Sellfy’s headline is the kind that stops a creator mid-scroll: 0% transaction fees on every plan. No percentage skimmed off each sale, no matter whether you sell a $5 preset pack or a $200 video course. For anyone who has watched a percentage-based platform take a tenth of every order, that sounds like the end of the fee conversation.
It is not the end. It is the beginning of a different conversation, about a cap. Sellfy charges a flat monthly subscription instead of a per-sale cut, and each plan caps how much you can sell in a year: $10,000 on Starter, $50,000 on Business, and $200,000 on Premium. Cross the cap without upgrading and Sellfy may charge a 2% overage fee on the excess. The real question for a seller in 2026 is therefore not “is 0% good?” — it obviously is — but “at my sales volume, does a flat fee plus a cap beat a percentage fee with no cap?” This article answers that with current 2026 prices, worked math at real sales levels, and a direct comparison against Gumroad, Payhip, and Lemon Squeezy.
The direct answer: Sellfy’s 2026 plans
Sellfy sells three plans, all with 0% platform transaction fees, unlimited products, and a 14-day free trial. There is no free plan. Prices checked against Sellfy’s pricing page and multiple October 2026 comparisons agree on these figures:
| Plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing | Annual sales cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $29/month | $22/month ($264/year) | $10,000 |
| Business | $79/month | $59/month ($708/year) | $50,000 |
| Premium | $159/month | $119/month ($1,428/year) | $200,000 |
Two costs sit outside that table and apply on every plan. First, payment processing: Stripe or PayPal still charge their own fee, typically around 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, and Sellfy quotes that rate itself. “0% transaction fee” means 0% to Sellfy, not 0% total. Second, tax: Sellfy is not the merchant of record, so you are. Sellfy provides advanced VAT and tax settings, but collecting, filing, and remitting sales tax and VAT is your job. That distinction matters more than most sellers expect, and we will come back to it.
File limits also scale by plan: a single digital product can hold up to 50 files, with maximum file sizes of 10 GB on Starter, 15 GB on Business, and 20 GB on Premium. For most ebook, template, preset, and music sellers that is generous. For a seller shipping multi-gigabyte video courses, the Premium tier’s 20 GB ceiling is the one to check before committing.
The cap, translated into monthly sales
Annual caps are easy to misread, because nobody thinks in annual totals when they are checking a dashboard in February. Translated into steady monthly sales, the caps look like this:
| Plan | Annual cap | Steady monthly equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $10,000 | about $833/month |
| Business | $50,000 | about $4,167/month |
| Premium | $200,000 | about $16,667/month |
That translation changes the decision. Starter is not a “small seller” plan in the abstract; it is a plan for a seller doing under $833 a month on average. A creator who has one good launch month at $2,000 and eleven quiet months at $300 is fine — the cap counts the year, not the month. A creator doing a steady $1,200 a month will cross Starter’s cap in about eight and a half months, and then faces the upgrade-or-overage choice for the rest of the year.
The overage rule deserves precise wording, because sources describe it two ways. Sellfy’s FAQ says it may start charging a 2% overage fee on sales above the cap, while some versions of its pricing page describe the caps as soft, with an expectation to upgrade rather than a forced cutoff. The safe way to plan is to treat the cap as a real cost boundary: budget either the upgrade to the next tier or 2% on everything above the cap, whichever is cheaper for your volume, and do not build a business model that depends on the cap never being enforced.
The break-even math: a $25 product, four sales levels
Percentages and flat fees only become comparable when you run them through the same product at the same volume. Take a $25 digital product, sold through a seller’s own traffic (not a marketplace), with card processing at 2.9% plus $0.30 per sale — about $1.03 per $25 order — kept constant across platforms so the comparison is honest.
