[HN Gopher] Show HN: Easyful - A Free Gumroad Alternative
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Show HN: Easyful - A Free Gumroad Alternative
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!
Author : jhartist
Score : 66 points
Date : 2023-08-08 19:36 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.easyful.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.easyful.com)
| [deleted]
| scastiel wrote:
| Nice platform it seems, but I have a couple of questions:
|
| - 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?
| scastiel wrote:
| Just had a closer look, it seems the second question's answer
| is: creators use their own Stripe account, so the problem
| should not happen here.
| jhartist wrote:
| Longer answer to your question here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37055297
|
| tldr; we might add some paid features in the future but keep
| the base app free since operating costs are low.
| MitchJohn wrote:
| Fyi the floating coins blocks some of the text on mobile.
| rozenmd wrote:
| How do you handle sales tax across all the jurisdictions for
| makers, are you a merchant of record like Gumroad?
| jhartist wrote:
| Good question: we are not a merchant of record, and Easyful
| doesn't even process transactions. We're just a fulfillment
| layer that plugs into Stripe payment links.
| janosdebugs wrote:
| I started making 3D assets in the past year and I have a newfound
| appreciation just how large these files can be. A single 3D model
| can easily grow to several hundred megabytes if not optimized
| properly. With the rise of photogrametry scans you'll have lots
| of rather large assets.
|
| I'd figure out the business model fast if I was you.
| weinzierl wrote:
| What is the problem with Gumroad? I only used it as a buyer a few
| times and this is a couple of years ago. It seemed to me they are
| on the good side and fair to sellers and buyers? Was I wrong, has
| it changed or are they still ok?
| jhartist wrote:
| Gumroad is great! But their pricing model (flat 10%) doesn't
| make sense for many creators.
|
| We think it's better for most creators to own their own Stripe
| accounts and use a lightweight fulfillment platform like
| Easyful instead.
| kreutz wrote:
| How do you plan to make money?
| jhartist wrote:
| Good question: we mostly built Easyful to use ourselves, but if
| it gets a significant of usage we might build some more
| advanced pro features and sell those features as a paid tier
| upgrade, while keeping the base app free.
|
| 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.
| GGO wrote:
| one way or another, you will pay for it. I'd rather know how
| much I am paying and pay more, then don't know and keep paying.
| turnsout wrote:
| I really wish Stripe would just make something like this.
| Just the bare minimum necessary to host Checkout for products
| entered in your Stripe dashboard. I wonder if they can't due
| to some onerous clause in their agreement with Shopify.
| rpgbr wrote:
| It makes. I run my membership program entirely via Stripe's
| built-in, no-code features:
| https://manualdousuario.net/apoie/
| dgivney wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they do with Stripe Checkout?
| https://stripe.com/en-au/payments/checkout
| vikeri wrote:
| Have you tried Stripe's payment links?
| jhartist wrote:
| Definitely check them out - they're great. Easyful is
| just a fulfillment layer that plugs into Stripe payment
| links for emailing customers your content when they buy
| something.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Stripe offers revenue share to platforms such as Shopify [1].
| Easyful could go this path.
|
| [1]
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1594805/000119312515...
| a2128 wrote:
| This looks cool, but I'm curious about how taxes work with this
| setup. From my understanding, Gumroad handles sales tax for you
| in a number of countries (US and EU at least). Does Easyful do
| something similar, or is that left up to the user to go through
| that headache on their own?
| jhartist wrote:
| Stripe actually handles taxes for you with Payment Links, and
| Easyful is just a fulfillment layer on top of that.
|
| Check out the Stripe docs page about it:
| https://stripe.com/docs/tax/paymentlinks
| ecuaflo wrote:
| I made something similar for selling access to GitHub repos but
| it didn't take off. People were hesitant to give a new product
| like mine access to their repos because we hadn't built up trust
| that established brands like gumroad have. Makes it really hard
| for new players to enter this space. Have you seen similar
| concerns and how do you address them?
| jhartist wrote:
| Yeah, I wonder about that. My hope is that other platforms'
| fees are high enough to motivate creators to switch, and the
| transition to Easyful is pretty fast for most users, especially
| if you already have a Stripe account.
|
| But I guess we'll see whether we get any traction!
| fredley wrote:
| Have you read Sahil Lavingia's blog?
|
| https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting
| joshxyz wrote:
| thank you for sharing this
| keerthiko wrote:
| Is any content in this blog particularly relevant to Easyful's
| reason for existence or are you just mentioning it because you
| enjoyed the post?
|
| (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)
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| What's up with the design? It's really nice, but also very
| similar to Gumroad's visual language. Not really criticism, just
| curious about the idea behind it.
| rogerclark wrote:
| Gumroad's design is itself a reuse of several design trends
| from 2021-2023. Wondermind is one example of another site using
| the same aesthetic. https://www.wondermind.com/
| fullstackchris wrote:
| Definitely noticed that too. Seems like a cheeky tip of the hat
| towards Gumroad.
| snvzz wrote:
| Related:
|
| 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 EUR147k 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
| pyuser314 wrote:
| Stripe already has similar. It's called Payment Links. Extremely
| easy and they manage all past transactions.
|
| https://stripe.com/payments/payment-links
| jhartist wrote:
| Easyful is a layer on top of Stripe Payment Links that handles
| the fulfillment for you. All Easyful users are using Stripe
| Payment links.
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(page generated 2023-08-08 23:00 UTC)