What 0% transaction fees actually cost

Sellfy's pricing page leads with "No transaction fees, no hidden costs." The first half is true. Sellfy takes nothing per sale on any plan: you pay a flat subscription and keep the rest. Three costs sit underneath that line, though, and together they decide whether Sellfy is cheap or expensive for you.

• Processor fees still apply. Money moves through your own Stripe or PayPal account at 2.9% + $0.30 per US transaction, and PayPal averages 3.4% + $0.30 elsewhere, according to Sellfy's help centre.
• Every plan has a yearly sales cap. Pass it without upgrading and Sellfy charges a 2% overage fee on every order after the cap.
• You are the merchant of record. Sellfy calculates EU VAT at checkout, but you register for it and file it. Gumroad, Payhip and Lemon Squeezy do that job for you.

The company has been at this since 2011. It is run by UAB Sellfy out of Vilnius, Lithuania, and says over 75,000 creators have sold more than $165 million through it. What it sells is narrow and clear: a hosted storefront for digital downloads, video, subscriptions and print-on-demand merch, on your own domain if you want one.

Pricing and plan limits

Prices below were checked on Sellfy's pricing page on October 7, 2026. Yearly billing takes 25% off.

Every plan gets unlimited products, a custom domain and 0% transaction fees. The lines that separate them sit further down the comparison table. Removing Sellfy's branding, checkout upsells, cart-abandonment emails and an affiliate program all start at Business. Priority support is Premium only. Above $200,000 a year you move to a custom plan with no published price.

Two things the pricing page does not make obvious. The 14-day trial needs no card, but checkout is disabled for its whole length, so you can build the store and still not take one sale until you pay. There has been no free plan since November 2022. And Sellfy's own help centre still lists Starter at $39 a month, in an article updated in July 2026. The pricing page says $29, and that is the figure to plan around.

Refunds are tight. The 30-day money-back guarantee covers the first month after you upgrade. Cancel an annual plan after that and the store stays open until the term ends, with nothing refunded.

Sellfy vs Gumroad: where the flat fee wins

Gumroad has no monthly fee and takes 10% + $0.50 per direct sale, or 30% when the buyer arrives through Gumroad Discover. On a $20 product that is $2.50, a 12.5% cut. Sellfy Starter billed yearly costs $264, so it gets cheaper than Gumroad at about 106 sales of $20 - roughly $2,100 of revenue a year. On monthly billing ($348 a year) the break-even moves to about 139 sales, or $2,800.

Card processing is left out of both columns. On Sellfy it comes on top at 2.9% + $0.30, about $0.88 on a $20 sale; check Gumroad's current terms for how it treats processing before you compare to the cent.

The overage fee is milder than it sounds. Pass Starter's $10,000 cap and the choice is 2% on each later order, or $444 a year more for Business. On yearly billing the 2% stays cheaper until you are about $22,000 past the cap. A $25,000-a-year seller who needs neither upsells nor white-labelling can stay on Starter and pay $300 in overage, $564 in total against $708. Upgrade for Business's features, not because you crossed a line.

The tax job Sellfy leaves with you

This is the difference that should decide most purchases, and it lives in a help article rather than on the pricing page. In Sellfy's own words it "is not considered the Merchant of Record," and its comparison table answers the tax question with "No - you do it."

In practice Sellfy detects the buyer's country, adds the right EU VAT rate at checkout and hands you a VAT MOSS report. Registering for the EU's One-Stop Shop, or with HMRC for UK buyers, and filing the returns is yours. For a US seller with US buyers that costs little. For anyone selling e-books or presets into Europe it is a recurring filing obligation, and the platforms that look pricier per sale remove it. Gumroad has been merchant of record since January 1, 2025 and handles sales tax and VAT. Payhip collects and remits EU and UK VAT on every plan, from $0 a month + 5% or $29 a month + 2%. Lemon Squeezy is a full merchant of record at 5% + 50¢ per sale (see our Lemon Squeezy review).

So the trade is plain. Sellfy's flat fee is cheaper per sale, and the others charge more partly because they do your tax paperwork. Our roundup of payment platforms compares more of them.

