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I just launched Flurly - enabling online sellers to keep 99.9% of their sales.

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a platform to allow anyone to affordably sell any digital product online. In particular, Flurly only charges 0.1% of each transaction, which is 50x cheaper than competitors like Gumroad.

You can check out flurly here: https://flurly.com

Some may wonder how I plan to make money on this. It's a fair question. My current plan boils down to two key factors:

  1. Cost efficiency. By utilizing technology platforms like Stripe/Firebase/Vercel, I can amortize the cost. Or in other words my costs grow with revenue/usage. This way, I don't need to buy physical hardware servers, or negotiate deals with banks or write my own database. Also since it's just me, I don't need to pay for employee health insurance, benefits, etc.

  2. Volume. Hopefully by lowering the cost of doing commerce, more people will buy and sell, increasing the overall volume of commerce. Since the commission is on the overall volume, hopefully I can recoup some revenue/profits that way.

LMK if you run into any issues and I'll look into it right away

Thanks!

  1. 8

    Hi Christina,

    (I work for Gumroad, this post is in my personal capacity as an individual)

    I REALLY appreciate that the price comparison page says "Additionally, Gumroad takes between 0.6% to 5.6% of each transaction excluding payment processing fees. Flurly only takes 0.1%." Some of our competitors conveniently forget to exclude payment processing fees when making the comparison. Thank you for being truthful in your advertising.

    It is a little weird to say "good luck" to a direct competitor, but good luck. It is a tough market and handling behind-the-scenes complexity is about 100 times harder than I imagined before joining Gumroad. But, the creator economy is just getting started, and it is a rising tide that can lift many boats.

    1. 1

      Thanks you Philip! Indeed, it's a very big market and I believe a bit of friendly competition is always a net good for consumers. Best of luck to you and the team at Gumroad as well! The odds are certainly in your favor :)

  2. 1

    I like the simplicity.
    Some thoughts - How much do your customers care about the cost? Suppose an average user sells on average 100 bucks a month. You 3.9% fee is about $4 bucks. A 8.6% fee is about 8.6 bucks. How much do customers care about that 5 dollars difference?
    I looked at Sahil's Nov update and he made 920K revenue and his COG was 570K. Other costs were around 300K and he ended up with about 60K in profits. Suppose you have the same cost structure, won't you fees put you under?
    I think that customers who have really high transaction values in the tens of thousands would care about the fees. But those who do small amounts might not even notice them.

    Wishing you all the best!

  3. 1

    Love the simplicity and clarity of the site! I've been thinking about gifs as well to show some of the features of my own project. Glad to see how well it can be done!

    And super cool product. I love the idea of being able to keep costs low by managing the size of the team.

  4. 1

    Does Flurly also handle VAT?

    1. 1

      Not at the moment but on the roadmap!

  5. 1

    0.1% is indeed a lot less than what the competition charges. That said, here are some remarks:

    1. I don't think 0.1% is profitable for you. You'll earn 10 cents for every $100 sold.
    2. Your tagline is a bit misleading, considering there is also the 2.9% Stripe charge.
    3. It seems to me you're only linking to the Stripe checkout page? Why would I use your service as opposed to create a checkout link and use that directly?
    1. 1
      1. It's certainly tight, but I believe it can work at scale.
      2. Fair point. Let me see what I can do. Open to any suggestions as well :)
      3. For all the other things - hosting a storefront, management of users, upload/download/compression of files, customized email receipts, etc. etc.
  6. 1

    Interesting! Would be very easy for a competitor to swoop in & lower their fees though to put you out of business. Just a thought. One moat could be developing the sort of community Gumroad has which attracts & keeps creators

    1. 1

      Definitely. But I think the key to winning is underlying cost structure. Flurly is a huge bet that services like Stripe/Vercel/Firebase fundamentally change the cost structure of running platforms. If that assumption proves true, it could be truly competitive edge when it comes to unit economics.

  7. 1

    Interesting, so do you just pay the remaining percentage fee that stripe charges? If that's the case I don't see how you could ever profit because the more successful a business is using your product the more costly it is to you as opposed to reducing costs by volume that most models use. Either way a great idea and I also thought the 2.9 standard fee was too steep, good luck!

    1. 2

      That's right. The 0.1% is in addition to the (2.9% + 30c) stripe charges. I'll need to rework some of the marketing lingo.

    2. 2

      He's still chargine a 2.9 payment processing fee though, or am I missing something?

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