Gumroad now offers Patreon-like memberships to support creators

Gumroad, which helps creators sell products online, is now allowing creators on its platform to offer memberships as an additional source of recurring revenue. With memberships, creators will be able to customize what products and content members will have access to at pricing tiers of their choosing — they can even offer a pay-what-you-want option.

By introducing memberships onto Gumroad, the platform’s existing creators won’t have to use another service like Patreon or Substack to offer some kind of membership service. In theory, they’ll now be able to use a single platform for selling one-off products and making recurring revenue through memberships. And memberships aren’t the only way to make ongoing revenue on Gumroad, as the company also has tools to sell subscription products.

Gumroad offers a suite of tools to help creators sell products online. The service lets you make a landing page, create offer codes and license keys, and use analytics tools to better understand your audience and your sales. The majority of what’s sold on Gumroad is digital goods — about 95 percent, Gumroad tells The Verge — but creators can sell physical products, too, like T-shirts.

Gumroad faces a lot of competition from other platforms, though, like Patreon, Substack, and OnlyFans. But where Gumroad tries to differentiate itself from those platforms is in transparency, CEO Sahil Lavingia told The Verge in an interview. Lavingia publishes the financials of the business every month on Twitter and even hosts open board meetings on YouTube.

“Multiple people have told me, ‘I picked Gumroad because I could see when I give Gumroad money what they actually spend money on,” Lavingia said. “I think it’s underrated how much people appreciate knowing how the business that they’re using actually functions and runs as a business.”

Memberships are available now on Gumroad.