CANDI vs Gumroad — storefront and audience, or billing infrastructure?

The difference

Different products, not just different rates. Gumroad is a merchant of record. CANDI is not, and that single fact decides almost everything else.

	Merchant-of-record platforms	CANDI
Who is the seller	The platform. Their name is on the charge and the invoice.	You. Your name is on the charge.
Whose payment account	Theirs. Your customers pay them.	Yours. You connect your own account.
Where the money lands	With them, then paid out to you on their schedule.	In your account, on your own payout schedule. CANDI never holds it.
Sales tax / VAT	They calculate, collect and remit it.	Yours. CANDI does not calculate, collect, remit or file it.
Who verifies you	They do, as part of onboarding.	Your payment provider does. Not us.
Chargebacks	Theirs to fight, under their terms.	Yours, on your own account.

This is a structural comparison of the two billing models, not a claim about any one vendor. Business models change — check the vendor's own pricing and terms before you decide.

Which to pick

Pick on who you want to be to your customer. Neither answer is universally right.

Gumroad is a place to sell. It gives you a hosted storefront, a checkout, file hosting, an audience and a marketplace, and since 1 January 2025 it acts as merchant of record and handles tax obligations on your behalf. Its published rate when we checked on 2026-07-26 was 10% + $0.50 per sale through your own profile or links, and 30% when a buyer finds you through its marketplace. Check their current pricing rather than trusting that figure indefinitely.

This is the one comparison on this site where we are plainly cheaper, and we are not going to pretend that settles it. You are buying different things. Gumroad's rate includes distribution — a storefront you did not build and, on the marketplace, buyers you did not find. If that discovery is what is actually growing your revenue, a percentage is a reasonable way to pay for it, and CANDI has nothing equivalent to offer.

When CANDI is the better fit

You already have your own product, site and audience, and you only need the billing.
You want the charge in your own name, on your own payment account, with the payout on your provider's schedule.
You need billing models a creator storefront does not really do — metered usage credits, licence keys tied to activations, proration on mid-cycle plan changes, revenue splits, signed webhooks your own systems can act on.
The percentage matters at your volume, and you are not paying it for distribution.

When Gumroad is the better fit

You want a storefront and file hosting without building either.
You want tax handled — CANDI does not do tax at all.
Marketplace discovery is a real channel for you.
You would rather not touch an API.

Before you switch

The honest part. Read this before you move anything.

Where CANDI actually is today. Live payments are not switched on yet, so nobody is taking live money through CANDI. Test mode is fully open — its own database, its own keys, the whole API, and Stripe onboarding, so you can connect a Stripe account and build the entire integration today. Stripe hosts the verification; CANDI never sees your identity documents.

If cross-border sales tax is the problem you are actually trying to solve, a merchant of record solves it and CANDI does not. That is a real reason to choose Gumroad, and we would rather say so here than have you find out after you migrate. Check their current pricing and terms directly — we deliberately do not restate them, because a number we copied today is a number that is wrong later.

Also compare

The rest of the field. Same comparison, different vendor.

CANDI vs Creem

MoR at a rate close to ours, tax remittance included.

CANDI vs Paddle

The established MoR for software, deep compliance.

CANDI vs Lemon Squeezy

Popular with indie sellers; surcharges on the headline rate.

CANDI vs Polar

Developer-first MoR with tiers that cut the rate.

Merchant of record vs seller of record

The underlying decision, without a vendor attached.

Questions

Answered plainly. Including the ones where the answer is no.

Is CANDI cheaper than Gumroad?

On published rates, yes — our floor is from 3.9% all in and Gumroad listed 10% + $0.50 when we checked in July 2026. But Gumroad's fee also buys a storefront, file hosting and marketplace distribution, none of which CANDI provides. Compare what you are actually getting, not just the percentage.

Does CANDI give me a storefront like Gumroad?

No. CANDI is the billing layer — checkout, subscriptions, licences, credits and webhooks on your own payment account. You bring the product and the site.

Does CANDI handle tax like Gumroad does?

No. CANDI does not calculate, collect, remit or file tax; orders book a zero tax line. Gumroad acts as merchant of record and handles it.

Can I move from Gumroad to CANDI today?

Not for live payments — those are not switched on yet. You can build the whole integration in test mode now.

CANDI vs Gumroad These are not really the same kind of product, and picking between them on fee percentage alone will lead you to the wrong one.