Payhip vs Shopify: Which Costs Less for Digital Products

Payhip vs Shopify at a Glance

The two platforms answer the same question — where buyers pay for your ebook, template or course — with opposite pricing models. Payhip charges little or nothing up front and takes a share of each sale; Shopify charges a fixed monthly plan and takes no platform share on card payments through its own payment processor. Compare line by line below, then read the section behind each row.

What Each Platform Charges

Two bills sit on every sale on either platform: what the platform itself takes, and what the card processor takes. On standard US online cards through Stripe and Shopify Payments on Basic, the second is the same on both sides, so the comparison that decides the platform is the first.

Payhip: Free Forever, Plus or Pro

As of October 2026, Payhip's Free Forever plan is $0 a month with a 5% fee on each sale, Plus is $29 a month with a 2% fee, and Pro is $99 a month with no transaction fee from Payhip. The plans do not gate features: Payhip's pricing page says every plan gets all of them, even the free one. Its pricing page lists monthly prices only.

The payment processor charges separately on every plan. Payhip's help center gives the standard Stripe fee as 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, and PayPal's card fee as 2.99% plus a fixed fee that depends on the currency, with an extra 1.5% on international commercial transactions. Both depend on your country. In most cases you connect PayPal plus one other processor for cards.

If you are also weighing a storefront that charges a flat monthly fee instead of a percentage of each sale, our Stan Store vs Shopify comparison works through that model.

Shopify: Basic Plan and a Free Digital Products App

As of October 2026, Shopify Basic costs $39 a month billed monthly, or $29 a month billed yearly. That is the entry plan for a new store: Shopify's help center says the Starter plan isn't available to new stores.

To deliver files you add Shopify's own Digital Products app, which is free. Shopify also doesn't treat a download as a different kind of sale:

The trade-off is the flat fee itself: Basic costs $39 in a month with no sales, where Payhip's free plan costs nothing. Card processing through Shopify Payments on Basic is 2.9% + 30¢ for standard US online cards, the same as Stripe's standard rate through Payhip.

If you take payments through a third-party gateway instead, Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee of 2% on Basic, on top of the gateway's own fee. PayPal is exempt when Shopify Payments is your primary provider.

That fee is what changes the arithmetic for sellers whose country or business category Shopify Payments doesn't support. What exactly it applies to, and how it compares across plans, is covered in our guide to running Shopify without Shopify Payments.

At What Monthly Sales Does Shopify Get Cheaper?

The comparison below prices only what each platform takes. Card processing is left out because, through Stripe and Shopify Payments on Basic, it is the same on both sides — 2.9% + 30¢ on standard US online cards — and so it cancels. A domain, apps and tax work are outside it too; the tax section covers the last one.

The Same $1,000 Month on Both Platforms

Take one month: $1,000 of downloads sold, Shopify Payments available, card processing set aside.

The mechanism is simple: Payhip's free plan grows with every sale, and Basic does not. Free and Plus land a dollar apart here because they cross at about $967 a month — below that the 5% plan is cheaper, above it the $29 plan with 2% is. Within Payhip, Pro's $99 only pays off above $3,500 a month.

Where the Lines Cross

The lines leave out real costs on both sides. A Shopify store may add a domain and paid apps; on Payhip the tax handling is Payhip's job, while on Shopify it is your own registration and filing work. If you sell to buyers in the EU, that work can matter more than the fee gap — read who handles VAT before you decide on price alone.

Run Your Own Numbers

One setting changes the picture: whether Shopify Payments is available for your store. Without it, Basic carries the 2% third-party fee on every sale, the same percentage as Payhip Plus, while its monthly price is $10 higher. Basic then never costs less than Plus, and Payhip's free plan stays cheaper than monthly Basic up to $1,300 a month.

Enter your monthly digital sales, choose how you would pay for Shopify, and say yes or no to Shopify Payments after checking Shopify's list of supported countries: Shopify says that if your country isn't listed, or Shopify Payments doesn't support your business category, you need a third-party payment provider. The calculator opens on the $1,000 month above.

Who Handles VAT and Sales Tax on Digital Sales?

Digital sales into the EU carry a VAT rule worth knowing: Shopify's help center notes that customers in the EU pay VAT on digital goods at their own country's rate, wherever the seller is located. Someone has to charge the right rate, keep the evidence and pay it over. On Payhip that is Payhip; on Shopify it is you.

Payhip Collects and Pays It for You

Payhip treats digital VAT as its job rather than yours. Its help center says it handles digital UK and EU VAT automatically by default, and the UK, though outside the EU, has a similar rule for digital products. Payhip states the aim directly:

In Payhip's own example, with VAT added on top of the price, a $10 product sold to a buyer in France, where VAT is 20%, costs the buyer $12. Payhip keeps $2.50 from that sale: its 5% fee of $0.50 plus the $2 of VAT it collects to pay over. The example is on the 5% plan; the processor's fee comes off separately.

The US followed this year. Payhip says that from July 1, 2026 it handles US sales tax on your behalf, because it is defined as a marketplace facilitator in the US, and it charges nothing for it. Payhip adds that if you have a physical presence in a state where it collects and pays the tax, you may still be required to file a "zero dollar return" there. Canadian sales tax moved to Payhip on the same date, except Quebec's QST, which you still handle yourself if you are required to.

One boundary is worth knowing: no Payhip page we have found calls Payhip the merchant of record, and the money from each sale goes straight to the payment processor you connected (see what we looked for below). "Marketplace facilitator" is a US sales-tax status, not the same label.

