Sell digital downloads on Ghost without losing 10% to Gumroad

Gumroad takes 10% of every digital sale, forever. Ghost brings the readers and charges nothing. Here's how to sell digital downloads on your own Ghost site, on your own Stripe, and keep the 10%.

Gumroad takes a tenth of everything you sell. Not once. Every single time, forever. Sell a £20 preset pack a hundred times and Gumroad quietly pockets £200 of it. Sell it a thousand times and that is £2,000 you earned and never saw. The product didn't get better. The server bill didn't spike. The fee just kept showing up.

Meanwhile your Ghost blog, the engine actually bringing those buyers in, charges you nothing on a sale. So why is the checkout the most expensive part of your stack? That mismatch is the whole reason I built Mytho.

What Ghost can and cannot do with digital products

Ghost is brilliant at one flavour of paid content: recurring memberships. Paid tiers, gated posts, and a subscription running on your own Stripe with a 0% platform fee. If your product is "ongoing access to my writing", Ghost already does that out of the box and you don't need anything else.

Where Ghost stops is the one-off file. An ebook. A Lightroom preset pack. A Notion template. A sound pack. Ghost has no native way to take a single payment, hand someone a download link, and stop that link from being shared across the entire internet twenty minutes later. It was built to publish words, not protect files. So creators reflexively reach for Gumroad, because it's the familiar name, and get used to losing 10% of their work.

The 10% in actual money

Here is the exact same digital product, sold the same number of times, through three setups:

Gumroad (~10%): on £2,000/mo of sales, that is roughly £200 a month — £2,400 a year — before Stripe even takes its card fee.
Lemon Squeezy (~5%): gentler at about £100 a month, and it acts as a merchant of record, which is handy for EU VAT.
Mytho (0% + $15/month): about £140 a year flat, whether you sell £2,000 or £20,000.

Percentage models are designed so that the harder you work and the more you grow, the more they extract. A flat subscription just sits quietly in the background. Once you're doing any consistent volume, the maths isn't even close.

Selling digital downloads on Ghost without the middleman

Mytho adds the file-delivery piece Ghost is missing, without taking the cut Gumroad demands. You upload a file, set a price, and Mytho auto-publishes a clean product page directly to your Ghost site via the Admin API. When someone buys, payment routes straight through your Stripe account, and Mytho immediately emails them a secure, expiring download token. Your file stays protected, not pasted into a Discord.

The bits that matter for digital specifically:

Your Stripe, your money. The payment lands in your account. No platform sits in the middle taking a slice.
Secure, expiring links. Downloads are tokenised and time-limited, not a public file URL anyone can repost.
Member-gated downloads. Because Mytho reads your Ghost tiers, you can give a download away to paying members and charge everyone else, with no second login.
One cart for everything. The same checkout sells your ebook, your t-shirt and your print-on-demand mug together. Digital and physical do not need two systems.
It lives on your domain. Buyers never leave your site to pay, which is better for trust and better for your brand.

When Gumroad is still the right call

I am not going to pretend Gumroad is bad, because it is not. If you have no audience yet and you want a marketplace that might surface your product to strangers, Gumroad Discover is a genuine advantage Mytho does not have. If you sell one digital thing, occasionally, and 10% of "occasionally" is a rounding error, the convenience is worth it. Gumroad is a storefront that finds you customers.

But if the customers are already yours, arriving through your Ghost blog and your newsletter, then paying a marketplace fee for an audience you brought yourself is the bit that stings. At that point you are renting a checkout, and you can own one for less.

The short version

Ghost brings the readers. You should not have to hand a tenth of every sale to whatever you bolted on to take their money. Sell your digital downloads on your own Ghost site, on your own Stripe, and keep the 10%. Try Mytho free for seven days and run your own numbers. If Gumroad still wins for you, at least you will know exactly what the convenience is costing.