What you can sell

Digital files are the core. Each product holds up to 50 files, with a per-file cap of 10GB, 15GB or 20GB depending on plan, though Sellfy recommends staying under 5GB per file. Video can be sold as a download, a 1080p stream or both. Audio cannot be streamed at all, only downloaded. Piracy protection is basic but real: each download link allows 5 attempts from different devices, and PDF stamping prints the buyer's email at the bottom of every page.

Subscriptions bill weekly, monthly or yearly, but you cannot put them on Sale. New in September 2026, Sellfy issues license keys - generated, or your own list - with an API to validate and activate them. That brings plugin and small-software sellers into range, who previously needed a separate licensing service.

Print-on-demand is what Gumroad and Payhip do not offer. Sellfy prints only when an order comes in, then charges the production cost to your card on file. Base prices on its POD catalogue, checked October 7, 2026: a Bella + Canvas 3001 tee from $11.69, a Comfort Colors 1717 tee from $15.29, a dad hat from $14.65, a clear iPhone case from $9.38 and a framed matte poster from $20.35. Sellfy says 97.66% of orders are printed and shipped within 5 business days. Delivery then takes 5-11 business days in the US, 8-17 in Canada and 7-27 elsewhere.

The storefront, and selling from your own site

Building the store is picking rather than designing. You choose a theme (an image-led layout, a split screen or a dense product grid), then set a logo, colours and a domain. The custom domain works on Starter; the Sellfy branding does not go away until Business.

Already run a site? Then the Sellfy store can stay in the background. Product cards with a "Buy now" button embed into WordPress or any other page. Prices can show in 25 currencies, although Sellfy bills its own subscription and POD costs in USD. Your money is not held, either: it lands in your Stripe or PayPal balance at the moment of sale.

Marketing tools, and the ones Starter lacks

Email marketing comes with every plan, metered by monthly credits: 2,000 on Starter, 10,000 on Business, 50,000 on Premium. The tools that raise revenue per buyer do not. Checkout upsells, cart-abandonment emails and an affiliate program are Business features. That is why Business, at $59 a month billed yearly, is the realistic plan for anyone past the hobby stage. Starter is a store with your name on the domain and Sellfy's on the page.

Sellfy has also launched a separate email product, Mailaway, which it promotes from its homepage and runs on its own site.

Getting out, integrations and support

Exporting orders takes one click: Orders, then Export, gives you a CSV of buyer details. Your email subscribers are not in it. To get those, Sellfy's help centre says you "may request a recipient list instead," and we found no documented export for products. Leaving with a large catalogue means re-uploading every file somewhere else by hand. That, more than any contract, is the lock-in.

Integrations are thin but cover most setups. Webhooks send JSON for three events (new order, email subscribe, email unsubscribe), and the Zapier app links the rest of a stack through an API key.

Support is where reviews split. Capterra users rate Sellfy 4.5 out of 5 across 32 reviews, customer service 4.4, but most of those reviews date from 2018-2021. Trustpilot is lower at 3.9 out of 5 from 72 reviews, checked October 7, 2026, and the recent complaints repeat: slow or missing replies from support, and print-on-demand orders that never arrived. Sellfy answers about two in three negative reviews there. Priority support is a Premium feature, so on Starter and Business expect to wait in the queue.

Verdict: who should buy Sellfy, and who should not

Buy it if you sell mostly to US buyers, make somewhere between $3,000 and $50,000 a year, and want downloads, video, subscriptions and merch in one branded store on your own domain. Take Business billed yearly at $59 a month. Starter keeps Sellfy's branding and lacks upsells, cart recovery and affiliates, which are the features a store of that size actually uses.

Skip it if you sell to Europe or the UK and do not want to register for VAT yourself. Payhip handles VAT from $0 a month, and Lemon Squeezy is a full merchant of record at 5% + 50¢. Skip it too if you make under about $2,000 a year or are still testing whether anyone will buy. Gumroad costs nothing until a sale lands. Sellfy's trial cannot take a single order.

The 0% is real. It just is not the whole bill.

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