Gumroad vs Polar Fees, Creator Rate Against Developer Rate
A $25 sale costs $4.03 on Gumroad and $1.75 on Polar's free tier. Compare the 12.9% + 80¢ real Gumroad rate, Discover's 30%, and Polar's plan ladder.
Gumroad and Polar both stand between you and global sales tax as merchants of record, and there the resemblance ends. Gumroad is a creator storefront with hosted product pages, the buyer-facing Discover marketplace, memberships, and weekly payouts, priced at an advertised 10% + 50¢ that becomes 12.9% + 80¢ once its separately billed 2.9% + 30¢ card processing is counted, with Discover-sourced sales at a flat 30% and mobile-app sales at 40%. Polar is developer-facing billing infrastructure with an open-source codebase, priced at 5% + 50¢ on its free Starter tier and falling through paid plans to 3.4% + 30¢ at Scale.
The gap is not subtle. A $25 direct sale costs $4.03 on Gumroad and $1.75 on Polar Starter, and a $9 monthly membership renewal loses 21.8% on Gumroad against 10.6% on Polar. What keeps the comparison honest is that the two mostly serve different sellers (courses and ebooks live on Gumroad, SaaS and software licenses on Polar) and Gumroad’s marketplace can send you buyers Polar never will. Run your price through the calculator below. The analysis that follows puts a number on the storefront premium and the point where it stops paying for itself.
Gumroad breakdown
- Base fee (10% + 50¢) $10.50
- Payment processing (2.9% + 30¢) $3.20
Polar.sh breakdown
- Base fee (5% + 50¢) $5.50
| Platform | Fee | Effective rate | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|
 Polar.shMoR Starter (free) | $5.50 | 5.50% | $94.50 |
 GumroadMoR Direct sale (your audience) | $13.70 | 13.70% | $86.30 |
The ranking counts per-transaction cost only. Monthly plan fees, payout fees, and dispute fees are listed separately on each platform page. Rates are verified against official pricing pages, and the sources list the dates.
Every Gumroad vs Polar.sh fee side by side
| Gumroad | Polar.sh | |
|---|---|---|
| Base transaction fee | Direct sale (your audience) 10% + 50¢ + processing Gumroad Discover marketplace 30% iOS/Android app sale 40% | Starter (free) 5% + 50¢ Pro ($20/mo) 3.8% + 40¢ Growth ($100/mo) 3.6% + 35¢ Scale ($400/mo) 3.4% + 30¢ |
| International cards | No surcharge | +1.5% |
| Currency conversion | No surcharge | No surcharge |
| Subscription billing | Included | Included |
| PayPal | Supported (processing fee applies) | Not offered |
| Monthly fee | None | Varies by plan ($0–$400/mo) |
| Payout fees | Weekly payouts to bank or PayPal | $2/month with payouts + 0.25% + 25¢ per payout (0.25–1% FX on non-USD payouts) |
| Dispute / chargeback fee | Not published | $15.00 |
| Sales tax / VAT handling | MoR Gumroad has handled all sales tax worldwide as merchant of record since Jan 2025 | MoR Polar handles global sales tax and VAT as the legal seller |
| Source | Official pricing, last verified 2026-07-10 (Direct-sale processing fees are charged on top of the 10% + 50¢. Confirm in-app) | Official pricing, last verified 2026-07-10 (Plans introduced May 2026. Grandfathered Early Member orgs pay 4% + 40¢ + 0.5% on subscriptions) |
| Platform | $10 sale | $50 sale | $500 sale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gumroad | $2.09 | $7.25 | $65.30 |
| Polar.sh | $1.00 | $3.00 | $25.50 |
Two products, one badge
Gumroad sells an audience machine, with hosted pages, a marketplace, memberships, and a mobile app. Polar sells plumbing, a merchant-of-record checkout you wire into your own product. Both carry the MoR badge (Gumroad since January 2025, Polar from launch), so sales tax and VAT are registered, collected, and remitted by the platform either way. The bills are where they separate. Gumroad’s direct rate is 12.9% + 80¢ once its advertised 10% + 50¢ and its separately billed 2.9% + 30¢ processing are added together. Polar starts at 5% + 50¢ free, and its paid plans buy the rate down as revenue grows, with Pro at $20 a month (3.8% + 40¢), Growth at $100 (3.6% + 35¢), and Scale at $400 (3.4% + 30¢).
