A course creator with 40,000 email subscribers and a designer with three finished Canva template packs are, from a monetisation standpoint, facing the exact same decision: where does the actual selling happen. Neither question gets answered by asking which platform is “best” — Gumroad, WooCommerce, and a dedicated LMS aren’t ranked against each other on a single scale. They’re built around different assumptions about who already has an audience and who’s still building the infrastructure to reach one.
In my experience helping people configure whichever of these three they’ve already half-committed to, the platform choice usually gets made backwards — someone picks WooCommerce because it feels more professional, or Gumroad because a creator they follow uses it, and only afterward discovers the fee structure or the setup requirement doesn’t actually fit their situation. The real deciding factor isn’t which platform has the most features. It’s whether you’re paying for infrastructure you already have — a WordPress site with real traffic — or infrastructure you don’t, and how much of every sale you’re willing to hand over in exchange for skipping that build.
This site already covers the mechanics of each option on its own: selling digital downloads in WooCommerce, selling online courses with WordPress, and selling eBooks or templates and printables. What’s missing is the decision that comes before any of that setup work — which of these three a product should actually live on in the first place. That’s what this covers: the real combined cost of each option once processing fees and hosting are added to the headline number, not just the number a pricing page leads with, and the two genuinely different products “a dedicated LMS” can mean depending which one gets picked.
What Actually Decides This
Three real questions determine which of these fits, not one. Does a WordPress site with actual traffic already exist, or would the infrastructure be built from scratch just to sell one product? Gumroad needs neither — it’s a hosted page and a payment link, live in minutes, in exchange for 10% + $0.50 per direct sale on top of standard card processing (a combined cut closer to 13% + $0.80, not the 10% figure alone), or a flat 30% if a buyer finds the product through Gumroad’s own Discover marketplace instead of a creator’s own link. WooCommerce charges nothing per sale — no percentage cut at all — but only pays off once a site is already paying for its own hosting and traffic regardless; without that, it’s building a storefront to sell one thing. A dedicated LMS splits into two different products depending which one gets chosen: Teachable and Thinkific are hosted, flat-monthly-fee platforms with no WordPress site involved, while LearnDash is a WordPress plugin running on the same hosting stack WooCommerce does. None of the three send buyers the way a real marketplace would — Gumroad’s Discover tab is the one partial exception, and it costs three times the direct-sale fee for the privilege.
The Three Options, Side by Side
| Gumroad | WooCommerce (self-hosted) | Dedicated LMS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost model | 10% + $0.50 per direct sale, plus separate card processing; 30% flat, all-in, via Discover | Free core plugin — you pay hosting, domain, and card processing separately, no percentage cut | Hosted (Teachable/Thinkific): flat monthly fee, some tiers add a transaction %. Self-hosted (LearnDash): annual licence, no per-sale cut |
| Setup time | Minutes — upload a file, set a price, get a link | Hours to a day — needs an existing WordPress site with hosting already running | Hosted: under an hour. LearnDash: the same setup as WooCommerce, plus the plugin |
| Who owns the traffic | Discover can send buyers you didn’t have — at three times the direct-sale fee | Entirely yours — no platform sends you buyers | No real buyer marketplace either, despite the “platform” framing — Teachable and Thinkific are storefront software, not Udemy |
| Tax handling | Gumroad collects and remits sales tax/VAT globally as merchant of record | You’re the merchant of record — VAT/sales tax is your own responsibility | Same as WooCommerce for both hosted and self-hosted — the LMS doesn’t act as merchant of record |
| Best fit | Testing an idea, low volume, no existing site or budget to build one | Meaningful, sustained volume on a site that already gets traffic | Course structure — lessons, quizzes, drip content, certificates — matters more than plain file delivery |
Gumroad: No Setup, a Real Cut
Gumroad’s entire pitch is that there’s nothing to set up. Upload a file, set a price, get a shareable link or embed a button on an existing page — no hosting account, no WordPress installation, no payment gateway to configure separately. Checked live today against Gumroad’s own pricing page and its fee documentation: a sale made through a creator’s own profile or direct link costs 10% + $0.50 per transaction, and that figure explicitly does not include credit card processing, billed separately at the standard 2.9% + $0.30. Add both together and a direct sale’s real combined cut lands closer to 13% + $0.80 than the 10% figure Gumroad leads with on its own pricing page — a gap worth knowing before assuming the headline number is the whole story. Sales that come through Gumroad’s own Discover marketplace, where buyers browse Gumroad directly rather than arriving via a creator’s own link, are simpler in one respect and worse in another: a flat 30% fee, all-in, with no separate processing charge on top — but three times the direct-sale rate in exchange for whatever traffic Discover itself sends.
