Does anyone use Gumroad for a SaaS business?
Gumroad is great for selling digital products, but it’s also very easy to setup subscriptions. People can subscribe to your service and get a license key, which you can verify inside your application. So instead of using Stripe, I think you could also use Gumroad and it’s probably even easier. I’m wondering if anybody is doing that.
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I do :) https://justsketch.me
Your website is rad...did you design it yourself?
I had bits of inspiration from here and there, but yeah.
Cool! And do you recommend it? And do you experience some limitations compared to for example Stripe?
It's great, to be honest. I've done payment systems and user management multiple times, and it's a headache and a half. Gumroad just works.
I don't need to worry about user accounts, logging in/out, passwords, refunds, etc, etc. It isn't even that much more expensive than Stripe if you pay the monthly fee ($10 per month). I considered "doing it properly" as Gumroad was supposed to be for the MVP only, but I've come to love it's simplicity and robustness.
Awesome, I was thinking the same thing! Thanks for sharing your experience.
On the back of this story, I’ll probably do a service on Gumroad, too.
Same here ! Clever stuff.
In case anyone is still confused about Gumroad terms of use, I've confirmed with the Gumroad team that it is entirely ok to use Gumroad as a payment provider for SaaS businesses.
We are using it for https://www.paritydeals.com/
Hi @jakeprins, I went through the phase of picking a payment solution in 2019 (also for SaaS), contacted many companies in the process.
Gumroad was one of them, they confirmed that they don't have any issues with it and that I can use Gumroad.
Maybe something has changed since then so I would contact them just to make sure. Their support is quite quick so it shouldn't take long.
Also, if you haven't already take into consideration the fact that they take quite a hefty % of your profits.
P.S. In the end I went with a different company, so I've got no experience working with Gumroad.
Thanks for sharing that information!
I think that's against Gumroad terms of use
I looked into it and I don't believe it is against their terms of use. I can't think of a reason they added license key auth otherwise.
from the terms, what you are not allowed to sell in gumroad:
SaaS is, afterall, software as a service :)
maybe its my interpretation, but I would double check with them before risking being blocked out
Yeah, I've sent a support request checking with them.
It's actually an interesting discussion, cause arguably my webapp is an app which is being authenticated by the license key, so it's a product.
I guess it gets a bit unclear when they say "Access to a website", then define service as the following:
The term "service" covers a wide variety of products that can't be sold on Gumroad.
For example, using Gumroad to charge for:
IT repairs or maintenance
Fixing someone's roof or redesigning their website
A consulting fee
I'll update you when they get back to me
Any update from them?
Wow this is an old thread of mine 😄 Yeah, its fine to use it to authenticate your app (or in my case, web app).
I've launched Project Ekalavya on subscription recently and faced no issues as of now.
On the IH Podcast about Ghost, it was suggested you could do the same kind of thing too - ie - use Ghost's membership model as a simple way to pay for SaaS fees.
You can (I plan to at dailytrainingsession.com) but you're currently limited to Ghost's front-end as the payment API is tightly coupled to their front-end handlebars themes. The use cases are a little limited as a result. https://forum.ghost.org/t/membership-with-jamstack/9642 If they move towards developing a decoupled API for payments/members it would be awesome for start-ups building on the JAMstack.
Gumroad takes 10% commission on every transaction which is a headache.
Hi Jake!
I have exactly the same reflexion right now! Any news or feedback you can share ^^? I read the comments. Have you gone with Gumroad?
Yes, I tried out Gumroad and works pretty well! But for building a SaaS, I decided to build a boilerplate that includes Billing with Stripe. Check it out here: https://serverless.page ;)
Hi Jake!
Just wanted to thank you for you reponse and links, it was helpful!
I decided however to go with Stripe. Here is the result if you are interested in: https://app.taskomoro.com/
Cool! Looks good
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.