First, the platform fee alone, before processing:
| Monthly sales | Sellfy Starter (annual billing) | Gumroad direct (10% + $0.50) | Payhip Free (5%) | Lemon Squeezy (5% + $0.50) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $250 (10 sales) | $22 | $30 | $12.50 | $17.50 |
| $500 (20 sales) | $22 | $60 | $25 | $35 |
| $1,000 (40 sales) | $22 | $120 | $50 | $70 |
| $2,500 (100 sales) | $22 | $300 | $125 | $175 |
Add the same $1.03 processing per sale to every column and the ranking does not change, because processing is identical everywhere. The crossover points fall out of the table cleanly. Against Gumroad’s 10% plus $0.50, Sellfy Starter at $22 a month breaks even at roughly $200 a month in sales — below that, Gumroad’s zero monthly fee wins; above it, Sellfy pulls away fast, and by $1,000 a month the gap is nearly $100 a month, or about $1,176 a year. Against Payhip Free at 5%, the crossover is higher, around $440 a month. Against Lemon Squeezy at 5% plus $0.50, it sits near $320 a month.
Now run the same product at the plan boundaries. A seller doing $800 a month — $9,600 a year, just inside Starter’s cap — pays $264 a year on Sellfy’s annual plan. On Gumroad, that same $9,600 costs about $1,152 in platform fees (10% plus $0.50 across 384 sales). On Payhip Free, about $480. Sellfy wins by a wide margin at that level, and it wins by more as volume grows, right up to the cap.
The story flips at the edges, and the edges are where sellers get hurt. A seller doing $150 a month pays $22 a month to Sellfy for the privilege of keeping 0% of very little, while Gumroad would cost about $18 and Payhip Free about $7.50. At that level, the flat fee is a tax on testing. And a seller doing $5,000 a month has outgrown Starter entirely: Business at $59 a month annual billing is the honest comparison, and even there Sellfy beats Gumroad’s roughly $600 a month by an enormous margin — but the seller must actually upgrade, not sit on Starter hoping the cap stays soft.
Sellfy vs Gumroad: the comparison most sellers actually need
Gumroad is the default comparison because it is the default starting point: free to start, upload a file, set a price, and sell in minutes. Its direct-sale fee is 10% plus $0.50 per transaction, with processing on top, and sales through its Discover marketplace cost 30%. In January 2025 Gumroad also became a merchant of record, which means it now collects and remits sales tax worldwide for its sellers — a genuinely valuable piece of paperwork to hand off.
Sellfy answers with a different trade. You pay every month whether you sell or not, you keep 100% of each sale minus processing, and you handle your own tax. You also get things Gumroad does not bundle the same way: a full store builder with free templates rather than a profile page, built-in email marketing and affiliate tools, upselling, and print-on-demand built into every plan, including Starter. That last point decided the comparison for merch sellers in 2026, because Gumroad quietly stopped supporting new physical products — its pricing FAQ now lists physical goods among the things you cannot sell, and new merch listings cannot be created. If a t-shirt, mug, or poster is any part of your plan, Sellfy is in the running and Gumroad, for new listings, is not.
The tax trade is the part sellers underweight. On Gumroad, the 10% buys you freedom from VAT and sales-tax filing across dozens of jurisdictions. On Sellfy, you save the 10% and inherit the filing. For a US seller selling mostly to US buyers in a handful of states, that filing is manageable, and the savings dwarf the effort. For a seller with buyers in twenty countries, the compliance work — or the cost of a tax tool — eats into the savings, and Lemon Squeezy’s merchant-of-record model at 5% plus $0.50 starts to look like the honest middle ground: cheaper than Gumroad, with tax handled, and no monthly fee.
My decision rule, after running these numbers for several seller profiles, is this. If you sell under $200 a month, or you are still testing whether anyone wants the product at all, start on a percentage platform with no monthly fee and switch later; paying $29 a month to learn that a product does not sell is an avoidable loss. If you sell $300 to $800 a month steadily, Sellfy Starter on annual billing is usually the cheapest option, and the cap has comfortable headroom. If you sell over $1,000 a month, Sellfy’s flat fee is almost always the cheapest of the mainstream options, and the question shifts from “which platform” to “which Sellfy tier keeps me under the cap with room to grow.”
The features gated behind Business
Price is not the only tier difference, and this is where Starter buyers get surprised. Several growth tools are gated behind Business at $59 a month on annual billing: cart abandonment recovery, affiliate marketing, upselling, and removing Sellfy branding, among others. Starter gives you the store, the products, and the 0% fee. It does not give you the tools that recover lost checkouts or turn buyers into affiliates.
