The creator-economy service Gumroad decided to open-source its platform at a suspiciously convenient time. (And even “open source” might be stretching it.)
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That was a rough read, not really sure I understood the authors point. It was kind of all over the place, bad because AI, bad because not really open-source, bad because doge...
Only thing I really left with was the author doesn't like the word gum. Seems like a hit piece on Sahil? Pretty sure the open-source part of Gumroad has been in the works for a while.
By wrasee 2025-04-0619:47 Right. Somewhat burred the lede. My take was that the value that services like Gumroad can bring is precisely the value-add they provide over what a create could do themselves. So if the CEO has chosen to essentially automate the entire business by replacing staff with AI, then what value-add is left exactly?
Better then to watch out for middlemen that "extract value rather than add it" and empower creators to host things themselves. Thought that was a nice observation.
Ironically, I always thought that was somewhat the point of Gumroad (short of self-hosting). Are they on to enshittification Stage II?
I like that you were able to succinctly summarize the issues raised here in one sentence and then not understand them in the next sentence
It is like “the author wrote about Athos, Porthos, and Aramis… what I got from this is the book is about hats?”
By dragandj 2025-04-078:53 Porthos was well known for wearing magnificent hats, though.
By aprilthird2021 2025-04-0619:381 reply Extremely sad to see Sahil is working with DOGE in basically firing hundreds of thousands of Americans (that too disproportionately veterans) in the manner they have been doing it.
I have always liked reading his honest takes on running a company, their unique way of working with non-full-time employees, etc.
I wonder if he has posted about his work in this regard himself?
By paulddraper 2025-04-0620:153 reply HN: "Why so many people to do X? This should be like a 20 person startup!"
Also HN: "No....!!! You can't downsize!!!"
By aprilthird2021 2025-04-072:04 Governments are public works projects basically to keep citizens employed, which is why they disproportionately hire veterans, for example.
Running a government as lean as X would also inspire corruption amongst a myriad of other things. This is one reason government jobs are so "cushy", to disincentivize corruption. If the pitch given to Sahil was "Run the government like X" I'm even more ashamed he accepted the premise.
By ambicapter 2025-04-0620:341 reply Ah yes, running the US Federal Government and running Twitter are two completely comparable endeavours.
By paulddraper 2025-04-0621:072 reply Which one is more efficient?
By jwagenet 2025-04-0621:25 Efficiency isn't the primary mandate of the government.
By krainboltgreene 2025-04-0621:161 reply Given the government does everything, everywhere, and twitter can barely serve me tweets correctly,I’d say the answer is obvious.
By paulddraper 2025-04-0622:411 reply “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.“
By krainboltgreene 2025-04-0623:29 Where "wasting the labours of the people" seems in reality to mean "subsidizing rural schools so they have the same education standards as urban schools".
Of course the guy you're misquoting also had slaves, so I'm not sure if I give a shit about his predictions for American's happiness.
So what are the alternatives to gumroad? I’d been thinking of using them to sell the PDF version of a book, but after reading about the doge thing, I feel like I need to look elsewhere.
By ninefoxgambit 2025-04-070:182 reply I sell templates for a living and have used several of these providers.
The main options are Gumroad - high fees and ugly design, solid system never had issues does most what I need.
Lemon Squeezy - it was very popular until being acquired by stripe. Full of serious bugs, bad support. Lovely design, slightly better fees than Gumroad, but many hidden. Would still use over Gumroad just cause the Gumroad checkout design is so bad it loses sales imo.
Paddle - haven’t used it but I think it’s probably as good as Gumroad or Lemon.
Polar.sh - the trendy new option, most creators abandoning Lemon Squeezy are moving there. Has lots of innovation in features beyond payments such as selling private GitHub access.
All of these platforms are MOR as far as I know, all provide the checkout UI etc. all handle digital asset file delivery. They are perfect for creators selling digital products that want a turn key solution and don’t want to do any development work.
By jjani 2025-04-1617:06 > Lemon Squeezy - it was very popular until being acquired by stripe. Full of serious bugs, bad support. Lovely design, slightly better fees than Gumroad, but many hidden. Would still use over Gumroad just cause the Gumroad checkout design is so bad it loses sales imo.
Curious to read the acquisition made it less popular. Is it due to the concern of Stripe buying it solely as an "extinguish" strategy? Or is it unrelated to the acquisition and just because of the bugs and poor support?
Polar.sh looks great. Do they accept PayPal payments? Probably half of my sales on Gumroad come from PP.
