Gumroad - Introducing Gumroad Memberships

Creators have made over $350,000,000 selling with Gumroad. The vast majority of these sales have been one-time purchases. Single-product sales are a great model for lots of creators, but many others want to offer their audience the option to pay monthly or yearly for their work. Today, we're thrilled to announce Memberships, an evolutionary upgrade to Subscriptions that gives creators the tools they need to create paid communities, courses, software, newsletters, and more.

Recurring revenue is powerful fuel for your business. Nothing beats the rush of excitement that comes from a successful launch day, but knowing when your biggest fans will pay you next adds stability and predictability to your income. With this in mind, we've spent the past year building features that bring eight years of experience selling single products to offering Memberships. We also handle taxes, chargebacks, compliance, and fraud for Memberships in the exact same way we do for other products.

Some people reading this announcement have already used these features as we've released them over time, leading to over $1 million a month in recurring income. For you, we've prepared documentation at https://help.gumroad.com/memberships to make sure you're aware of every feature available for Memberships so that you can offer them to your audience. Here are some examples of what you can build with memberships:

• https://gumroad.com/trendsvc/membership a newsletter.
• https://gumroad.com/supersummary/membership a content library subscription.
• https://gumroad.com/pavelkuligin/membership a software subscription.
• https://gumroad.com/refugeingrief/membership a community.

Offer precise options with tiers.

One of the biggest efforts in the Memberships push has been creating powerful and flexible tiers. You can think of every tier on a Membership as its own separate Gumroad product, they are that customizable. You can set different prices, different content, and different workflows for each tier, allowing your audience to pick their preferred way of supporting your work. Popular features like pay-what-you-want pricing and purchase-specific posts are also available within tiers.

Similarly, upgrades, downgrades, cancellations, and refunds take on new complexities with multiple tiers of recurring payments. Gumroad Memberships now gives your customers the ability to change their own tiers. Other customer management tasks like issuing refunds are easy with our existing customer management dashboard.

Built for your first fan, here for the whole crowd.

We have everything you need to get started building your first membership product for free. Create a free Gumroad account to build and publish a landing page, an email list, and as many memberships and products as you want. When you are ready to launch or are beginning to find traction, upgrade to to a paid plan for lower payment processing fees and more powerful features like unlimited posts and HD video streaming.

Every month, we tweet out how many people made various levels of income in the previous month, from $10 all the way up to $100,000. We build for creators at every level. Often, it is that first sale, those first few dollars that open people's minds to the possibility of earning meaningful income as a creator. We spend a lot of time thinking about creators making hundreds or thousands of dollars a month and the impact we can have on their lives.

For creators making as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, our years of implementing for business-focused use cases shine. Our service is incredibly scalable and supports integrations, analytics, embeds, custom domains, custom styles, and much more. With the Gumroad API, you can build exactly what your business needs as you grow. All of this support for high-volume sellers applies to memberships as well, and we look forward to see creators set and break new records for recurring revenue with Gumroad in the future.

Consolidate on a single service.

Many creators use Gumroad for one-off digital products while using platforms like Patreon to collect subscription revenue. Memberships gives those creators the option to consolidate on one platform. Switching platforms is a big change, can take a lot of work, and can even cause churn in established products, but lower overhead (both in operational time and in fees) makes the investment worthwhile. We invite creators from all platforms to give Gumroad Memberships a try, and you can always run multiple platforms concurrently, directing new customers to Gumroad while you make the switch.

On Gumroad, your audience is just that: yours. We offer easy exports for your customer list and mailing list. You get the email address of everyone who buys from you. You're in control of your business and if you outgrow Gumroad, we make leaving easy too.

Launching Memberships is part of our efforts to be the best place for creators to earn a living on the internet...

...And this is just the beginning.

Just as we made the investment in carefully integrating Memberships features with every other aspect of Gumroad, we'll do the same with what we build in the future. Take a look at our public roadmap to see what we're working on next, and know that upcoming upgrades to affiliates, payment methods, and more will apply equally to memberships, making them even more powerful over time.

But it's not just about the features. While we believe we can ship the highest-quality offering, we are able to do that in part because we take a different tack than many of our competitors. We are public about how much money we help our creators earn, and we share our own financials monthly to ensure that creators feel secure about building their own businesses on top of Gumroad.

And as a sustainable, profitable company, we can guarantee we will be around for the long term. The life of a creator can be a long one, and we are commited to being around and growing with you.