Selling simple digital templates and assets

The only genuinely scalable option here

Every other opportunity in this guide trades a finite resource: your hours, your space, your appearance. This one does not. A template that sells a hundred times costs no more to deliver than one that sells once.

The trade is that it is the slowest to produce a first payment, and the most likely to produce nothing at all.

The fee comparison that actually decides it

Etsy: $0.20 per listing (expiring after four months), 6.5% transaction fee on the displayed price, plus 3% + $0.25 payment processing. On a $10 digital sale that is roughly $1.20 in fees.

Gumroad: 10% + $0.50 per direct sale, no listing fee, no monthly fee. On the same $10 sale, $1.50. But sales made through Gumroad’s own Discover marketplace cost 30%.

On fees alone they are close. That is not the real difference.

Traffic is the real difference

Etsy has buyers already searching. Gumroad does not — it is a checkout, not a marketplace, unless you use Discover and pay 30% for the privilege.

So the question is not “which is cheaper” but “do I have an audience?” If you do, Gumroad keeps more of each sale. If you do not, Etsy’s $0.20 listing fee is buying you distribution, which is the expensive part.

Starting on Etsy and adding Gumroad later, once you have people who come to you directly, is a defensible sequence.

The failure mode

The overwhelming majority of digital template shops earn nothing, and the reason is almost always the same: a generic product in a saturated search term. “Budget spreadsheet” competes with thousands of listings. “Budget spreadsheet for freelancers with irregular income” competes with very few, and the person searching that phrase is far closer to buying.

Specificity is not a refinement here. It is the whole strategy.