Show HN: Easyful – A Free Gumroad Alternative | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Easyful – A Free Gumroad Alternative

easyful.com

159 pointsjhartist89 comments

Hi HN,

If you’re selling templates or digital assets online, platforms like Gumroad have a ton of amazing features . . . but they’re also expensive. It’s not uncommon to be paying 10%, 20% or even 30% of your revenue just to host and deliver some digital content to customers.

Instead, we think most creators should own their own Stripe account and use a lightweight fulfillment layer to send customers their orders.

So we built Easyful, a platform built on Stripe to email your content to customers when they buy it. And it’s free!

We’ve been using Easyful ourselves for a few months now. Try it out and let us know what you think!

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Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528

Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011

Tell HN: Stripe killed my music locker service, so I'm open sourcing it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36403607

Don't Use Stripe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34035581

Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271815

Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36967159

Note that half of those submissions were flagged to death. I don't doubt that there are some legitimate stories here, but one of those is a repeated repost with verbatim content from months earlier, and others are very vague about what sort of business they were running. It's become common knowledge that making a big stink on HN can get a lot of attention and sometimes resolve your problems, so even people who were shut down for clear violations of policy or law will try to use HN to get a mob going.

Not that there aren't legitimate problems with Stripe, but the extent of those problems is blown out of proportion if you take all of these complaints at face value.

Seeing the discussions in these submissions doesn't give me that impression.

Instead, I am inclined to think that mass-flagging is being done by Stripe sockpuppets as a means of mitigating negative impact on Stripe's public image.

The person who called out "Don't Use Stripe" [0] tied a very legitimate account to their accusation.

jacquesm is a very prominent user, and called out another one for being too vague, with no reply [1].

The third was clearly selling an NSFW AI service [2] and admitted it.

The other three I'm willing to believe, I'm just cautioning against believing every submission you see.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34036111

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34272248

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36969195

Thanks for diving into the evidence for us. It's an important lesson not to believe everything you read on HN.

Than you for the parent post clarification, but your GP post did NOT have an agnostic tone or focus on the spirit of sober inquiry. Instead, it came across as an admonition. I just wanted to share.

"Not that there aren't legitimate problems with Stripe, but the extent of those problems is blown out of proportion if you take all of these complaints at face value." That conclusion feels a bit like legerdemain, considering that you acknowledge the strength of some of these claims (which are HN only).

It's a bit like you're boxing your argument into: "If there are only seven people dead from mass shootings this year, their importance is blown out of proportion versus much more common preventable causes of death." But in a universe where the only people that get any news coverage for mass shootings are the ones that get posted and upvoted on HN. I hope my point here isn't too oblique.

> Instead, it came across as an admonition.

That's because it was intended to. OP hijacked a Show HN to share a bunch of links with complaints about Stripe. They were so quick to do so that they didn't notice that half their links were dubious. Then this hijacking post becomes pinned to the top with upvotes just like the dubious Stripe posts did before clearer heads prevailed.

HN needs to get out of this habit of accepting people's inflammatory claims at face value, or we're going to rapidly lose credibility and become just another internet outage farm.

---

As far as your specific complaint goes: HN's sense that Stripe can't be trusted comes from the subjective experience of seeing many complaints about Stripe on HN. There are no stats to help us understand the extent of the problem. If a full half of these complaints were dishonest, do you not see how that would skew our collective sense of how likely getting screwed over by Stripe is?

As I said, I'm not trying to discount the experiences of the three stories that OP shared that seem to have been legitimate. What I'm challenging is the idea that everyone should steer clear of Stripe on the basis of a clearly flawed heuristic, as well as the idea that it's okay to hijack a Show HN to push that heuristic on people.

Fair enough and well argued.

I guess I’m just expressing a bit of anxiety towards picking of payment processor, and also wish there were concrete stats on the issue.

Dismissing all claims on the face value of some is also in error. The simple fact that there are so many of these claims, and also given the exact repercussions of those who were in (ToS) error, are enough to recognize a statistically strong weight toward the "do not trust" response which blanket dismissal and acceptance of partial ignorance cannot overcome. The extent to which hidden forces (i.e., "sockpuppets") quash this dialogue further suggests that we're only seeing the tip of this customer-antagonistic iceberg.

While my heuristics says a lot of those deserves bans, where in that process are local law enforcement and court systems involved? It sounds wrong that a Stripe account, AdSense account, these quasi bank accounts used by small businesses and individuals(and criminals) as quasi public utility can be opened and closed by decisions of "the team", by unqualified software engineers and ex-engineer managers, completely unmonitored. The web is not a huge advert or scientific experiment anymore, I mean, it hadn't been for a decade or two, but now it's significantly less so.

