[HN Gopher] Gumroad's Interestingly Timed "Open-Source" Play
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Gumroad's Interestingly Timed "Open-Source" Play
Author : pier25
Score : 169 points
Date : 2025-04-06 19:01 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tedium.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (tedium.co)
| bhaney wrote:
| There's a fairly interesting story in here, and I almost didn't
| bother reading it because of the opening where the author just
| talks about their pathological aversion to gum and how they
| dislike Gumroad because it has "gum" in the name.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Sounds like gum-related misophonia. Which I can empathize with,
| unfortunately.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| So can I. People have their quirks.
|
| Myself, I've explicitly stuck to KDE instead of Gnome for
| many years, because the logo of the latter - a foot - was
| viscerally disgusting and repulsive to me.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| You are not alone
| thih9 wrote:
| Interestingly this is a big topic
|
| https://wiki.gnome.org/Engagement(2f)FootAndCulturalIssue.h
| t...
|
| https://cassidyjames.com/blog/gnome-foot-logo-rebrand/
|
| > It is actively off-putting and unappealing to at least
| some folks including much of the GNOME design team, newer
| contributors, people outside the open source bubble--and
| apparently potentially entire cultures (which has been
| raised multiple times over the past 20+ years).
| LadyCailin wrote:
| Moist
| hotsauceror wrote:
| Crisp. Pleasure.
| netsharc wrote:
| Yeah, scroll past the screenshot of the github repo to almost
| get to the meat of the story... tedium.co indeed.
|
| It seems the actual meat is a link to a Wired article the
| author read and decided to write a long-ass blog post about, to
| promote his newsletter and project on ko-fi...
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-affa...
| neilv wrote:
| The Wired article should be an HN post, though it has some of
| the same problem with distracting from the lede with detail
| that makes people's eyes glaze over and miss/forget the
| important parts.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is the story:
|
| > The story is about DOGE, but it points out something curious:
|
| > > On March 25, tech staffers and contractors at the VA
| noticed an unfamiliar name trying to push changes that could
| impact VA.gov code. It was Sahil Lavingia, a newcomer to the
| agency listed in the VA's internal directory as an adviser to
| the chief of staff, Christopher Syrek.
|
| > Who's Sahil Lavingia, you might ask? Why, the founder and CEO
| of Gumroad!
|
| The rest of TFA is a frame around this single paragraph from
| the original Wired story [0] and doesn't really add anything
| meaningful to it. The connection to the not-really-Open-Source
| release is tenuous at best, the heart of it is just "turns out
| Sahil is in DOGE, DOGE is bad, so boycott Gumroad".
|
| [0] https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-
| affa...
| navbaker wrote:
| I think the real story is a guy who replaced all his customer
| service with chatbots is now pushing code at the Department
| of Veterans Affairs, a place with actual life or death stakes
| if a customer can't get the answers they need because they're
| stuck in chatbot hell.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Several months ago there was a strange story from a startup
| founder who was lost and looking for his next step.
|
| He described how he got recruited into DOGE (or what was to
| become of it) via a series of online conversations that
| served as interviews. It was light on details but gave the
| impression that he basically got vibe-checked by a couple
| informal chats until he was into DOGE.
|
| He left quickly afterward, not giving many details. He meant
| it as a side note to his story but I thought it was telling
| that people with zero experience in auditing or managing
| large government systems were being vibe-checked with online
| chats straight into DOGE, which was then given massively
| destructive powers to cut government spending.
|
| So I suppose I'm not too surprised to see another startup
| founder mysteriously appear in DOGE, doing mysterious things
| to our nation's infrastructure.
| incompleteCode wrote:
| Are you referring to the co-founder of Loom?
| https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-
| with-...
| Aurornis wrote:
| That's it! Thanks for searching for it.
|
| This is the part that stood out:
|
| > Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer
| for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said "yes".
| Then he said "cool" and I was in multiple Signal groups.
|
| Major government decisions being made by a cabal of
| people recruited on a whim to work out of Signal groups,
| outside the reach of record keeping and transparency
| attempts.
|
| An omen about what was to come.
| bn-l wrote:
| To be fair it is a dumb brand and they need to keep explaining
| what they do.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Had to skip to basically the end to find out the reason:
|
| tl;dr:
|
| > On March 25, tech staffers and contractors at the VA noticed an
| unfamiliar name trying to push changes that could impact VA.gov
| code. It was Sahil Lavingia, a newcomer to the agency listed in
| the VA's internal directory as an adviser to the chief of staff,
| Christopher Syrek.