On Shopify, Filing Is Your Job

Shopify can work out the tax at checkout. Its help center says you can automatically assign VAT rates for each EU country to digital goods, and every order records two pieces of location evidence — the billing address and the buyer's IP address. How you switch the digital VAT rates on depends on the tax service your store uses, so the exact setting differs between stores. Calculating is where Shopify stops:

So the registration is yours. Shopify's help center says a seller outside the EU registers for Non-Union OSS for digital sales to EU consumers, or for VAT in each EU country where they do business; a seller inside the EU uses OSS for sales to other EU countries. IOSS is for physical goods only and doesn't apply to digital ones. The returns and payments that follow are laid out in our guide to what Shopify leaves to you after collecting EU VAT.

Two Shopify features look like they might take this over, and neither does for a download store. Managed Markets makes Global-e the merchant of record, but an order with only digital products leaves you as the merchant of record, and an eligible order must contain a physical product too. Shopify Tax's automated filing covers US sales tax returns only, is closed to new enrollment and is ending — our US sales tax guide covers that wind-down.

What You Get for Selling Files, Courses and Memberships

On Payhip, the tools a digital seller reaches for are product types and settings inside the platform. Shopify is a general store, so the same jobs are done by its free apps, by links to tools you already use, or by apps from the App Store.

Files, License Keys and PDF Stamping

On Payhip, each uploaded file can be up to 5 GB, and a few executable types are blocked for security. License keys are built in, though Payhip leaves enforcing them up to you, and PDF stamping, once you switch it on, prints the buyer's email and purchase date on every page of portrait PDFs under 250 MB. The download limit is 5 by default, and you can change it.

Shopify's Digital Products app sends files automatically with no access limit by default, and the limit you can set counts per link, not per customer. The free app does not generate license keys or stamp PDFs — no Shopify page we have found describes either as a built-in feature — so on Shopify those come from third-party delivery apps. Which protection layer each app adds is covered in our guide to protecting digital products on Shopify.

Courses, Memberships and Coaching

Payhip treats each of these as a product type:

• Courses support seven lesson types — video, text, quiz, download, survey, assignment and embed — and Payhip's features page lists drip and certificates as included.
• Memberships take as many pricing plans as you like: one-time, recurring, or a set number of months.
• Coaching integrates directly with Calendly and Zoom.

On Shopify the free route is narrower. Shopify Subscriptions, also free, creates auto-billed subscriptions that renew weekly, monthly or yearly.

The Digital Products app can sell access as a link from supported providers, among them Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific and Calendly, so the course or the booking lives on that provider. Which course apps turn a store into a course site is covered in our guide to selling courses on Shopify.

This is real overhead on Shopify for a creator: each missing tool is another app to install, and whatever those apps charge is not in the break-even lines above. We put numbers on app costs in how much Shopify apps add to a monthly cost.

To see Payhip's course, membership and coaching products set up end to end, this tutorial by creator Aurelius Tjin (January 2025) walks through them from 18:28. It is one creator's walkthrough; prices and fees in this article come from Payhip's current pages, not from the video's pricing chapter.

Physical Products: Where Payhip Stops

Payhip is not files-only. On a physical product you can add an SKU, track inventory and add a weight, and Payhip prices shipping from that weight and the buyer's location using rates you set.

The limits show up at the edges. Payhip has no print-on-demand feature; its only direct print integration is Bookvault, for books, and for other items its help points to connectors such as Pabbly Connect to Printful. The Payhip pages we read on physical products and integrations do not describe point-of-sale selling, catalog sync to Instagram, Facebook or Google Shopping, or stock across several warehouse locations.

Shopify sells downloads beside physical stock: physical and digital products live in one store, a file or link can be added to a product you already sell, and a digital product simply has shipping switched off. If your files are the add-on to a physical line rather than the whole business, that is the argument for Shopify more than any fee line.

Your Domain, Customer List and Payouts on Payhip

Three practical worries come up before a creator commits to a hosted checkout, and Payhip's help center answers each:

• Your own domain. You can connect a domain you bought elsewhere by updating a few DNS records; Payhip has guides for GoDaddy and other registrars.
• Your customer list. The Customers page exports your customers as a CSV file, and students, members or clients export with date, enrollment-status and product filters.
• Your money. Each payment goes directly to your connected processor at the time of purchase. Stripe then pays your bank daily by default, and PayPal withdrawals are manual unless you switch on auto transfers, available only for PayPal Premier and Business accounts.

Payhip's pricing page says it deposits sales immediately after a transaction; in practice the timing is your processor's, as the Stripe and PayPal defaults above show.

Can You Run Payhip Inside a Shopify Store?

A Shopify store can sell some products through Payhip. Payhip's help center explains how to embed a Payhip button on your Shopify store: you generate the button code in Payhip and add it to your theme, as a Direct Purchase or an Add to Cart button.

Before setting it up, count what it costs: the button sells your Payhip products through Payhip's checkout, and Payhip's billing help says its Free Forever fee of 5% is charged on "any transactions processed through your Payhip site", cut to 2% on Plus and to none on Pro — on top of what you pay Shopify. It makes sense for a handful of files that need Payhip's VAT handling or license keys, not as a way around either platform's fees.

The Bottom Line

The choice is a fee model and a tax model at once. Payhip's percentage is cheapest while sales are small, and Payhip handles the digital EU and UK VAT and the US sales tax that on Shopify you would register for and file yourself; Shopify's flat plan is cheapest once sales are steady and leaves that work with you.

Frequently Asked Questions