Show HN: Easyful – A Free Gumroad Alternative (easyful.com)
Hi HN,
If you’re selling templates or digital assets online, platforms like Gumroad have a ton of amazing features . . . but they’re also expensive. It’s not uncommon to be paying 10%, 20% or even 30% of your revenue just to host and deliver some digital content to customers.
Instead, we think most creators should own their own Stripe account and use a lightweight fulfillment layer to send customers their orders.
So we built Easyful, a platform built on Stripe to email your content to customers when they buy it. And it’s free!
We’ve been using Easyful ourselves for a few months now. Try it out and let us know what you think!
92 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] thread[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1594805/000119312515...
We've had success with that model before with Smallchat, a saas app we launched several years ago, and it's still going strong supporting millions of free users.
With low-operating-cost saas apps, you can get away with offering a pretty generous free tier. A small percentage of paid users can more than pay for your mostly-free user base.
Thats good to hear. Congrats. I always wondered do low operating cost SaaS apps reach a point where the interest or subscription(s) for the paid plans outweigh the cost of running the free tier accounts? And how does one tackle that?
Do you have a blog or some stats to look at? I would love to read about this and this mission of yours.
I see many people suggest that there should be a small fee to cover the hosting costs, do you think such tactics lead to the race to bottom scenario where you can't really charge properly for the paid plan as the starter plan itself is under-priced?
https://www.standerd.co/
- If it is free, does that make me the product? How will you make money?
- How do you prevent the problems that Flurly had, which led to Stripe closing their account?
tldr; we might add some paid features in the future but keep the base app free since operating costs are low.
We think it's better for most creators to own their own Stripe accounts and use a lightweight fulfillment platform like Easyful instead.
https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting
(I remember reading it when Sahil posted that first, as a fellow bootstrapped tech cofounder but I don't remember anything of note from there to discuss re: Easyful)
- Layout that uses the full width of the page. - The page is primarily made up of blocks that occupy a single column or two columns. - Large blocks of a primary color - The font used for the logos are quite similar. Not sure what it's called, but they're both some sort of chunky and playful sans with some oversized and/or geometric elements. - Decorative coins featured prominently (G) ($) - Cartoony graphics with a hand-drawn feeling to them. - Graphics poke out of the grid in many places. - Similar navbars
Each point by itself is hardly surprising, most landing pages have some of them, but taken together it seemed like a lot to me :)
Either way, great work and I'd love to try it on my next project <3
Check out the Stripe docs page about it: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/paymentlinks
If Stripe collects the tax and sets it aside, that’s helpful, but it still means you have to figure out which jurisdictions you owe tax to, and figure out how to get the taxes delivered and reported to those jurisdictions (“remitted”), which can be a headache, to say the least.
I mean, big, established companies are a big target. But it doesn't seem that the Norway Revenue Service would spend time finding who's Joe from South Africa who sold a $50 ebook to 10 Norwegians...
But I guess we’ll see whether we get any traction!
https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links
I'd figure out the business model fast if I was you.
Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528
Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011
Tell HN: Stripe killed my music locker service, so I'm open sourcing it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36403607
Don't Use Stripe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34035581
Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271815
Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36967159
Not that there aren't legitimate problems with Stripe, but the extent of those problems is blown out of proportion if you take all of these complaints at face value.
Instead, I am inclined to think that mass-flagging is being done by Stripe sockpuppets as a means of mitigating negative impact on Stripe's public image.
jacquesm is a very prominent user, and called out another one for being too vague, with no reply [1].
The third was clearly selling an NSFW AI service [2] and admitted it.
The other three I'm willing to believe, I'm just cautioning against believing every submission you see.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34036111
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34272248
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36969195
"Not that there aren't legitimate problems with Stripe, but the extent of those problems is blown out of proportion if you take all of these complaints at face value." That conclusion feels a bit like legerdemain, considering that you acknowledge the strength of some of these claims (which are HN only).