|
| > Who's Sahil Lavingia, you might ask? Why, the founder and CEO
| of Gumroad! It's not even the central point of the piece, but the
| fact is, if you're supporting Gumroad--a tool that, notably, has
| survived as long as it did because of a high-profile crowdfunding
| campaign--you're allowing its CEO the financial freedom to work
| in the Department of Veterans Affairs, at the behest of DOGE, for
| free.
| turnsout wrote:
| Man, I never had anything but positive feelings about
| Gumroad... But this is something I truly cannot support.
| wrasee wrote:
| Same. But a nice observation in conclusion
|
| > To me, I think that there is a real opportunity to take away
| the reins from middlemen who extract value rather than add it
| by leaning into things we host ourselves. Creators, for too
| long, have given too much power away to the company that made
| our lives mildly more convenient. If they're trying to optimize
| to the nubs, destroying quality of service in the process, why
| even bother letting them have a lane in the middle?
| firejake308 wrote:
| I would love to support creators directly, but there are some
| hard problems that creators need to solve before they begin
| direct-to-consumer sales:
|
| 1. Discoverability
|
| 2. Payments
|
| 3. Shipping
|
| While it is theoretically possible to handle all of these
| without a middle-man, the middlemen running the marketplaces
| have thus far done a much better job than individuals could
| ever hope to.
| wrasee wrote:
| Personally I've never discovered anything on Gumroad
| itself. It's always been from some other source (here on
| HN, reddit, social media) and then followed a link to
| Gumroad.
|
| Payments and shipping are precisely the kinds of things
| that could act as services directly to the creator itself.
| I thought that was somewhat the point of his conclusion -
| put these services directly in the hands of the creator.
|
| Otherwise Gumroad is just acting as a payment + shipping
| wrapper. And if they're replacing what service they had
| left with AI, what value-add is left exactly?
| drawnwren wrote:
| Great... we've been complaining about useless AI being forced
| upon us in the commercial sector and now YC alums are going to
| implement it in veteran healthcare through a backdoor?
|
| I've been pretty neutral about the whole thing to date, but
| it's starting to seem like YC's AI blindness is actually
| explained by true evil capitalist intentions.
| rapfaria wrote:
| Something was off when gumroad's founder kept saying "AI now
| at junior dev level", "AI now at mid dev level" on twitter
| senko wrote:
| tldr:
|
| 1. Gumroad (the code) is freemium, not open source
|
| 2. Gumroad (the company) has reolaced customer support with lousy
| AI chatbots, without escalation to humans
|
| 3. Gumroad CEO volunteers for DOGE
| sroussey wrote:
| Investors also just love it when founders do other things that
| use up all their time
| burcs wrote:
| That was a rough read, not really sure I understood the authors
| point. It was kind of all over the place, bad because AI, bad
| because not really open-source, bad because doge...
|
| Only thing I really left with was the author doesn't like the
| word gum. Seems like a hit piece on Sahil? Pretty sure the open-
| source part of Gumroad has been in the works for a while.
| wrasee wrote:
| Right. Somewhat burred the lede. My take was that the value
| that services like Gumroad can bring is precisely the value-add
| they provide over what a create could do themselves. So if the
| CEO has chosen to essentially automate the entire business by
| replacing staff with AI, then what value-add is left exactly?
|
| Better then to watch out for middlemen that "extract value
| rather than add it" and empower creators to host things
| themselves. Thought that was a nice observation.
|
| Ironically, I always thought that was somewhat the point of
| Gumroad (short of self-hosting). Are they on to
| enshittification Stage II?
| jrflowers wrote:
| I like that you were able to succinctly summarize the issues
| raised here in one sentence and then not understand them in the
| next sentence
|
| It is like "the author wrote about Athos, Porthos, and
| Aramis... what I got from this is the book is about hats?"
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Extremely sad to see Sahil is working with DOGE in basically
| firing hundreds of thousands of Americans (that too
| disproportionately veterans) in the manner they have been doing
| it.
|
| I have always liked reading his honest takes on running a
| company, their unique way of working with non-full-time
| employees, etc.
|
| I wonder if he has posted about his work in this regard himself?
| paulddraper wrote:
| HN: "Why so many people to do X? This should be like a 20
| person startup!"
|
| Also HN: "No....!!! You can't downsize!!!"
| ambicapter wrote:
| Ah yes, running the US Federal Government and running Twitter
| are two completely comparable endeavours.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Which one is more efficient?
