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 has quietly pocketed £200 of it. Sell it a thousand times and that is £2,000 you earned and never saw. The product did not get better. The fee just kept showing up.

Meanwhile your Ghost blog, the thing actually bringing those buyers in, charges you nothing on a sale. So why is the checkout the expensive part. That mismatch is the whole reason I am writing this.

What Ghost can and cannot do with digital products

Ghost is excellent at one flavour of paid content: memberships. Paid tiers, gated posts, a recurring subscription on your own Stripe with a 0% platform fee. If your digital product is "ongoing access to my writing", Ghost already does that natively and you do not need anything else.

Where Ghost stops is the one-off file. An ebook. A Lightroom preset pack. A Notion template. A sample pack. Ghost has no idea how to take a single payment, hand someone a download link, and stop that link from being shared with the entire internet an hour later. It was built to publish, not to deliver files. So people reach for Gumroad, because it is the obvious name, and then they get used to the 10%.

The 10% in actual money

Here is the 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 card fees.
Lemon Squeezy (~5%): gentler at about £100 a month, and it handles cross-border tax for you, which is a real perk.
Mytho (0% + £12-ish a month): about £180 a year, flat, whether you sell £2,000 or £20,000.

The percentage models are designed so that the better you do, the more they take. A flat fee just sits there. Once you are doing any real volume, the maths stops being close.

Selling digital downloads on Ghost, the keep-your-money way

Mytho adds the part Ghost is missing, without the part Gumroad adds. You upload a file, set a price, and Mytho creates a real product page on your own Ghost site through the Admin API. When someone buys, payment runs through your Stripe account, and Mytho emails them a secure download link that expires, so your file is not getting passed around in a Discord by Tuesday.

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.