Good question: because we’re not handling payment processing or anything, just emailing users your content, we think Easyful can be default-free forever. If we get a bunch of usage, we might build some more advanced pro features and sell those features as a paid tier. We’ve had success with that model before.

How do you actually make any money though? It costs you money to provide this service. Where is that coming from?

Two answers:

• 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.

How do you mail files that are several hundred megabytes in size? Also, you need to store these somewhere, which costs money. I might be wrong, but it seems you missed a few critical parts of why people use Gumroad. You should take a closer look at their audience, there is a sizable segment of people that sell 3D models, textures, etc.

Yeah. And what about analytics and stuff?

Ya.

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.

You produce the content and provide the marketing. They provide almost everything else for you: the storefront, the billing, the invoicing, charging sales tax/VAT, etc. If you wanted to do it yourself, you'd be in for quite a lot of work, even if you happened to host your own software.

Granted.

Is charging 30% fair?

That depends on how much you value your time you would otherwise spend dealing with a storefront. A lot of creators on Gumroad are relatively small-time, so to them it's probably totally worth it since they would have to spend a disproportionate amount of time dealing with things they are not very good at. I'm quite good with servers, but I'd also have a hard time justifying the time spent on maintaining and updating a webshop software that deals with all the things required. If I was selling 3D assets, I'd pick one of the many fab sites over hosting my own anytime.

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.

Exactly. it's not fair in the sense that platform pricing is not set by an "efficient free market". What you pay for is not the features, it's the visibility. So the pricing of gumroad/apple store/etc is way above their operating costs.

I'd look at it differently: currently running a business, me and my wife are spending a lot more than 30% of our time on non-core activities. If a service would reliably take a chunk of that off of our shoulders, it would absolutely be worth the commission. Especially since there are no fixed costs, no income = no costs.

Thanks for engaging my question.

I now realize I should have been asking if 30% is "reasonable".

For you, absolutely, and I appreciate your explanations.