A $20 File Pays You $19 at Payhip and $7 at Amazon. List It Where the Money Stays Yours

Why this pays

The buyer pays $20 in all four places. What comes back to you is decided by which page you listed on and, in one case, what number you typed in the price box.

The spread is $12.00 on a $20 sale, before a single word of marketing. And the store that keeps the most is also the one with no payout cycle at all: Payhip sends the buyer's money to your own PayPal or Stripe at the time of purchase. The play is to put the file where $19 stays yours, price it where the fee table rewards it, and keep the buyer list on your own disk so the store is never the only copy.

The play, in three lines

1. Connect PayPal or Stripe on Payhip first, then upload the file, set the price, make it Visible: $19.00 of every $20, arriving with the sale.
2. If the same file is a book, list it on Amazon KDP too, priced at $12.99 or under so it earns 70% instead of 35%.
3. Export the customer list on the day of the first sale and on the first of every month, because two of the four stores keep the list when the account goes.

The path above walks every click. What follows is the reasoning behind each step and the numbers you quote from.

Where the money comes from

• Your own audience, through your own link. The cheapest buyer there is: 5% at Payhip, 5% + 50c at Lemon Squeezy, 10% + $0.50 at Gumroad. Every reader you send to your own page is a sale at the low rate.
• Gumroad's Discover marketplace. A stranger who finds you inside Gumroad costs 30%, three times the rate on a buyer you brought yourself. Useful for the first sales, expensive as a habit.
• Amazon readers. The biggest pool and the least of it comes back: 35% at $20, 70% only inside the $2.99 to $12.99 band, and Amazon owns all customer data, so none of them become your list.

The pain you are selling the cure for

The buyer wants the file now, on the device in their hand, paid for in one click with a card they already use, and a download that does not break. They do not care which store it sits on. Every one of the four handles that. What they cannot see is the fee table behind the buy button, and that table is where a $20 file quietly becomes $7. Nobody who sells files for a living argues about it; they read it once and list accordingly.

Step one: the $20 through each table

• Payhip's Free Forever plan: $0 a month, all features, unlimited products, 5% on every transaction; the billing page says plainly that PayPal and Stripe still charge their own fees on top. Plus at $29 a month cuts the fee to 2%; Pro at $99 removes it.
• Lemon Squeezy: free to open, no card, no contract; 5% + 50c per sale, plus 1.5% for international cards, 1.5% for PayPal, 0.5% for subscriptions.
• Gumroad: no monthly fee; 10% + $0.50 through your own profile or links; 30% when a new customer finds you through Discover.
• Amazon KDP: free to publish, no listing fee, and 35% on an ebook listed at $20.
• The first chart above is this list as shares of the price: 95%, 92.5%, 87.5%, 70%, 35%.

Step two: the store, with the processor first

• On Payhip: Account, Settings, Payment Details, link PayPal or Stripe. Then Products, Add new product, Digital Product: upload with the Upload product file button, each file up to 5GB; title, price, cover image, description; Visible. A plus after the price, 5+, sets pay-what-you-want with a floor.
• The buyer's money goes to your processor at the time of purchase. There is nothing to wait for and nothing for Payhip to hold.
• Gumroad's page is the same shape: New product on the Products dashboard, a type, a price from free to USD 5,000 with the same plus, files and pages on the Content tab, publish.
• PayPal and Stripe do not receive in your country: the digital-files guide connects one of Payhip's other processors on the same screen.

Step three: the Amazon number that is not 70%

• The 70% royalty option is available only at a list price of $2.99 to $12.99 on Amazon.com, a band widened from $2.99 to $9.99 on 7 July 2026, and only on purchases by customers in certain territories; for Brazil, Japan, Mexico and India the book must also be enrolled in KDP Select.
• Outside the band the only rate offered is 35%. The 35% option runs from $0.99 for a file under 3 megabytes up to a $200.00 maximum, so a $20 ebook is perfectly legal to list and pays $7.00.
• Delivery costs on the 70% option are charged per sale, averaging $0.06 a unit, and vary with file size.
• The decision is a price. At $12.99 the same book pays about $9 after delivery; at $20 it pays $7 and looks more expensive. Type the number knowing which side of $12.99 it is on.

The floor you have to reach

• Payhip holds nothing, so there is no floor.
• Lemon Squeezy releases money at a $50 minimum; below it the balance stays Pending and rolls into the next cycle. Three $20 sales.
• Gumroad needs a $100 USD balance, with higher local minimums in a long list of countries. Five sales.
• KDP has no minimum on direct deposit; wire and cheque both need 100 USD on Amazon.com or 100 EUR in the EU; Japan is wire only at 10,000 JPY with no cheque at all.

The days between the sale and the money

• Payhip: the same day, because the buyer paid your processor.
• Lemon Squeezy: net sales are held 13 days and released on the 14th and 28th of the month, then 1 to 5 days more to reach the bank.
• Gumroad: no fixed payout schedule in the terms; above a 15% refund rate it reserves 25% of a seller's pending funds for 90 days on a rolling basis.
• KDP: monthly, roughly 60 days after the close of the sale month, and 90 days for Expanded Distribution.

Whether you can take the buyers with you

The second chart above lines up the days; this is the list. Payhip exports the full customer list to CSV from the admin dashboard with one Export button, and connecting your own domain is optional, not required. Lemon Squeezy's export window closes with the account: after termination there is no access to the service or the data stored in it, and store, checkout, customer list and payouts all sit with one entity, now trading as Link, LLC. On KDP the manuscript can be sold elsewhere under a nonexclusive licence, but no reader list travels, because Amazon owns all customer data. The habit that fixes all three: export on the day of the first sale, and on the first of every month after, to a folder that is not the platform.

What ends it

• Payhip: selling banned content risks the account being permanently deleted without prior notice.
• Lemon Squeezy: one vendor holds everything, and the export ends when the account does.
• Gumroad: it may halt sales and suspend or terminate an account at any time, in its sole discretion, without cause or notice.
• KDP: Amazon may terminate or suspend the account at any time if it has concerns with it, and termination for breach forfeits unpaid royalties.
• None of these is a reason not to list. All of them are the reason the list lives on your disk and the file lives in more than one store.

What to do today

1. Run the table above on your actual price.
2. Connect PayPal or Stripe on Payhip, upload the file, make it Visible.
3. If it is a book, decide which side of $12.99 it lives on before you open KDP.
4. Export the customer list the first time it has a name in it.