The per-sale arithmetic
A $10 product surrenders $2.09 to Gumroad (20.9%) and $1.00 to Polar Starter (10%). At $25 it’s $4.03 against $1.75. A $79 software license costs $10.99 against $4.45, or $3.40 on Pro. The multiple sits between 2.1x and 2.5x across the range, and subscriptions push it wider. Gumroad memberships pay the full 12.9% + 80¢ on every renewal, so a $9 monthly membership loses $1.96 (21.8%) per cycle where Polar takes 95¢ (10.6%), since Polar levies no renewal surcharge on any tier. International cards are Polar’s one surcharge, +1.5% on all plans, and it doesn’t close the gap. A $49 international subscription runs $3.69 on Starter versus $7.12 on Gumroad.
Growth moves one price and not the other
At $4,000 a month (160 sales averaging $25), Gumroad collects $644. Polar Starter collects $280, and Pro collects $216 in transaction fees plus its $20 plan, $236 all-in, a $408 monthly gap that compounds to roughly $4,900 a year. The trajectories diverge from there. Polar’s ladder steps down to 3.4% + 30¢ at scale, but Gumroad’s schedule contains no number below 12.9%, and its only other published rates point upward, to Discover’s 30% and the mobile app’s 40%.
What 30% buys, if it buys anything
Discover is the entire case for paying Gumroad rates. Polar originates zero sales, since nobody browses it looking for something to buy. Discover surfaces products to shoppers and takes 30% of the sales it sources. Treated as acquisition spend, that’s buying revenue at the equivalent of a 3.3x return on ad spend, defensible whenever the sales are genuinely incremental. The failure mode is paying marketplace commission on your own traffic. A creator whose buyers arrive from an email list or YouTube channel is paying storefront prices for plumbing. Developers face an easier call, because Discover’s browsers aren’t shopping for API access or license keys, which prices the channel at roughly nothing for them.
Payouts and the smaller print
Gumroad pays weekly with no payout fee. Polar charges $2 a month plus 0.25% and 25¢ per payout ($14.75 on a $5,000 month) and publishes a $15 dispute fee. None of it moves the ranking. The 7.9-point rate gap between Gumroad direct and Polar’s free tier is the whole story, and it points the same direction at every price and every volume.
Verdict
Sell where your buyers already are. If your product is software, whether SaaS, an API, or a license key, Polar wins on every line. It’s $1.75 versus $4.03 on a $25 sale, no renewal surcharge against Gumroad’s full 12.9% + 80¢ on every membership cycle, and a plan ladder that cuts the rate to 3.4% + 30¢ as revenue grows while Gumroad’s price never falls. If you sell courses, ebooks, or templates and have no audience, Gumroad’s premium is a marketing bet. Discover’s 30% only has to source sales you couldn’t have made, and the hosted storefront means selling without building a site. Creators with their own traffic end up paying marketplace rates for plumbing, and developers get nothing from Discover at all. The honest split is Gumroad for audience-poor creators who value distribution and weekly payouts, and Polar for anyone whose growth its ladder can reward.What’s the best alternative?
Gumroad and Polar.sh aren’t the only two options for this kind of selling. Kelviq, a newer merchant of record, charges 3.5% + 40¢ per sale with no monthly fee (2.9% + 40¢ on your first $5,000). On a $100 domestic sale that works out to $3.90, next to $13.70 on Gumroad and $5.50 on Polar.sh, and the fee includes usage metering and entitlements that SaaS and AI products otherwise build separately. Run your own numbers in the Kelviq fee calculator, or see the direct matchups in Kelviq vs Gumroad and Kelviq vs Polar.sh.