Stripe vs Iyzico vs Gumroad for digital products

I have used all three. The honest answer is that the right checkout depends entirely on where you are in the journey, not which one is "best". Here is the comparison I wish someone had given me eighteen months ago.

The 30-second summary

• Gumroad is for sales 1 through 10, while you are still proving the offer.
• Stripe is for sales 10 onward once you want to own the customer.
• Iyzico is for Turkish-market sales at any volume because TR card UX matters.
• Lemon Squeezy / Paddle are for founders selling into many VAT jurisdictions who do not want to manage tax themselves.

The wrong question is "which one". The right question is "which combination fits where I am right now".

Gumroad: the unbeatable on-ramp

Setup time: 20 minutes. Fee: 10% flat (or higher with their add-ons). You give them your bank info, upload a product, copy the buy link. Done.

What you get: a checkout that takes any card on Earth, sends the receipt, handles VAT for EU buyers, hosts the file, generates the license key. What you give up: 10% of every sale, the customer's email address sitting in someone else's database, and any ability to instrument the funnel beyond Gumroad's basic dashboard.

The moment to leave: when you can plot ten sales on a chart. The 10% on those ten sales pays for two days of Stripe wiring with margin to spare, and the customer data alone is worth the switch.

Stripe: the standard for owning the customer

Setup time: two full days for a first-time integration, plus a half-day of refund testing. Fee: 2.9% + $0.30 per international transaction (varies by country).

What you get: hosted Checkout that is PCI-compliant by default, Apple Pay and Google Pay out of the box, automatic VAT calculation through Stripe Tax, a Customer Portal where buyers handle their own refunds and invoices, webhooks that tell you exactly what happened and when, and a clean API for everything else.

What you have to handle yourself: the webhook handler that listens for checkout.session.completed, signature verification, idempotency to handle retries, the database row that records the order, the license key generator, the email that contains the download link. Nothing in that list is hard. All of it requires you to actually do it.

For ToolGenX I built this in a two-day weekend once. The webhook is 80 lines. The order persistence is another 60. The license generator is 30. The email template is the longest file at 120 lines. Total: about 290 lines of code that did not exist before.

Iyzico: the Turkish-market answer

Setup time: similar to Stripe, two days if you have not used the API before. Fee: 2.85% + 0.35 TRY per transaction with a "single withdrawal" model.

What it does better than Stripe for the Turkish market:

• Local card acceptance. Some TR-issued cards behave oddly on Stripe's 3D-Secure flow. Iyzico's is tuned for them.
• Taksit (installment payments). A common expectation for purchases above ~$50 in Turkey. Stripe does not offer this on TR-issued cards.
• E-invoice (e-fatura) integration. Iyzico's merchant panel exports the data your accountant needs to issue compliant TR invoices.
• TRY-native pricing. No currency conversion math the buyer has to do.

For a shop that targets the Turkish market — which mine does, since I am in Istanbul and Turkish customers are a meaningful chunk of the audience — Iyzico in parallel with Stripe is not optional. It is table stakes.

The "merchant of record" alternatives

Lemon Squeezy and Paddle handle one thing Stripe does not handle by default: they become the merchant of record, which means they collect and remit VAT and sales tax in every jurisdiction you sell into. You never file an EU MOSS return.

The premium for this is roughly 5% on top of card processing fees, totalling around 5-8% per sale depending on plan. That is more than Stripe + Stripe Tax (~3.4% combined), but less than the cost of a fractional CFO who can navigate cross-border digital goods tax for you.

The case for them:

• You sell into 10+ tax jurisdictions and do not want to think about it.
• You are not in the EU yourself, so cross-border filings would be painful.
• You value the time-to-market more than the fee.

The case against:

• You are in the EU or are willing to enable Stripe Tax, in which case the same outcome costs you half as much.
• You want the customer relationship to be with your brand, not the platform.
• You are willing to do a small amount of accounting work.

For ToolGenX I went Stripe + Iyzico because I am in Turkey, my accountant handles the cross-border filings, and the fee delta over five years is real money.

What a sane setup looks like

For a small digital products shop selling to a mix of EU + US + TR buyers, here is the configuration I actually shipped:

• Stripe Checkout for international card payments, with Stripe Tax enabled. Hosted page; we never touch a card number.
• Iyzico Checkout Form as the second gateway — accepts the same global Visa, Mastercard, and Amex as Stripe, with taksit (installments), Turkish lira pricing, and e-invoice enabled for buyers in Türkiye. Embedded in our checkout page, not a redirect.
• Provider picker at checkout: a simple radio button group, defaulting to whichever provider matches the buyer's IP country.
• One database (Supabase) holding orders, line items, licenses, and the consent + withdrawal evidence required by EU law.
• One webhook handler per provider writing to that same database, with idempotency on the provider's event ID.
• One refund pathway: the EU-mandated Withdrawal Button in the buyer's account, which auto-checks eligibility and fires the provider's refund API.

That is the whole architecture. It fits in your head. It is what every other small digital shop converges on after their first or second rebuild.

When to stop using Gumroad

Stop the moment the 10% fee on a single month exceeds the cost of the Stripe wiring (~2 days of your time, valued at your hourly rate). For most solo founders this happens between sale 5 and sale 25. Mine was sale 12.

After that, leaving Gumroad up as a backup checkout is fine. Leaving it as the primary checkout costs you money and signal every month.

When to add Iyzico

The moment a Turkish customer asks for taksit, or the moment you realise your TR sales are stalling because of card friction. If you are a TR-based founder, do it on day one. The compliance and tax paperwork is the same either way and the conversion lift on TR cards is meaningful.

What this does not solve

Payment infrastructure is plumbing. It does not solve distribution, it does not solve the wrong offer, it does not solve "nobody knows my site exists". If you are reading this because your sales are flat, the answer is almost never "the wrong checkout". It is almost always the wrong channel or the wrong message.

But once you have signal — once buyers are showing up and bouncing at the redirect — fixing the checkout is the highest-leverage thing you will do all month.

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Part of the solo founder series. The Stripe + Iyzico setup described above is what powers checkout on ToolGenX itself. See the refund policy for the consent and withdrawal flow built on top of it.