Payhip vs Sellfy: Fees, Tax & Which One Costs You Less (2026)

Payhip and Sellfy end up on the same shortlist for a reason. Both are self-serve storefronts for digital products, both are mature enough to trust with real revenue, and both are pitched at creators who don't want to assemble a checkout out of plugins. Where they diverge is in how they ask to be paid — and that single design decision cascades into your margin, your tax paperwork, and whether growth feels rewarded or punished.

This comparison walks through fee structure, tax and compliance, storefront and product support, and marketing tooling. Then it runs the actual arithmetic at a realistic revenue level, because both platforms publish headline numbers that hide the same thing: the payment processor still has to be paid.

Disclosure: we build Pocketsflow, a creator commerce platform. We've worked to keep the Payhip and Sellfy details accurate and verifiable. Pricing changes — confirm on their sites before you commit.

The core difference: pay per sale or pay per month

Payhip has a free tier with no monthly cost, and it takes a cut of each transaction — roughly 5% on the free plan, dropping toward 2% and then 0% as you move onto its paid tiers (commonly around $29 and $99/month). The free plan is genuinely usable. You can launch, sell, and get paid without ever entering a card number, which is why it shows up so often in "start for free" recommendations.

Sellfy sits at the other end. It's a subscription product, typically around $29–$159/month depending on tier, and paid plans charge 0% in platform transaction fees. There's no meaningful free plan — you're expected to commit before you've earned anything. Each tier also carries an annual revenue cap; cross it and you're moved up a plan whether or not you wanted the extra features.

So the shapes are inverted. Payhip lets you start at zero and charges you as you succeed. Sellfy charges you before you succeed and then leaves your upside alone. There's a crossover point where one overtakes the other, and finding it is most of the decision.

The fee nobody puts on the pricing page

Here's the part that trips people up. Neither platform's headline number includes payment processing.

Both Payhip and Sellfy run on Stripe and PayPal, which means standard processing — commonly around 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, higher for international cards and currency conversion — comes out of every sale on top of whatever the platform charges. Sellfy's "0% transaction fees" is true and also incomplete: it means 0% to Sellfy. Stripe still invoices you. Payhip's 5% sits on top of that same processing cost, not instead of it.

This matters most at low ticket prices. On a $9 template, $0.30 of fixed processing is 3.3% before any percentage applies. Creators selling cheap, high-volume products get hit hardest by the flat component, and no pricing page will tell you that.

What "all-inclusive" would actually mean

A truly all-inclusive fee would cover the platform, the processor, and the tax handling in one number. That's rarer than it sounds. When you compare platforms, the honest question isn't "what's the percentage" — it's "how many separate invoices does a single sale generate?"

Tax and merchant of record: the expensive asterisk

If you sell to the EU, UK, or a growing list of other jurisdictions, digital-goods VAT applies at the buyer's local rate. Someone has to calculate it, collect it, and remit it.

Payhip does handle EU and UK VAT for digital products — it calculates and applies the correct rate at checkout, which is a real convenience and more than most platforms at its price point offer. Sellfy provides VAT settings and lets you configure rates, but the compliance obligation largely stays with you. In both cases you are generally the seller of record for the transaction, which means the registrations, filings, and liability sit on your side of the line.

A merchant-of-record platform inverts this: the platform is the legal seller, so it owns the tax registration and remittance globally, and you receive a payout. For a solo creator selling into twenty countries, that's the difference between a compliance project and a non-event. We've written more on how this breaks down in our Gumroad vs Payhip comparison, where the same asterisk appears.

Storefronts, products, and what you can actually sell

Sellfy's storefront is the stronger of the two out of the box. You get a hosted store with reasonable themes, a custom domain on paid plans, and — distinctively — print-on-demand. If you want to sell a t-shirt next to your Lightroom presets without wiring up a separate fulfilment service, Sellfy is one of the few creator platforms that does it natively. It also handles digital downloads, subscriptions, and physical inventory.

Payhip covers digital downloads, courses, memberships, coaching, and physical products, and it has a well-regarded course builder for a platform that isn't primarily a course platform. Its storefront is functional rather than beautiful. Many Payhip sellers embed the checkout into an existing site rather than using the hosted store as their front door, which is a reasonable pattern and tells you something about where the product's strengths lie.

