Best Gumroad Alternative: Sell Digital Products With No Transaction Fees

Are you thinking about using Gumroad to sell digital products online? Read this guide first.

Today we will explain what Gumroad is, why you should consider Gumroad alternatives to sell digital products and why Heights Platform is the better alternative to Gumroad.

What is Gumroad?

Gumroad is a simple eCommerce platform that lets creators sell digital and physical products directly to their audience.

Gumroad creators have their own online storefronts where they can offer a variety of digital products, including ebooks, music, videos, training, software, and physical goods. Gumroad provides features such as payment processing, file hosting, analytics, and customer management.

The platform is simple to use but quite limited for creators who want to build a profitable online business and provide value to their customers.

Gumroad Takes a 10% Transaction Fee on Your Earnings

Gumroad is "free" to use, meaning you can create an account on their free plan. However, they charge a 10% flat fee on every sale you make through the platform. And that excludes the standard credit card processing or PayPal fees!

Together with the standard processing fees, creators using Gumroad lose around 13% of their earnings for every sale.

Most creators find these fees to be too high, particularly if they are selling digital downloads and other low-priced items.

When you are just starting out, it might seem convenient to take advantage of their free plan.

However, as soon as you start making sales, Gumroad can get pretty expensive really quickly.

Why are Creators Choosing Heights Platform Over Gumroad?

Heights Platform is an all-in-one course creation platform that allows creators to build their whole online knowledge business. Heights Platform does not charge any transaction fees: anything you earn is 100% yours to keep!

Creators using Heights Platform can sell digital products, and build engaging online courses, membership programs, and private communities.

Heights lets you fully customize the appearance of your platform according to your brand style; you can build last-longing connections with your customers, offer upsells, utilize different launch strategies - and be 100% flexible on how you structure your content and digital products.

Let's see in more detail why creators are switching to Heights Platform:

Sell More than Digital Products

Heights Platform and Gumroad differ significantly in the type of products you can sell.

Gumroad focuses on offering a storefront for digital products.

Both Heights and Gumroad offer features such as accepting payments in various currencies, setting the price of your product and offering discount codes.

Selling digital courses on Gumroad is quite basic and does not support interactive elements or a more complex course structure. Gumroad also does not have options to sell challenges, cohort-based courses, or host online communities.

Heights Platform offers a more comprehensive solution and more advanced features for creators who want to sell digital downloads and beyond.

Heights Platform makes it easy to upload and create sales pages for digital products, and customers can access all their purchased content in a branded dashboard. But it doesn't stop here.

Creators using Heights can also offer full-scale online courses, challenges, projects, and communities - and structure their content into bundles.

Heights Platform's all-in-one approach makes it an ideal platform for creators who want to offer a wide range of products and services, beyond just digital downloads.

No Transaction Fees

As we previously mentioned, Heights Platform is the alternative to Gumroad that does not charge any transaction fees.

Everything you earn from your courses and digital products is 100% yours to keep!

Gumroad takes 10% transaction fees from your earnings, without including standard card processing fees and PayPal charges.

Instead of taking a chunk of your revenue, Heights charges a flat monthly or annual subscription.

You might think that the Gumroad free plan is a more convenient alternative at the beginning - however, as your business grows, the transaction fees will also grow and become much more expensive than the regular Heights subscription.

For example, if you are making $2000 a month, that means you are paying $200 every month to Gumroad!

Create Engaging Online Courses

Online courses in Gumroad are no more than a page of content (similar to a Word document) sold through a paywall.

Needless to say, to make an online course valuable and worth its price, you need more than that.

You need to structure your online course content into lessons and modules, to build a fluid and comprehensive learning experience for your students.

You need gamification tools to make learning fun and incentivize students to make progress.

You need powerful analytics to understand your students' journey and improve your content.

You need tools to engage your students and interact with them.

The list goes on.

When you sell online courses on Heights Platform, you can include assignments, projects, videos, multimedia content, embeds, and file downloads, and create as many lessons and modules as you like.

When you get access to all of these features, you can build an online course you are proud of - and that stands out from the crowd!

With Heights, you are not charging customers to access a simple document: you are selling an amazing, interactive learning experience where students are incentivized to learn and make progress.

Built-In Community

In any online business, it is important to build brand loyalty, foster human connections, and provide value to your customers through an online community.

With Heights Platform, you can build your own branded community right inside your platform.

Create a thriving online community without the need to activate external integration or use third-party tools that add to your expenses.

On Gumroad, you have the option to integrate with a third-party community platform, and that is about it.

Learn more about building and growing an online community:

• Why You Should Build an Online Community of Engaged Customers and How to Do it
• How to Choose the Right Online Community Platform For Your Knowledge Business
• 7 Steps to Revive Your Online Community and Increase Engagement

Gamification Tools

Gamification refers to the application of game design and principles to non-game situations, like educational materials and courses. Its implementation can enhance the learning experience by making it more captivating and satisfying for learners.

Heights Platform is well known for its gamification tools, including the option to reward students with points and badges, create assignments and projects to improve the learning experience and more.

Gumroad does not have any gamification tools or features associated with its courses or digital products.

Website Builder and Marketing Tools

Gumroad storefronts are ok, but they are not comparable to having a full, comprehensive website with multiple pages that reflects your brand and promotes your products.

Heights Platform is the Gumroad alternative that lets you build a fully-customizable website for your business, thanks to our Web Page Builder.

With a customizable website and limitless sales pages, you can display your digital offerings and communicate your purpose to a wider audience - without the hassle of utilizing custom code or paying an extra subscription for web design software.

It is so easy to create your own website in a matter of minutes, thanks to pre-designed templates and a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor.

Learn more about the website builder in Heights Platform: Introducing the Web Page Builder in Heights Platform

Together with the ability to design countless sales pages and a full website, Heights also has its own affiliate program for creators (so your students and customers become your marketing team!) - and you can send email marketing campaigns to your customers or contact them directly from the platform.

Complete Branding Customization

Style customization and branding play an essential role in creating a successful business and selling online courses.

To make your business stand out from the crowd, it is important to build a brand style and be consistent with it and create an online store that reflects your brand.

Heights Platform lets you build a fully customizable platform, with white-label branding options and visual tools to reflect your brand image and colors.

You can edit your program's UI, upload your own logo, connect your custom domain, customize colors, fonts, and much more for your site. Your online course, digital downloads, membership site or coaching program should be a reflection of your brand, which is why you need a platform that gives you full ownership of your content and style.

Gumroad on the other hand does not allow creators to customize the appearance of their pages and the Gumroad branding is always present and visible in any product you sell.

The Best Gumroad Alternative: Heights Platform

Both Gumroad and Heights Platform let creators sell digital products. The difference is that Gumroad offers this one specific thing, and stops there.

Heights Platform is one of the best Gumroad alternatives that empowers you to go beyond simply selling digital products behind a paywall. On Heights, creators can sell digital downloads, build online courses, structure their courses as they wish, set up membership sites, communities, cohort-based courses and much more!

Some of the main reasons why Heights is the best alternative to Gumroad is that Heights does not charge any transaction fees, and you can create comprehensive and engaging online courses, apply gamification tools, set up a community, build your whole website and fully customize the look and feel of your online store.