By bigbadfeline 2025-04-0718:48 https://docs.polar.sh/merchant-of-record/fees >Polar is currently built on Stripe
Stripe supports paypal only in Europe, Switzerland, United Kingdom
By 999900000999 2025-04-071:02 Honor System + a paypal donate link at the bottom of your page.
Itch has no mandatory cut at all.
Theirs an argument that taking any payment at all is more trouble than it’s worth.
Say you sell 15 copies of the book per month for 10$ each. After taxes and merchant fees , and the occasional chargeback, you’ll be lucky to net half.
Is 75$ a month really worth the stress ?
This is a part of why I’m going FOSS for my side projects. Even trying to collect a single legit dollar gives people a right to complain.
Of course you can complain on GitHub anyway when it doesn’t work right, but it’s MIT, fork , send a PR or leave me alone.
By kamranjon 2025-04-0620:06 I use Shopify and it’s pretty dang nice, especially the shipping discounts you get as a smaller business. I’m not sure of many alternatives though, I just knew it by name so I chose it - there might be better ones out there.
By chris_pie 2025-04-0620:11 There's also Paddle (who's a Merchant of Record)
Stripe can likely do it with link.com, assuming you don’t need help with distribution
By nikolas- 2025-04-0619:53 Lemon Squeezy (recently acquired by Stripe) has a native digital product solution (https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/ecommerce/digital-products)
The major benefit of a service like Gumroad is they are the merchant of record and handle worldwide taxes for you. Stripe does not do that (yet?)
By rchaud 2025-04-0622:00 They announced the MOR feature in December 2024, so I wouldn't really say that's a big selling point for them just yet, they have been around for over a decade.
By fuzztester 2025-04-0620:02 >taxes for you.
including EU VAT, last I checked.
By thedangler 2025-04-0620:23 Plenty of options. I use sytescope.com with a funnel to sell subscriptions. You can sell digital content on there too and hook it up with lots of payment systems.
By lovegrenoble 2025-04-0620:13 This one is top, using it for ages: https://getdpd.com
By candiddevmike 2025-04-0620:04 Paddle works OK and supports a bunch of payment providers
By kacesensitive 2025-04-0620:07 Lemon Squeezy is excellent
By fuzztester 2025-04-0620:011 reply what is the doge thing?
Open the article, press Ctrl-F, and type "DOGE" to get your answer.
(TL;DR: DOGE is the name of a new US government agency devoted to gutting other government agencies, and the founder of Gumroad is giving it pro-bono help.)
By walmartwagie 2025-04-0620:49 By fuzztester 2025-04-0621:151 reply Ah yes. For the last two or three weeks, or maybe ditto months, in some of my free time, that I dedicate for reading world news, I've been doing practically nothing but reading about the shenanigans of the Frump and his sidekick the Tusk / the Fsck, so I guess it makes sense that I didn't know what the DOGE was. end of /s
:)
after the /s, thanks for your answer. the /s is dedicated to the HN people I mention below, not to you.
actually by the "doge thing", I meant sahil's interaction with it, which I knew would be in the article, or in a linked one, but was a bit lazy to read.
and I continue to marvel at the brilliance of the knee jerk, trigger happy HN downvoters who can't even imagine that there can be a different interpretation of a phrase like "the doge thing" from what they can think of or know.
DOGE is the right place for those jokers.
Alternatively, you posted a 5 word question that was maddeningly vague and was almost destined to be misunderstood.
By fuzztester 2025-04-092:18 >you posted a 5 word question that was maddeningly vague
"maddeningly vague", hell yes, but only for 'hotshot' HN dumbasses (of which there are many here) who don't look before they leap, aka, in this case, don't read (the comment context) before they yap.
proof: here is the comment to which I was replying above, when I asked "what is the doge thing":
>So what are the alternatives to gumroad? I’d been thinking of using them to sell the PDF version of a book, but after reading about the doge thing, I feel like I need to look elsewhere.
See the overall comment, as well as the part I highlighted.
from the context, as shown above, it is clear (to anyone with common sense) that I was asking what they meant by their reference to doge, in the context of gumroad, and was not asking about doge itself, which I could, obviously, have easily googled for.
so, is it now clear to you, dear sir, andybak, that my question was not vague at all, and in fact, it was your comment that was maddeningly idiotic and unjustified? even more idiotic in view of the fact that Frump, Tusk, and their shenanigans like doge and tariffs have been making news headlines all around the world for the past few weeks? in view of that, isn't it likely that I would know what doge meant?
jfc.
in future, look before you leap, or you're likely to land up in a pile of dog(e) shit (of your own making).