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Given the government does everything, everywhere, and
| twitter can barely serve me tweets correctly,I'd say the
| answer is obvious.
| paulddraper wrote:
| "I predict future happiness for Americans if they can
| prevent the government from wasting the labors of the
| people under the pretense of taking care of them."
| jwagenet wrote:
| Efficiency isn't the primary mandate of the government.
| agentk9 wrote:
| This may also have an engineering explanation - much easier to
| move fast and break things if your main code base is open source
| and accessible to LLMs and coworkers.
| dhosek wrote:
| So what are the alternatives to gumroad? I'd been thinking of
| using them to sell the PDF version of a book, but after reading
| about the doge thing, I feel like I need to look elsewhere.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Stripe can likely do it with link.com, assuming you don't need
| help with distribution
| nikolas- wrote:
| Lemon Squeezy (recently acquired by Stripe) has a native
| digital product solution
| (https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/ecommerce/digital-products)
| oakesm9 wrote:
| The major benefit of a service like Gumroad is they are the
| merchant of record and handle worldwide taxes for you. Stripe
| does not do that (yet?)
| fuzztester wrote:
| >taxes for you.
|
| including EU VAT, last I checked.
| rchaud wrote:
| They announced the MOR feature in December 2024, so I
| wouldn't really say that's a big selling point for them
| just yet, they have been around for over a decade.
| fuzztester wrote:
| what is the doge thing?
| teraflop wrote:
| Open the article, press Ctrl-F, and type "DOGE" to get your
| answer.
|
| (TL;DR: DOGE is the name of a new US government agency
| devoted to gutting other government agencies, and the founder
| of Gumroad is giving it pro-bono help.)
| walmartwagie wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service
| fuzztester wrote:
| Ah yes. For the last two or three weeks, or maybe ditto
| months, in some of my free time, that I dedicate for
| reading world news, I've been doing practically nothing but
| reading about the shenanigans of the Frump and his sidekick
| the Tusk / the Fsck, so I guess it makes sense that I
| didn't know what the DOGE was. end of /s
|
| :)
|
| after the /s, thanks for your answer. the /s is dedicated
| to the HN people I mention below, not to you.
|
| actually by the "doge thing", I meant sahil's interaction
| with it, which I knew would be in the article, or in a
| linked one, but was a bit lazy to read.
|
| and I continue to marvel at the brilliance of the knee
| jerk, trigger happy HN downvoters who can't even imagine
| that there can be a different interpretation of a phrase
| like "the doge thing" from what they can think of or know.
|
| DOGE is the right place for those jokers.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Paddle works OK and supports a bunch of payment providers
| kamranjon wrote:
| I use Shopify and it's pretty dang nice, especially the
| shipping discounts you get as a smaller business. I'm not sure
| of many alternatives though, I just knew it by name so I chose
| it - there might be better ones out there.
| kacesensitive wrote:
| Lemon Squeezy is excellent
| chris_pie wrote:
| There's also Paddle (who's a Merchant of Record)
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| This one is top, using it for ages: https://getdpd.com
| thedangler wrote:
| Plenty of options. I use sytescope.com with a funnel to sell
| subscriptions. You can sell digital content on there too and
| hook it up with lots of payment systems.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Yes thanks for calling it out. I've been troubled with a lot of
| these startups calling themselves open-source, which might be
| correct but misses the ethos of open source by a mile. For
| example editors like Zed are actively getting better because of
| open source contributions and yet the enterprise value is
| directly going to the founders and none to the contributors.
| There is something really rotten about this and Gumroad might be
| the lowest level of hell on this gradient.
| ipaddr wrote:
| There is a lot to complain about but complaining that a for
| profit company's enterprise tier profits isn't going to
| contributors of an open source project is one bridge too far.
| Contributing to open source isn't about getting paid if for
| profit companies using open source make money.
|
| Open source code is the payment. No one has to work on someone
| elses open source project but many do because they use the
| project and have modified it and now want those changes part of
| the project for everyone because it means you don't have to
| maintain two versions. Some do it for street cred. Some
| convenience others to sponsor them because their company uses
| the project and wants to shape it. Some do it to give an option
| over for profit companies in the same space. Some want to make
| the impossible possible (printer drivers on linux for a
| specific model)
|
| But no one should help expecting to get paid if someone else
| makes money from it. This includes the creator (looking at you
| wordpress).
| colesantiago wrote:
| Avoid Gumroad's service and using the open source code.
|
| The Gumroad CEO has been using Devin for vibe coding their
| codebase which adds more risk of untested code and risks of more
| bugs since there are less vetted engineers in the company.
|
| As with most tech / influencers overhyping technology, I'm
| assuming he has invested in Devin and other AI tools and has not
| disclosed it.
|
| On top of the fact that Sahil has been working for DOGE is also
| another reason to avoid Gumroad.
|
| You should just use Patreon, Stripe, BuyMeACoffee, Ko-fi, etc.