Rough rule: if the storefront is your brand, Sellfy. If your brand lives on a site, a newsletter, or a social audience, and the storefront is just a checkout, Payhip.

Marketing tooling

Both include the standard kit: discount codes, cart abandonment, upsells, affiliate programs, and email. Payhip's affiliate system is genuinely good and available even on lower tiers, which matters if word-of-mouth distribution is part of your plan. Sellfy bundles email marketing with monthly send limits that scale by plan, plus its own upsell and cross-sell flows.

The catch on both is tiering. Features you'd consider basic — removing platform branding, custom domains, higher email limits — sit behind upgrades. Budget for the plan you'll need in six months, not the one that covers you today.

The math at $3,000/month

Assume $3,000/month in sales, an average order value of $30 (so 100 transactions), and Stripe processing at 2.9% + $0.30. These figures are illustrative — plug in your own AOV, because the fixed $0.30 swings the result more than most people expect.

Processing on 100 transactions: 2.9% of $3,000 = $87, plus 100 × $0.30 = $30. Total processing: $117/month.

• Payhip, free plan: 5% platform fee = $150, plus $117 processing = $267/month. No subscription.
• Payhip, ~$29 plan (≈2%): $60 platform fee + $117 processing + $29 = $206/month.
• Sellfy, ~$29 plan: $0 platform fee + $117 processing + $29 = $146/month.

At this volume Sellfy wins on raw cost — its subscription is cheaper than Payhip's percentage. Flip to $600/month in sales (20 orders) and it reverses: Payhip free costs roughly $30 platform + $23 processing = $53, while Sellfy's $29 subscription plus $23 processing is $52 — near identical, except Payhip charged you nothing in the month you sold nothing, and Sellfy still billed $29.

That's the honest summary. Below roughly $1,000–$1,500/month, Payhip's free plan is the safer bet. Above it, Sellfy's subscription usually costs less — provided you're consistent enough that the monthly fee never lands in a dead month.

What the table leaves out

None of the numbers above include the cost of VAT compliance: filings, registration thresholds, or an accountant's time. On Sellfy that cost is yours. On Payhip, EU/UK VAT is handled but you're still the seller of record for the rest. It doesn't appear in any comparison table, and for many creators it's the largest line item of all.

Who should pick which

Choose Payhip if you're starting out, your revenue is lumpy, or you want a real free tier and a strong affiliate program without a monthly commitment. The 5% is steep at scale, but paying zero in a slow month is worth more than most creators calculate.

Choose Sellfy if you have steady revenue above roughly $1,500/month, want a polished branded storefront, or need print-on-demand alongside your digital catalogue. Go in knowing the subscription is due whether you sell or not, processing is still yours, and tax compliance largely stays on your desk.

Choose neither if the trade itself is what bothers you. Nothing in the laws of commerce requires a platform to charge either a subscription you pay before earning or a revenue share that scales with success. If you want to see the field, we've covered the best Payhip alternatives and the best Sellfy alternatives in detail.

The third option

The reason Payhip vs Sellfy is a hard question is that both answers make you pick a losing side, and both quietly leave processing and tax off the headline.

Pocketsflow removes the trade-off. The fee is a flat 2%, all-inclusive — one number covering payment processing, VAT and sales tax, and merchant-of-record coverage. No monthly fee, no revenue cap, no separate processor invoice, no VAT filings. It is the lowest fee in the category: 2% against Payhip's ~5%, Sellfy's subscription-plus-processing, Gumroad's ~10%, and Lemon Squeezy's ~5%+. Payments run through our payment processor, and email marketing, affiliate and partner programs, upsells, custom domains, and link-in-bio come included rather than gated behind a tier.

On the $3,000/month example above, that's $60 total — against $267 on Payhip's free plan and $146 on Sellfy once you've added Stripe back in. Roughly $1,000–$2,500 a year that stays in your business, before you count the tax admin you no longer do. If you're still deciding what to charge, start with our guide to pricing digital products and then run the fee math against whichever platform you're leaning toward.

Payhip and Sellfy are both real, working products, and the right one depends mostly on whether your revenue is steady enough to absorb a subscription. But if what you actually want is one low fee that covers everything — processing, global tax, merchant of record, and the growth tools on top — start selling on Pocketsflow for free and keep 98% of what you make.