Gumroad charges no monthly fee at any sales volume, and — checked directly against its own sales tax documentation — now acts as merchant of record for every sale, meaning it collects and remits sales tax and VAT globally without a creator having to register for or track any of it themselves. That detail is worth weighing specifically against WooCommerce’s side of this comparison: this site’s own guide to selling digital downloads in WooCommerce flags EU VAT on digital goods as the part most setup guides skip entirely, precisely because WooCommerce leaves that obligation with the seller. Gumroad’s fee is, in part, the price of making that problem someone else’s.
WooCommerce: You Own It, You Pay For It Piece by Piece
WooCommerce itself costs nothing — it’s a free plugin, and this site’s own guide to selling digital downloads in WooCommerce covers the two checkboxes, Virtual and Downloadable, that turn a normal product listing into file delivery with no separate extension required. What WooCommerce doesn’t do is bundle the infrastructure Gumroad throws in for free. This site’s own breakdown of what a WordPress website actually costs puts a basic self-hosted site at roughly $100–$300 a year in domain and shared hosting alone, with an extra $100–$400 a year once ecommerce is genuinely part of the plan — premium extensions for shipping or subscriptions, and often a step up from basic shared hosting once a catalogue and its checkout traffic outgrow it.
On top of that sits the actual payment processing, which WooCommerce doesn’t touch either — a card processor does, separately, on every transaction. Checked live against Stripe’s own pricing page today: a domestic EEA card is charged 1.5% + €0.25 through Stripe, rising to 3.15% + €0.25 (plus a further 2% if currency conversion is needed) for an international card. Stripe’s pricing page resolved to its Netherlands figures for this check rather than a US-specific page, so a US-based reader should expect the commonly published US rate of roughly 2.9% + $0.30 rather than the EEA figure above — the exact percentages differ by region, but the shape of the comparison holds either way. Add it up and WooCommerce takes zero percent of a sale as a platform cut — the entire fee is processing, not a platform revenue share — but that zero only means something once the fixed monthly cost of running the site is already being paid for by something else, whether that’s other products already selling or traffic the site would generate regardless. A single digital product with no existing site behind it is the wrong reason to stand up WooCommerce from scratch.
“Dedicated LMS” Is Actually Two Different Products
“A dedicated LMS” sounds like one category, and most best-platform comparisons treat it that way. It isn’t. Teachable and Thinkific are hosted platforms — the course, the checkout, and the video delivery all run on their own infrastructure, no WordPress site required at all, closer to Gumroad’s zero-setup model than to WooCommerce’s. LearnDash is the opposite kind of product entirely: a WordPress plugin that adds course structure, quizzes, and enrolment on top of a self-hosted site, running on the exact same hosting stack WooCommerce does, sold as an annual licence rather than a monthly platform fee. This site’s own guide to selling online courses with WordPress already uses a third option in this same self-hosted category, Tutor LMS, free at its core — worth knowing before assuming LearnDash is the only self-hosted path.
Checked live against each platform’s own pricing today: Teachable’s pricing page lists its Starter tier at $39 a month ($29 on annual billing), still charging a 7.5% transaction fee on top of that — the fee only drops to 0% once a creator steps up to the $89-a-month Builder tier ($69 annual) or higher, alongside standard card processing (2.9% + $0.30 for US cards, 3.9% + $0.30 for international cards). Thinkific’s equivalent tiers — Basic, Start, Grow — are priced by visitor region rather than one global figure; checked today they resolved to €53, €107, and €213 a month respectively (€39, €79, €159 on annual billing), each including Thinkific’s own built-in 2.9% processing rate. Both charge a flat fee regardless of how many courses or students sit under it — the opposite economics from Gumroad’s per-sale cut. A slow month costs the same subscription either way, but a big month doesn’t get taxed any harder once past the fee-eliminating tier.
