Gumroad, a digital sales platform for indie creators to vend everything from comics to music to video games to DIY classes, has launched tiered monthly memberships.
Through them, creators can offer regular installments of content in exchange for monthly payments. Like Patreon, perhaps the largest provider of creator-to-consumer content subscriptions, Gumroad is letting creators set different tiers. So, they could choose to offer an extra comic page per month to $2 subscribers and ten extra pages per month to $5 subscribers, or sell different levels of license for software they developed. Memberships also let creators offer fixed-length subscriptions that will end after set periods of time.
Any products delivered through memberships pop up in subscribers’ account libraries.
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Gumroad, which was founded in 2011 by CEO Sahil Lavingia, bills itself as more creator-friendly than competitors like Patreon and OnlyFans. Lavingia publishes the platform’s financials on Twitter every month; in September, for example, it earned an $819,000 slice (with an ultimate net profit of $16,000) from processing $12.9 million worth of transactions for 19,480 creators. Ten of its creators made more than $100,000 that month, 192 made over $10,000, and 1,657 earned more than $1,000.
“Multiple people have told me, ‘I picked Gumroad because I could see when I give Gumroad money what they actually spend money on,’” Lavingia told The Verge, which was first to report on Gumroad’s new memberships. “I think it’s underrated how much people appreciate knowing how the business that they’re using actually functions and runs as a business.”
Memberships are now available to all Gumroad creators.
