honest Version) covers the full $0 setup, and Affiliate Marketing for Beginners: What It Actually Is (and What It Isn't) explains the other side of online income — earning from other people's products.

Ready for a five-minute brain break? Take a free quiz at the Quiz Hub — results are instant and free. And if you want to see what a $0-built shop actually looks like, browse my free printables at Patience Feather Supply on Ko-fi.