LearnDash runs on annual licensing instead: checked live against its own pricing today, $259 a year for Essentials, $399 for Pro (adding an AI course-outline builder, advanced reporting, and cohort/group management), $599 for Elite (adding multi-instructor support and front-end course creation) — no per-student or per-sale fee at any tier, unlimited courses and learners included. LearnDash was acquired into the Liquid Web/Nexcess family, but the plugin itself stays portable to any host, the same as any other WordPress plugin — it doesn’t lock a site into a specific hosting provider the way the acquisition might suggest. Because it’s a plugin rather than a self-contained platform, its real total cost is WooCommerce’s own cost stack — domain, hosting, and a payment processor — plus the licence fee on top, not a separate standalone number.
The Same $49 Product, Three Ways
Put a $49 digital product — a course, a template pack, an eBook, the maths works the same for all three — through each option at 100 sales in a single month, $4,900 in gross revenue, and the gap between the headline fee and the real one shows up fast.
- Gumroad, direct sales: 10% + $0.50 per sale ($5.40) plus card processing at 2.9% + $0.30 ($1.72) comes to $7.12 per sale, $712 across 100 sales — net revenue around $4,188.
- WooCommerce, assuming a site and hosting already exist and are being paid for regardless: just the card-processing cut, roughly $1.72 per sale at the commonly published US rate cited above, $172 across 100 sales — net revenue around $4,728, before whatever the month’s hosting and domain cost would have run anyway.
- Teachable’s Builder tier ($89 a month, 0% transaction fee): the same $172 in card processing, plus the flat $89 subscription — net revenue around $4,639, with no server maintenance and no existing site required.
- LearnDash (Pro tier, $399 a year, roughly $33 a month amortised) on a WooCommerce-equivalent hosting stack: $172 in processing, plus roughly $20 a month in typical hosting, plus the amortised licence — net revenue around $4,675.
At this volume, every option except Gumroad’s direct-sale fee lands within about $90 of each other — the real gap sits between Gumroad and everything else, not between WooCommerce and the LMS options. Gumroad’s cost only makes sense once the alternative is not selling at all, because there’s no existing site or budget to build one on.
Matching the Platform to Where You Actually Are
No existing site, no existing audience, testing whether a product sells at all: Gumroad’s fee is the price of finding out fast, without a hosting bill accumulating regardless of whether anything sells.
An existing WordPress site with its own traffic, and either a single product or a handful sitting alongside other content: WooCommerce’s zero-percent platform cut is worth the setup once the infrastructure is already a sunk cost rather than something being built new for this one purpose.
A course specifically — lessons, quizzes, drip-fed content, completion certificates — rather than a flat file: a real LMS, hosted or self-hosted, handles structure that Gumroad and plain WooCommerce were never built for. Choose the hosted route (Teachable, Thinkific) to avoid touching WordPress at all; choose LearnDash specifically when a WordPress site — and its SEO value, and its ownership of the content — already matters more than avoiding server maintenance.
Where People Get This Wrong
- Comparing headline fees, not combined fees. Quoting Gumroad’s 10% or Teachable’s 0% on a top tier without adding card processing on top makes both look cheaper than the real number.
- Standing up WooCommerce for a single product with no existing site. All the zero-platform-cut maths above only wins once the hosting bill is already being paid for regardless of this one product.
- Treating “dedicated LMS” as one thing. Assuming Teachable and LearnDash share the same cost structure, ownership model, or setup effort, when they’re built on genuinely different assumptions about who runs the infrastructure.
- Assuming a hosted LMS sends buyers the way a marketplace does. Teachable and Thinkific are storefront software, not Udemy — they don’t discover buyers for a creator any more than WooCommerce does.
Before You Commit
None of these three is the right answer independent of the situation it’s being chosen for. The honest version of this comparison isn’t which platform wins — it’s which cost a creator is actually equipped to pay: a percentage of every sale, a fixed monthly subscription, or the time and existing infrastructure a self-hosted setup assumes are already in place. Get that part right first, and the specific plugin or tier underneath it is a much smaller decision than most best-platform comparisons make it look.
Etienne Basson works with website systems, SEO-driven site architecture, and technical implementation. He writes practical guides on building, structuring, and optimizing websites for long-term growth.