Stripe vs Gumroad

At a Glance

Attribute	Stripe	Gumroad
Category	Payments	Payments
Pricing Model	freemium	freemium
Starting Price	Free	Free
Free Tier	Yes	Yes
Open Source	No	No
Platforms	web, mobile, platforms, marketplaces	—

Stripe

Gumroad

Stripe

Gumroad

No features listed.

Stripe

Pros

Stripe Radar blocks fraudulent payments automatically and the machine learning improves over time without any configuration+176
The test mode with fake card numbers lets you simulate every failure scenario before going live — no other provider does this as well+164
Webhooks are reliable and the dashboard makes it easy to replay failed events, which saves hours of debugging payment edge cases+149
The Stripe CLI for local webhook forwarding makes local development with payment events actually pleasant+138
Billing portal is fully hosted — your customers can manage their own subscriptions without you building any UI+121

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Gumroad

Pros

Lowest barrier to start selling anything digital — you can have a product page live in 5 minutes with no technical setup+167
The creator community and discovery features give small products some organic visibility you don't get with pure payment processors+142
Pay-what-you-want pricing and flexible discount codes work great for early access launches and presales+118
Analytics per product are easy to understand and share with co-founders or investors without needing a BI tool+94

Cons

The fee structure (10% on free, 0% on paid plan but $10/mo) makes unit economics tricky for low-margin or high-volume products+156
Checkout is hosted on Gumroad's domain which feels less professional than a custom checkout for SaaS products+134
Payout holds and account restrictions are reported frequently by creators and the appeal process is slow and opaque+119
No real subscription management features — upgrading plans or managing per-seat billing requires manual workarounds+98