This is a problem, but it's not a problem with Stripe, it's a problem with banks in general. Banks use heuristics that are "good enough" to detect fraud and money laundering, and if they do then they'll block you just as surely as Stripe will.

Stripe's processes may very well need improvement, but private fraud teams making important calls is how finance is run everywhere.

agree

you cannot run gumroad like financial transaction business without licence and agreement with stripe. it is bound to be closed down on short notice, and all the earnings will be clawed back.

so don't use this app. period.

Running gumroad and running “as a gumroad customer would” are two different things

Why are these [flagged]

Why not take 1-2% instead of 30? Just what you need to cover the hosting costs. Taking 0% tells users you’ll end up screwing them one way or another in the future.

Good question: because we’re not handling payment processing or anything, just emailing users your content, we think Easyful can be default-free forever. If we get a bunch of usage, we might build some more advanced pro features and sell those features as a paid tier. We’ve had success with that model before.

How do you actually make any money though? It costs you money to provide this service. Where is that coming from?

Two answers:

• The operating costs are very low, since all Easyful does is email your customers your content when they buy it.

• Our team at nicer.io is primarily a product agency, so when we make our own apps like Easyful, SimplePerks and Smallchat, they don't have the pressure to be highly-profitable. We often end up getting good connections, agency customers and referrals from these apps, and keeping them running and supported is pretty low-cost for us.

How do you mail files that are several hundred megabytes in size? Also, you need to store these somewhere, which costs money. I might be wrong, but it seems you missed a few critical parts of why people use Gumroad. You should take a closer look at their audience, there is a sizable segment of people that sell 3D models, textures, etc.

Yeah. And what about analytics and stuff?

Ya.

I have zero intuition why online stores charge 30%. Is that fair?

Should the store's cut go down with more volume?

Or should smaller, younger, lower volume vendors get a better deal?

I have no idea.

So I keep landing on the notion that online market places should be not-for-profit orgs (consortiums?) that are run at cost plus some margin. And then figure out the hosts' cut from there.

You produce the content and provide the marketing. They provide almost everything else for you: the storefront, the billing, the invoicing, charging sales tax/VAT, etc. If you wanted to do it yourself, you'd be in for quite a lot of work, even if you happened to host your own software.

Granted.

Is charging 30% fair?

That depends on how much you value your time you would otherwise spend dealing with a storefront. A lot of creators on Gumroad are relatively small-time, so to them it's probably totally worth it since they would have to spend a disproportionate amount of time dealing with things they are not very good at. I'm quite good with servers, but I'd also have a hard time justifying the time spent on maintaining and updating a webshop software that deals with all the things required. If I was selling 3D assets, I'd pick one of the many fab sites over hosting my own anytime.

Another point to make is the added visibility. ArtStation for example is quite prominent in the art / 3D world, whereas Steam is unavoidable as an indie dev. Itch.io takes a much lower cut, but it doesn't bring in even close to the amount of viewers as Steam does.

Exactly. it's not fair in the sense that platform pricing is not set by an "efficient free market". What you pay for is not the features, it's the visibility. So the pricing of gumroad/apple store/etc is way above their operating costs.

I'd look at it differently: currently running a business, me and my wife are spending a lot more than 30% of our time on non-core activities. If a service would reliably take a chunk of that off of our shoulders, it would absolutely be worth the commission. Especially since there are no fixed costs, no income = no costs.

Thanks for engaging my question.

I now realize I should have been asking if 30% is "reasonable".

For you, absolutely, and I appreciate your explanations.

Nice platform it seems, but I have a couple of questions:

- If it is free, does that make me the product? How will you make money?

- How do you prevent the problems that Flurly had, which led to Stripe closing their account?

Just had a closer look, it seems the second question’s answer is: creators use their own Stripe account, so the problem should not happen here.

Longer answer to your question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37055297

tldr; we might add some paid features in the future but keep the base app free since operating costs are low.

This looks cool, but I'm curious about how taxes work with this setup. From my understanding, Gumroad handles sales tax for you in a number of countries (US and EU at least). Does Easyful do something similar, or is that left up to the user to go through that headache on their own?

Stripe actually handles taxes for you with Payment Links, and Easyful is just a fulfillment layer on top of that.

Check out the Stripe docs page about it: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/paymentlinks

Stripe does not act as Merchant of Record. So it is not directly comparable to Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle.

That's the term/information I was looking for. Thank you

Could you share the implication this?

