Platform fees: costing a percentage per year
Platform fee arithmetic for sellers: the method for turning a percentage per sale into a yearly figure from your own numbers.
gumroad taking percentage every sale is a search with a feeling in it. Somebody has just looked at a payout, done the subtraction, and wanted to know whether that is normal and what it adds up to over a year.
This page does not print a figure. Percentages and fixed fees on selling platforms change, and a number typed into a guide is a number that will be wrong at some point without telling anybody. What this page gives you instead is the method, so you can do the sum yourself with today's published rates and your own sales -- and repeat it next year in four minutes.
Step one: write down what the platform publishes, with its date
Open the platform's own pricing or fees page and copy out three things exactly as written:
The percentage taken per sale. Note whether it is charged on the gross amount, the amount after tax, or the amount after a discount, because those are three different bases and the difference is not small.
The fixed amount per transaction, if there is one. Fixed fees hurt small orders disproportionately, which matters enormously if your average order is low.
Everything conditional. A different rate for a first sale, a discovery or marketplace rate, a payout fee, a currency conversion spread, a minimum. Platforms rarely have one number.
Write the date you read the page next to each one. This is the step people skip and it is the step that makes the answer re-checkable a year later.
Step two: your own two numbers
Your sales total for the period, at the same base the percentage is charged on. If the percentage is taken on gross, use gross.
Your number of transactions, which is what the fixed fee multiplies.
Both come from your own records, and both are things only you can supply. No page can tell you what they are.
Step three: the arithmetic
The percentage component is your sales total multiplied by the published rate. The fixed component is the per-transaction amount multiplied by your number of transactions. Add them, and add every conditional fee that applied. That total is what the platform cost you for that period.
Two refinements are worth the extra minute. Divide the total by your number of transactions to get the fee per order, which is the figure that tells you whether your pricing survives the platform. And run the same calculation with next year's expected volume rather than last year's, because a percentage grows with you while a licence does not.
Step four: the comparison that is actually fair
Set that annual figure against the cost of selling the same product from your own site. The honest version of that side is not zero:
A payment provider still takes a cut. Selling from your own storefront means a processor or a merchant of record, and they charge too. Their rate is usually lower than a marketplace's total, and it is still a number to read from their own page and date.
Hosting. Small, and real.
Your time. Setting up a storefront once, and maintaining it.
What a marketplace gives you that your own site does not. Discovery, in some cases. Tax handling and remittance, in some cases. Those have value, and pretending otherwise makes the comparison useless.
What a one-time licence changes is which of these grows. A platform percentage scales with every sale forever; a bought copy of a storefront does not. Whether that trade favours you depends on volume, and the method above is how you find out rather than guess.
Where the owned side sits
Deliora is the storefront half of that comparison: licence-key delivery for digital downloads, with keys carrying per-domain activation limits, download links that expire, and files kept outside the web root. Payment still runs through a merchant of record or a processor redirect -- there is deliberately no card handling on your box -- but the customer list, the order history and the download records are yours, on your server, where no risk team can suspend them.
Try the Deliora demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
Questions people ask
Why does this page not just print the percentage? Because it would be a figure with no mechanism to notice it changing. The platform's own page is the authority; read it there and write down the date.
Does selling from my own site make the fees disappear? No. A processor or merchant of record still charges. The difference is usually the size of the cut and who holds the customer relationship, not the existence of a fee.
What is the fastest sanity check? Fee total divided by number of orders. If the fee per order is a meaningful fraction of your price, the platform is a pricing decision rather than a convenience.
Where to look next
The product page is Deliora, with its feature record and its limits stated by the product itself. The alternatives page covers the platform this search names, another and a third cover two more, and the side-by-side sets them next to each other. For the published rates and their read dates, read the observatory: every figure there is quoted verbatim beside the date it was read and a link to the page it came from. Prices are on the observatory; read them on the date shown there.