Sell digital products without a subscription
A store subscription bills you every month whether you sell nothing or a hundred things. For anyone selling irregularly — or still finding out whether the product works — that's paying for empty months. Per-sale pricing flips the risk, and there's a point where it stops being the better deal.
The break-even maths
The comparison is a single calculation. Divide the monthly subscription by the per-sale percentage you'd otherwise pay, and you get the monthly revenue at which they cost the same.
At €19/month versus 15% per sale, that's about €127 of monthly revenue. Below it, the percentage is cheaper. Above it, the subscription is. The catch is that the number only holds if your revenue is steady: three good months and nine quiet ones at €127 average still means nine months of paying for nothing, while the percentage charges you exactly nothing in the quiet months.
Why "0% commission" is rarely 0%
Subscription plans advertising no commission still pass through payment-processing fees, which typically run around 2–4% plus a fixed amount per transaction. On a €10 sale a fixed fee of €0.30 is 3% on its own. So the real comparison is subscription plus processing versus the all-in percentage — not subscription versus percentage.
The risk difference, which matters more than the money
With per-sale pricing, a month with no sales costs you nothing. That sounds like a small thing until you've launched a product that didn't work: the subscription version of that experiment costs you money every month while you figure out what to change, and the pressure to "get value from the subscription" is a genuinely bad influence on product decisions.
This is why per-sale pricing suits testing and seasonal selling, and subscriptions suit an established catalogue with predictable monthly revenue. Same maths, different risk profile.
When to switch
Switch to a subscription when your revenue has been consistently above break-even for several months and you need what the subscription buys — a catalogue, memberships, bundles, an affiliate programme, deep customisation. Switching purely to save a few percent, and then rebuilding your whole checkout for it, usually costs more in time than it saves in fees for at least a year.
See how to sell digital downloads for the wider set of options, and the Payhip comparison for how one subscription-plus-commission model works in practice.
Frequently asked questions
Is per-sale pricing always cheaper?
No — above your break-even revenue a subscription costs less, and the higher your volume the bigger that gap gets. It's cheaper when revenue is low, uneven, or seasonal, which describes most sellers in their first year.
What percentage is reasonable for selling digital products?
All-in rates across creator tools generally sit somewhere between 5% and 20%, and what's reasonable depends on what's bundled: hosting, delivery, payment methods, and file protection all cost something whether they're itemised or not.
Can I start per-sale and move to a subscription later?
Yes, and that's usually the sensible order. The friction is in migrating existing links and buyers, so plan the switch for a natural break rather than mid-launch.
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