I’m not an accountant, but I think the distinction is that the MoR will handle both the collection and remittance of tax for you, including filing any necessary paperwork. You get money deposited in your bank account, and you deliver product to customers, but you’re not worried about remitting taxes.

If Stripe collects the tax and sets it aside, that’s helpful, but it still means you have to figure out which jurisdictions you owe tax to, and figure out how to get the taxes delivered and reported to those jurisdictions (“remitted”), which can be a headache, to say the least.

If you're an individual digital creator in, say, South Africa, why would you worry about paying taxes in Norway for $500 that came from customers there?

I mean, big, established companies are a big target. But it doesn't seem that the Norway Revenue Service would spend time finding who's Joe from South Africa who sold a $50 ebook to 10 Norwegians...

"Why not just do tax fraud?"

What is the problem with Gumroad? I only used it as a buyer a few times and this is a couple of years ago. It seemed to me they are on the good side and fair to sellers and buyers? Was I wrong, has it changed or are they still ok?

Gumroad is great! But their pricing model (flat 10%) doesn't make sense for many creators.

We think it's better for most creators to own their own Stripe accounts and use a lightweight fulfillment platform like Easyful instead.

Have you read Sahil Lavingia's blog?

https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting

Is any content in this blog particularly relevant to Easyful's reason for existence or are you just mentioning it because you enjoyed the post?

(I remember reading it when Sahil posted that first, as a fellow bootstrapped tech cofounder but I don't remember anything of note from there to discuss re: Easyful)

Presumably because Easyful seems to be directly comparing itself to Gumroad, which is the subject of the blog post.

thank you for sharing this

Nice project, but this is a bit of a misrepresentation of Gumroad.

The reason you “give up” so much money to them is because they handle VAT, which this service doesn’t seem to do at all.

Stripe by default will not collect and remit VAT.

> because they handle VAT

Not everywhere unfortunately, so I still have to pay attention to it, which I can't so it's a show-stopper for me.

Stripe actually does collect VAT and helps you file and remit. Check out their docs page for doing this with Payment Links, which is what Easyful uses:

https://stripe.com/docs/tax/paymentlinks

Like I said, and the link confirms, it will not by default collect tax.

For that you need to set up Stripe Tax on top of it. Stripe Tax itself also takes a cut from your payment.

It also “helps” you file taxes only by providing the reports you need. You still need to file the reports and each country is different.

Please read the FAQ before this causes you trouble: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/fa q

>> Does Stripe Tax handle remitting and reporting tax, or filing tax returns?

> Stripe Tax doesn’t handle remitting and reporting tax, or filing tax returns. Stripe Tax provides itemized and summarized exports to help users prepare, file, and remit the tax that was automatically calculated and collected. To automate filing in the US, we recommend using TaxJar’s AutoFile solution. In Europe, we recommend using Taxually or Marosa. To get started, visit Taxually’s partner page or Marosa’s partner page.

Disclaimer: I work at Stripe

I won’t use a service like this if it’s free. Without a pricing or business plan I’m worried it will shutdown any moment or doesn’t get maintained anymore. Where do I go if I need support? This doesn’t sound like a long term sustainable business.

We’ve run Smallchat, a default-free saas app, for a few years now, supporting millions of users. Our experience: with low-operating-cost saas apps like this, you can add a paid tier with pro features if you get a lot of traction while keeping the base app free.

With Smallchat, for example, a small percentage of paid users more than covers the operating costs of our mostly-free user base.

What's up with the design? It's really nice, but also very similar to Gumroad's visual language. Not really criticism, just curious about the idea behind it.

Definitely noticed that too. Seems like a cheeky tip of the hat towards Gumroad.

Gumroad's design is itself a reuse of several design trends from 2021-2023. Wondermind is one example of another site using the same aesthetic. https://www.wondermind.com/

Hmm, I get your point but I think it's much closer than Wondermind.

- Layout that uses the full width of the page. - The page is primarily made up of blocks that occupy a single column or two columns. - Large blocks of a primary color - The font used for the logos are quite similar. Not sure what it's called, but they're both some sort of chunky and playful sans with some oversized and/or geometric elements. - Decorative coins featured prominently (G) ($) - Cartoony graphics with a hand-drawn feeling to them. - Graphics poke out of the grid in many places. - Similar navbars

Each point by itself is hardly surprising, most landing pages have some of them, but taken together it seemed like a lot to me :)

Either way, great work and I'd love to try it on my next project <3

How do you handle sales tax across all the jurisdictions for makers, are you a merchant of record like Gumroad?