It's a bit like you're boxing your argument into: "If there are only seven people dead from mass shootings this year, their importance is blown out of proportion versus much more common preventable causes of death." But in a universe where the only people that get any news coverage for mass shootings are the ones that get posted and upvoted on HN. I hope my point here isn't too oblique.
That's because it was intended to. OP hijacked a Show HN to share a bunch of links with complaints about Stripe. They were so quick to do so that they didn't notice that half their links were dubious. Then this hijacking post becomes pinned to the top with upvotes just like the dubious Stripe posts did before clearer heads prevailed.
HN needs to get out of this habit of accepting people's inflammatory claims at face value, or we're going to rapidly lose credibility and become just another internet outage farm.
---
As far as your specific complaint goes: HN's sense that Stripe can't be trusted comes from the subjective experience of seeing many complaints about Stripe on HN. There are no stats to help us understand the extent of the problem. If a full half of these complaints were dishonest, do you not see how that would skew our collective sense of how likely getting screwed over by Stripe is?
As I said, I'm not trying to discount the experiences of the three stories that OP shared that seem to have been legitimate. What I'm challenging is the idea that everyone should steer clear of Stripe on the basis of a clearly flawed heuristic, as well as the idea that it's okay to hijack a Show HN to push that heuristic on people.
I guess I’m just expressing a bit of anxiety towards picking of payment processor, and also wish there were concrete stats on the issue.
Stripe's processes may very well need improvement, but private fraud teams making important calls is how finance is run everywhere.
you cannot run gumroad like financial transaction business without licence and agreement with stripe. it is bound to be closed down on short notice, and all the earnings will be clawed back.
so don't use this app. period.
• The operating costs are very low, since all Easyful does is email your customers your content when they buy it.
• Our team at nicer.io is primarily a product agency, so when we make our own apps like Easyful, SimplePerks and Smallchat, they don't have the pressure to be highly-profitable. We often end up getting good connections, agency customers and referrals from these apps, and keeping them running and supported is pretty low-cost for us.
I have zero intuition why online stores charge 30%. Is that fair?
Should the store's cut go down with more volume?
Or should smaller, younger, lower volume vendors get a better deal?
I have no idea.
So I keep landing on the notion that online market places should be not-for-profit orgs (consortiums?) that are run at cost plus some margin. And then figure out the hosts' cut from there.
Is charging 30% fair?
Another point to make is the added visibility. ArtStation for example is quite prominent in the art / 3D world, whereas Steam is unavoidable as an indie dev. Itch.io takes a much lower cut, but it doesn't bring in even close to the amount of viewers as Steam does.
I now realize I should have been asking if 30% is "reasonable".
For you, absolutely, and I appreciate your explanations.
[Edit] Searching the website, it looks like it is not a POS.
The reason you “give up” so much money to them is because they handle VAT, which this service doesn’t seem to do at all.
Stripe by default will not collect and remit VAT.
Not everywhere unfortunately, so I still have to pay attention to it, which I can't so it's a show-stopper for me.
https://stripe.com/docs/tax/paymentlinks
For that you need to set up Stripe Tax on top of it. Stripe Tax itself also takes a cut from your payment.
It also “helps” you file taxes only by providing the reports you need. You still need to file the reports and each country is different.
Please read the FAQ before this causes you trouble: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/fa q
>> Does Stripe Tax handle remitting and reporting tax, or filing tax returns?
> Stripe Tax doesn’t handle remitting and reporting tax, or filing tax returns. Stripe Tax provides itemized and summarized exports to help users prepare, file, and remit the tax that was automatically calculated and collected. To automate filing in the US, we recommend using TaxJar’s AutoFile solution. In Europe, we recommend using Taxually or Marosa. To get started, visit Taxually’s partner page or Marosa’s partner page.
Disclaimer: I work at Stripe
With Smallchat, for example, a small percentage of paid users more than covers the operating costs of our mostly-free user base.
What about putting your spin on it?
No thanks. We should be calling this type of thing out.