That gating changes the break-even math for a specific kind of seller: one whose store depends on recovered carts. If cart abandonment emails recover even 5% of abandoned checkouts on a $1,000-a-month store, that is $50 a month in recovered revenue, which more than covers the $37-a-month jump from Starter to Business on annual billing. A seller who buys Starter to save $37 and then loses $50 in unrecovered carts has saved money on paper and lost it in practice. Before choosing a tier, list the three growth tools you will actually use in the next six months, and buy the tier that includes them. Do not buy Starter for a store whose plan depends on Business features.
A setup checklist, and the honest downsides
If Sellfy fits your volume, the setup is fast: a 14-day trial on any plan, a store built from a free template, products uploaded with up to 50 files each, Stripe or PayPal connected, and your own domain or a Sellfy subdomain. The trial is the right time to test the two things that matter most: whether your largest file uploads cleanly within the plan’s size limit, and whether checkout feels smooth on a phone, where most discovery traffic now arrives.
The downsides, stated plainly, are four. First, the monthly fee is due whether you sell or not, so a dead month costs $22 to $119 depending on billing. Second, the sales cap is a ceiling you must monitor; a viral month is a good problem, but it is still a problem if it pushes you into an upgrade mid-year. Third, you are the merchant of record, so tax compliance is yours — budget time or a tool for it, and do not discover this after your first international sale. Fourth, Sellfy does not bring you customers. Unlike a marketplace, there is no built-in discovery traffic; every sale comes from an audience you built elsewhere. A seller with no audience and no traffic plan will pay $29 a month to hear silence, and no fee structure fixes that.
There is also a smaller caution from the pricing pages themselves: third-party trackers disagree on some details, such as whether Premium’s cap is truly $200,000 or effectively unlimited for high-volume sellers who contact Sellfy directly. Sellers above $200,000 a year can contact Sellfy for a custom high-volume offer, and at that level the conversation should be a direct one, not a pricing-page reading. Re-check the live pricing page before you pay, as plans and caps have shifted before and comparison articles go stale fast.
For sellers comparing the wider field, our earlier breakdown of digital product platform fees on a $10 product runs the same math at a lower price point, and the Etsy vs Payhip fee comparison covers the marketplace alternative. If you also sell on Etsy, the Etsy digital sellers fee math for Q4 2026 shows how marketplace fees stack against a store you own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Sellfy really charge 0% transaction fees?
Yes, on all three paid plans Sellfy takes 0% of each sale. Stripe or PayPal still charge payment processing, typically around 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, and that fee is separate from Sellfy’s pricing.
What are Sellfy’s prices in 2026?
Starter is $29 a month or $22 a month billed annually, Business is $79 or $59, and Premium is $159 or $119. Annual billing saves roughly 25% to 35% depending on the plan. All plans include a 14-day free trial and there is no free plan.
What is Sellfy’s annual sales cap?
Starter caps annual sales at $10,000, Business at $50,000, and Premium at $200,000. Exceeding a cap without upgrading may trigger a 2% overage fee on the excess, so plan an upgrade before you cross the line rather than after.
At what sales level does Sellfy beat Gumroad?
For a $25 product sold through your own traffic, Sellfy Starter on annual billing breaks even against Gumroad’s 10% plus $0.50 at roughly $200 a month in sales. Below that, Gumroad’s zero monthly fee is cheaper; above it, Sellfy’s advantage grows quickly, reaching nearly $100 a month saved at $1,000 in monthly sales.
Does Sellfy handle sales tax for sellers?
No. Sellfy is not the merchant of record, so you are responsible for collecting, filing, and remitting sales tax and VAT. Sellfy provides tax settings, but the compliance work stays with the seller — unlike Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy, which handle it as merchant of record.
Can I sell physical products and print-on-demand on Sellfy?
Yes. Sellfy supports digital products, subscriptions, physical products, and print-on-demand on every plan, including Starter. That is a meaningful difference from Gumroad in 2026, which no longer supports new physical product listings.
Sources: Sellfy pricing as checked in October 2026 comparisons including Sellfy’s official pricing page, SchoolMaker’s Sellfy pricing guide and Ciro’s Sellfy review; Gumroad comparison figures from SideHustle’s Sellfy vs Gumroad 2026 comparison.