Good question: we are not a merchant of record, and Easyful doesn’t even process transactions. We’re just a fulfillment layer that plugs into Stripe payment links.

In other words, you just ignore the topic.

I made something similar for selling access to GitHub repos but it didn’t take off. People were hesitant to give a new product like mine access to their repos because we hadn’t built up trust that established brands like gumroad have. Makes it really hard for new players to enter this space. Have you seen similar concerns and how do you address them?

Yeah, I wonder about that. My hope is that other platforms’ fees are high enough to motivate creators to switch, and the transition to Easyful is pretty fast for most users, especially if you already have a Stripe account.

But I guess we’ll see whether we get any traction!

Isn’t it possible to allow access to just the repo you’re selling, instead of all of them?

Yes people had an issue with just that. Some would sell for thousands, so I can understand being cautious about access.

I started making 3D assets in the past year and I have a newfound appreciation just how large these files can be. A single 3D model can easily grow to several hundred megabytes if not optimized properly. With the rise of photogrametry scans you'll have lots of rather large assets.

I'd figure out the business model fast if I was you.

How do you plan to make money?

one way or another, you will pay for it. I'd rather know how much I am paying and pay more, then don't know and keep paying.

I really wish Stripe would just make something like this. Just the bare minimum necessary to host Checkout for products entered in your Stripe dashboard. I wonder if they can’t due to some onerous clause in their agreement with Shopify.

I'm pretty sure they do with Stripe Checkout? https://stripe.com/en-au/payments/checkout

Have you tried Stripe's payment links?

Definitely check them out - they're great. Easyful is just a fulfillment layer that plugs into Stripe payment links for emailing customers your content when they buy something.

It makes. I run my membership program entirely via Stripe's built-in, no-code features: https://manualdousuario.net/apoie/

Have you done a write it up English for how that works? Does stripe send emails and you just have the emails contain the content as attachments or straight text?

When you start competing with your customers, it typically doesn't end well.

They do appear have this with links

Stripe offers revenue share to platforms such as Shopify [1]. Easyful could go this path.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1594805/000119312515...

Good question: we mostly built Easyful to use ourselves, but if it gets a significant of usage we might build some more advanced pro features and sell those features as a paid tier upgrade, while keeping the base app free.

We've had success with that model before with Smallchat, a saas app we launched several years ago, and it's still going strong supporting millions of free users.

With low-operating-cost saas apps, you can get away with offering a pretty generous free tier. A small percentage of paid users can more than pay for your mostly-free user base.

> With low-operating-cost saas apps, you can get away with offering a pretty generous free tier. A small percentage of paid users can more than pay for your mostly-free user base.

Thats good to hear. Congrats. I always wondered do low operating cost SaaS apps reach a point where the interest or subscription(s) for the paid plans outweigh the cost of running the free tier accounts? And how does one tackle that?

Do you have a blog or some stats to look at? I would love to read about this and this mission of yours.

I see many people suggest that there should be a small fee to cover the hosting costs, do you think such tactics lead to the race to bottom scenario where you can't really charge properly for the paid plan as the starter plan itself is under-priced?

What exactly are you using it for yourself?

We started building Easyful while looking for a platform to fulfill orders for Standerd, a Figma UI kit our team uses that we sell:

https://www.standerd.co/

Stripe already has similar. It’s called Payment Links. Extremely easy and they manage all past transactions.

https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links

Easyful is a layer on top of Stripe Payment Links that handles the fulfillment for you. All Easyful users are using Stripe Payment links.

What does fulfilment mean in this case? Digital downloads and the like?

Beautiful lading page and generous app. Thank you for making tools like this that help small-time creators improve their margins :) I used Payhip for my last project but I will bookmark this one to make sure I use it in the future

Exactly how do you plan on making money? From a customer perspective, this is sketchy to me. How do you plan on funding development, paying for customer support, scaling services...etc?

Fyi the floating coins blocks some of the text on mobile.

Is this a point of sales or am I the one selling? If it's not a POS it's not an alternative.

[Edit] Searching the website, it looks like it is not a POS.

On Gumroad there is a Discover section but I failed to find such on Easyful. How do I discover what's there?

Could you look into possibly switching to Adyen or an NMI gateway?

This should be the advice at the top. If you want to be comparable to Gumroad, you're better off using Adyen because they are a Merchant Of Record.

Am I the only one that thinks the blatant copying of even details like the website style, colors and fonts from Gumroad is disrespectful?

What about putting your spin on it?

No thanks. We should be calling this type of thing out.

Does your service support payments with Bitcoin? / Do you plan to add support for paying with Bitcoin?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com