What You Keep When You Sell a $20 Digital File

Sell the same $20 file in five different places and the amount that reaches you runs from $19.00 down to $7.00. The file does not change. The buyer does not change. Only the fee page changes.

What each platform takes out of a $20 sale

Two lines in that table need reading twice.

The Payhip figure is the best of the five and it is also the least complete. Payhip does not process the payment; the money goes straight to your own Stripe or PayPal account at the moment of purchase, and Payhip's own billing page says that PayPal and Stripe will still charge their transaction fees. So $19.00 is what Payhip leaves, not what lands. Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy both act as merchant of record, so their percentages already include card processing.

The Amazon line is the one almost nobody puts on the same page as the others.

The Amazon number that is not 70%

Amazon KDP is sold on a 70% royalty, and 70% is a real number. It is just conditional in two ways at once.

The first condition is price. The 70% option is available only on a list price between $2.99 and $12.99 on Amazon.com. That ceiling moved on 7 July 2026, up from the $2.99 to $9.99 band that had stood since 2007. Set your price outside it and the platform does not warn you and does not refuse you: it simply pays the other rate. The 35% option is legal from $0.99 up to $200.00, so a $20 file lists happily and earns 35% of it.

That is the trap. On the same $20 order, a book at $12.99 would have paid 70% of $12.99, which is $9.09. Priced at $20 it pays 35% of $20, which is $7.00. You raised the price by seven dollars and lowered the royalty by two.

The second condition is geography. The 70% rate applies only to buyers in certain territories, and for Brazil, Japan, Mexico and India the book must also be enrolled in KDP Select before it qualifies at all. A sale to a reader outside those lines pays the lower rate no matter what you priced it at, so your average royalty is not a number you set, it is a number your readers decide.

Against that, the delivery cost people worry about is noise. It averages $0.06 a unit and only applies on the 70% option.

Free to open, not free to run

All four of these let you open a store for nothing. Payhip's Free Forever plan is $0 a month with unlimited products. Lemon Squeezy is $0 a month with no card and no contract. Gumroad has no monthly or annual fee. Amazon KDP charges nothing to publish.

Which means the entry price tells you nothing at all, and the per-sale rate tells you everything. The one exception worth doing the arithmetic on is Payhip's ladder: the Plus plan is $29 a month and drops the fee from 5% to 2%, and the Pro plan is $99 a month with no Payhip fee. Three points of fee saved has to cover $29, so Plus starts paying for itself somewhere around $967 of monthly sales. Below that the free plan wins, and the upgrade prompt is just a prompt.

Gumroad has a ladder of its own, running the other way. Sell through your own link and the cut is 10% plus $0.50. Let Gumroad's Discover marketplace introduce the buyer and the cut is 30% on that transaction. If you are running your own list, sending it to a Discover link rather than a direct one costs you $3.50 on every $20 sale for a customer you already had.

A sale is not a payout

Payhip has no payout cycle at all, because the money never sits with Payhip. Lemon Squeezy holds net sales for 13 days, releases on the 14th and 28th, then takes another 1 to 5 days to reach a bank, and holds anything under $50 until the balance clears that threshold. Amazon KDP pays monthly, roughly 60 days after the sale month closes, and 90 days on Expanded Distribution, with no minimum on direct deposit but a 100 USD floor on wire and cheque.

Gumroad publishes its floor, just not where you would look for it. The pricing page, the terms and the privacy policy say nothing about a minimum. The help centre does, and it is $100, with higher minimums in local currency across a long list of countries. What the terms do spell out is the reserve: once a seller's refund rate passes 15%, Gumroad holds back 25% of pending funds for 90 days on a rolling basis.

Whether you can take the buyers with you

The file is portable. Everyone can move a PDF. The buyer list is the actual asset, and this is where the four separate hardest.

Payhip exports the full customer list to CSV with one button in the dashboard. It will also serve the store under a domain you own, but that is an optional extra you have to set up: the help page says plainly that it is not required to connect a domain to use Payhip, so the address in your customers' bookmarks is only yours if you went and made it yours. Lemon Squeezy holds the data inside the account, and the terms are explicit that after termination there is no access to the service or the data in it, so the export window closes exactly when you most want it open. Amazon KDP is the clearest of all: you may sell the manuscript elsewhere under a nonexclusive licence, but Amazon owns all customer data and no reader list travels with you.

What ends it

Every one of them can close you. Gumroad may halt sales and suspend or terminate an account at any time, in its sole discretion, without cause or notice. Payhip warns that selling banned content risks permanent deletion of the account without prior notice. Amazon may suspend or terminate whenever it has concerns, and termination for breach forfeits unpaid royalties. Lemon Squeezy's version of the risk is structural rather than punitive: store, checkout, customer list and payouts all sit with one company, now trading as Link, LLC.

What to do before you pick one

Write your price down first. If it is above $12.99, Amazon KDP is paying you 35% and the platform is not the cheapest place to sell that file, it is the most expensive by a wide margin. If it is $12.99 or under and you want Amazon's search traffic, the royalty gap closes and the calculation changes completely.

Then export your customer list this week, whichever platform you are on. The people who bought the first file are how the second one sells, and on one of these four they are not yours to keep.