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Sales and marketing SaaS platforms

· Tycho

This is an overview of sales and marketing platforms for selling mostly digital goods, which, outside handling payments, also provide tools for building store frontends, email marketing and other promotional and sales activities.

In the light of the very popular Gumroad their decision to up their fee to 10% + transaction fees (https://help.gumroad.com/article/66-gumroads-fees) I assume the rest of these will see a nice influx of new members.

These are all Merchant of Record (MoR) companies.

Gumroad

This is one of the more popular ones which many people use as de-facto platform when selling ebooks, SaaS and other products. They provide many features like worldwide payment handling (including VAT handling for the EU), website building, storefronts, email marketing (with list segmenting) and more without having to bring your own.

Even with the 10% new fee, this platform is still quite attractive because of all the features, reputation and unlimited subscriber email marketing. Most other platforms ask extra when your email subscribers go over a certain threshold; Gumroad does not.

Website: https://gumroad.com Fees: flat 10% + transaction fees

Lemon Squeezy

Lemon Squeezy offers advanced tools like Gumroad to build a complete payment and marketing experience for SaaS companies and digital downloads; they handle worldwide payments, subscriptions, taxes (including EU VAT tax), fraud prevention, license key management, checkout forms, storefronts, email marketing, coupon codes, bundles/upselling and real-time tracking and insights.

Besides that, they have a comprehensive developer API to integrate it with other SaaS products.

A comprehensive package for a very low flat fee, with the caveat that email marketing spending is separate from the flat fee over 500 subscribers. So depending on the number of subscribers in the business, Gumroad might be a better choice; for instance, B2C might have millions of the subscribers vs B2B.

Website: https://www.lemonsqueezy.com Fees: flat 5%+50¢ for < 500 email subscribers, after that it goes up with a few $ per 500 subscribers more.

Paddle

Paddle is mostly focused on SaaS sales and tax compliance; they offer worldwide playment handling (including VAT for the EU), tax compliance, subscriptions, invoicing, fraud protection and advanced reporting and more.

However, outside that, they don’t offer tools like email marketing; those would need to be externally sourced at providers like MailChimp or SendInBlue.

Paddle is very convenient if you have the rest of your business already set up and ready to go and you need (advanced) payments.

Website: https://www.paddle.com Fees: flat 5% + 50¢

FastSpring

Fastspring is, again, a mostly one-stop-shop solution for payments, subscriptions, invoices, tax handing and analytics. They don’t provide tools for anything else, but they are a very reputable organization. So reputable they don’t publish the pricing on their website.

The below fees are from Google, but you need to contact them for pricing information (annoying).

They feature great API’s for integrations.

Website: https://fastspring.com Fees: flat 8.9% OR flat 5.9%+95¢

Flurly

A platform and marketplace made by and for makers and the cheapest on this list, depending on what you need. They handle payments via Stripe, so that’s international (no mention of tax handling though), the process of getting started is incredibly simple, you can do collaborations and, as one of the few, they have affiliate programs.

They don’t offer the further advanced tools many of the others offer, but if those are not in your requirements, then this is seems a good new player. They are also a marketplace (like Gumroad), but not sure how many people find products via them directly.

Website: https://flurly.com Fees: flat 1% + stripe fees

Sellix

Platform to sell any kind of digital goods online, including ebooks + SaaS products. It seems to be rather cryptocurrency oriented (which luckily they accept themselves as well), which could be interesting to get into new markets with. They handle payments with cryptocurrency and fiat, storefronts, websites, advanced integrations (Zapier, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Google Analytics etc), support tickets and more.

Website: https://sellix.io/fees Fees: E0-E199/mo depending on required features + transaction fees Transaction fees overview: https://sellix.io/fees

Mentions

Some others can be used for this purpose which I just leave here in case it helps anyone. Some might not be merchant of record.

  • https://paperform.co/ - PaperForm is a form creator and integration platform which seems pretty advanced and seems (but I cannot find detailed information) to be MoR if you use Stripe. Fees are $24-$159/mo based on features required
  • https://prodbump.com/ - Simple to get started but you have to bring your own Stripe (not MoR). Flat fee of 1%+25¢
  • https://dash.whop.com - Marketplace with tools to start selling and take payments (including crypto); found it hard to understand what’s on offer. Flat fee of 3%.
  • https://payproglobal.com/pricing - this one is actively advertising as Gumroad alternative; I cannot see if it’s competitive as there is no pricing on their site, but it also lacks the completeness of tooling that Gumroad provides