|
| It would be great if there is a migration guide for creators such
| to move away from Gumroad as soon as possible.
| Kye wrote:
| Remember when the Gumroad account on Twitter doxed someone to win
| an argument?
|
| When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
| ifyouknewone wrote:
| A few months ago, I caught Gumroad trying to roll out MOR
| (Merchant Operator of Record) on Twitter and immediately called
| them out on it. They were attempting to launch this feature
| before it was even completed.
|
| They were internally rolling it out globally, even for parts of
| the world without a taxation system to collect on. Nevertheless,
| Gumroad was still planning to apply these charges. This was
| despite the fact that there are countless existing and affordable
| platforms, 100,000 times more developed--that could seamlessly
| integrate with Gumroad and already have this system in place.
| However, they decided to build it themselves.
|
| Why? I'm not entirely sure, but I'm willing to bet it has
| something to do with Sahil taking a position at DOGE and perhaps
| an effort to obscure payment activity.
|
| Why else? All the other scaled and fully built systems are likely
| to face heavy scrutiny over the next 24 months. And if a system
| is "still being built" or "unfinished," I guess it's much harder
| to comply with regulators or provide data in response to FOIA
| requests, isn't it?
|
| things that make you go hmmmmm.
| marcusb wrote:
| > Why? I'm not entirely sure, but I'm willing to bet it has
| something to do with Sahil taking a position at DOGE and
| perhaps an effort to obscure payment activity.
|
| Maybe they felt competitive pressure to offer a feature other
| payment providers have? Or, it could be a conspiracy theory
| involving DOGE.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| >When submitted a list of questions about his work for DOGE,
| Lavingia told Wired: "Sorry, I'm not going to answer these,
| besides to say I'm unpaid. And a fan of your work!"
|
| Crazy to me that people have actually been convinced that a bunch
| of billionaires and millionaires have suddenly decided to work
| for the good of the American people free of charge.
| rpgwaiter wrote:
| Probably a fine article, but I got halfway through and still had
| no idea what Gumroad is, or what the "creator economy" is aside
| from people online making money... somehow
| mrcwinn wrote:
| >Someone recently made the point to me that the recent rise in
| low-code and AI-based tooling is likely going to separate out the
| platforms that solve tough problems
|
| Former design assets marketplace CEO here. Wrong ^. Low-code
| gives you the tools to create a website. Great. Distribution is
| what disrupts. Platforms won because they aggregate traffic. When
| you break up the platform, you diffuse the traffic along with it.
|
| The exception is sometimes there are whales: dominant content
| creators that win most of the clicks. If you're interested in a
| lot of people winning, I'm not sure that's really all that better
| or different from a platform.
| timestep wrote:
| Generally Gumroad itself is an amazing idea. It's challenging to
| push out products, and any platform that helps empower people to
| just try is a win.
|
| I'm not sure about how the open-source element of this is
| supposed to work, but if it ends up with more people building
| things, creating and contributing, while making a dollar, that's
| a good thing.
| nickjj wrote:
| I know nothing about Gumroad's story or the CEO or any drama
| around it but I will say this.
|
| I had someone once give me an affiliate link for Gumroad and I
| got credited a sale.
|
| Gumroad wouldn't let me accept payment for it in a way that was
| reasonable for $17.
|
| It first asked me for basic information like my name. Then it
| asked me for my address. Then it asked me for the last 4 of my
| social security number. Then it asked me for my full social
| security number along with uploading my driver's license or
| passport. All through out this process is was slowly collecting
| my personal information 1 form at a time and it was positioned
| where it didn't seem like it ever needed more than the single
| piece of info it asked for. Every time I submit 1 piece of
| information it said it failed to verify my account but never said
| why then asked for more.
|
| I asked them for documentation or compliance reports on how my
| data was going to be stored and they ignored my support request.
|
| I waited over 2 weeks for a response while asking following ups
| and got no reply. I stopped providing information after the last
| 4 of my social.
|
| I decided to take a shot and emailed the CEO. In a few hours he
| personally Zelle'd me the amount with no questions asked and
| adjusted my account on Gumroad to reflect that. I don't know what
| to make of this, but it was disappointing I had to email the CEO
| to get $17 but he was very reasonable about it.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Can anyone explain what is meant by the Wikipedia page for
| Gumroad saying, "Number of locations: 11,894 (2023)"?
|
| I thought Gumroad has 0 locations.
| smallerize wrote:
| Good question. Here is the revision that added it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gumroad&diff=prev...
| No notes about sources or meaning. It survived an edit war last
| August.
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(page generated 2025-04-06 23:00 UTC)