Payhip

Payhip is a free-to-start ecommerce platform for selling digital downloads, online courses, memberships, coaching and physical products from a single storefront. It has been operating since 2011 and has stayed deliberately small and focused, building a reputation among self-published authors, designers, musicians, teachers, developers and photographers as the low-friction alternative to bigger platforms. The pitch is simple: unlimited products and unlimited revenue on the free plan, a working storefront with a custom domain, and a percentage of each sale as the price of that freedom.

Sellers get a store builder rather than just a checkout link. A Payhip store has a home page, product pages, category pages, an about page and a blog, all editable through a section-based editor with theme choices, color and font controls, and custom CSS. A custom domain can be connected on any plan including the free one, and Payhip handles SSL. Products can be arranged into collections, and the storefront is responsive by default. That places Payhip above Gumroad and SendOwl in store presentation and below Shopify and Squarespace in design depth.

Digital product delivery is the core function. Files of any type can be attached to a product, with delivery on payment, download limits, expiry windows and optional PDF stamping that prints the buyer's details onto each page to discourage file sharing. Video can be streamed instead of offered as a download. Software sellers can generate and assign license keys. Products can be priced fixed, set to pay-what-you-want with a minimum, or offered free as a lead magnet in exchange for an email address.

Courses are a first-class product type rather than a bundle of files. A course contains sections and lessons, and lessons can hold video, text, embedded content, downloadable resources and quizzes. Lessons can be released all at once, dripped on a schedule from the purchase date or from a fixed date, or gated behind completion of the previous lesson. Students get their own dashboard with progress tracking. This covers most of what a self-paced creator needs without paying for a dedicated course platform, though it lacks cohort features, live sessions, instructor-reviewed assignments and certificates.

Memberships run on recurring billing with tiers defined by the seller. Each tier can gate specific products, courses or content, and Payhip manages the billing cycle, retries, cancellations and downgrades. Coaching products sell bookable time. Physical products are supported with inventory counts, variants, shipping rates by region and weight, and order management, which makes Payhip usable for a small merchandise or print operation running alongside a digital catalog.

Checkout accepts cards through Stripe and payments through PayPal, with Apple Pay and Google Pay available where the connected account supports them. Sellers are paid directly into their own Stripe or PayPal account rather than waiting for a platform payout cycle, which is a meaningful difference from marketplace-style platforms that hold funds. Payhip also acts as the merchant of record for VAT purposes on digital goods, calculating and remitting European Union and United Kingdom VAT on the seller's behalf and providing the corresponding invoices. That is the feature which most often decides the choice between Payhip and a self-hosted cart, because handling VAT as an individual seller otherwise means registering, filing and paying in foreign jurisdictions.

Marketing tooling is built in rather than bolted on. Sellers create coupons with percentage or fixed discounts, usage limits and expiry dates. Cross-sell and upsell offers can be attached to products, and order bumps appear at checkout. Every customer is stored with purchase history and can be tagged, and Payhip includes email tools for sending to those lists alongside integrations with Mailchimp, MailerLite, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, AWeber and Constant Contact. An affiliate system lets a seller recruit affiliates, set commission rates per product, generate tracking links and pay out automatically. Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics can be added for conversion tracking, and product pages expose editable SEO titles and descriptions with automatic sitemaps.

The pricing model is the clearest part of the product. The Free Forever plan has no monthly cost, no product limit and no revenue limit, and charges a 5 percent transaction fee on each sale on top of Stripe or PayPal processing fees. The Plus plan costs $29 per month and lowers that transaction fee to 2 percent. The Pro plan costs $99 per month and removes the transaction fee entirely. Feature access is broad across tiers, with the differences concentrated in the fee rate and a small number of advanced options, so the decision is mostly a break-even calculation. A seller doing roughly $1,000 a month saves about $30 on fees with Plus, which is close to the subscription cost, and Pro starts to pay off well above that. The percentages and prices have been revised over the years, so current figures should be confirmed on the Payhip pricing page.

Limitations are worth naming. Design flexibility is real but shallow next to a full site builder, and there is no app marketplace, so extending behavior means custom CSS, the API or an integration from the supported list. Analytics report sales, traffic and conversion but not much beyond that. Multi-currency display is available, yet pricing and tax handling are oriented around a single base currency and the seller's Stripe or PayPal account country. There is no native point of sale, no wholesale or customer-group pricing, no depth of multi-user staff permissions, and no built-in support for subscriptions on physical products. The team is small, which means feature requests move slowly and support is email-based.

Payhip fits an individual creator or a two-person business selling ebooks, presets, sample packs, sewing patterns, templates, fonts, courses, coaching, memberships, software or a small line of physical goods. It fits anyone who wants to start selling today with no fixed cost and no tax registration work. It fits sellers in the middle range who are large enough that a double-digit flat marketplace fee hurts but too small to justify a hosted platform plus an accountant. It does not fit a physical-products business with a large catalog, complex shipping rules or retail locations, and it does not fit an established brand needing a fully custom storefront, a large extension ecosystem or multi-team permissions.

Against alternatives, Payhip's closest rival is Gumroad, which also handles tax as merchant of record but charges a higher flat rate and offers less storefront control. Ko-fi and Buy Me a Coffee are cheaper for donations and light memberships but weaker for courses and digital delivery. SendOwl provides a cart with no revenue share on paid plans but no store design and no VAT handling. Shopify costs a monthly subscription plus a transaction fee unless Shopify Payments is used, offers far more capability, and leaves VAT to the seller or to an app. Big Cartel is cheaper for a small physical catalog but takes on none of the tax work. For a solo creator who wants a real store, courses, memberships and someone else handling European VAT, Payhip is usually the cheapest credible option available, and its free tier makes trying it free in the strictest sense.