I love the idea! This makes it really easy to sell scripts (e.g. your own jQuery plugins or whatever) for $5 where it would normally be too much work to set up some payment processing.

The 30% cut is way too high though. Especially for higher priced links - I wouldn't want to sell my $99 game engine[1] through your service. I think something like "5%, but at least $0.30" would make more sense. But maybe having such "highly" priced links wasn't your intention in the first place?

[1] http://impactjs.com/ (Can't mention it often enough :))

I disagree. Take a bare minimum of 15%. That seems to be about what's competitive for non-merchant-account payment systems. You'll need to keep margins up.

Exactly. And keep in mind, you're competing against someone setting up their own web store. If I didn't use your service, I probably wouldn't go through all of the trouble of setting something up. In that scenario, I make $0. If you charge 30%, and I price my stuff at $10.00, I make $7 per transaction, which is $7 more than I would have made without your service.

No, that's definitely a good point. I'm going to switch to a .30c + x% (tiered) model - aim to make at least $70-80 of that $99 if you use Gumroad.

I'm also thinking hard about "Preferred" accounts. Basically, you send an email to sahil@slavingia.com in the next 24 hours, whenever I do your balance at the end of the month you get as much as I can give without losing money on the transaction. ;)

Paypal already takes $0.30 plus a small percentage. I think the service is a neat idea, but microtransactions are not a solved problem.

Thinking about it, Gumroad is the perfect application for Bitcoins:

http://www.bitcoin.org/

I can't imagine bitcoins in their current implementation gaining traction as a form of payment with 'regular folks'. I mean the whole idea is complicated enough that even I as a technically minded person have trouble fully understanding how it works.

Plus it's not clear to me that there are enough bitcoins to go around. Some comments below point out the fact that bitcoins can be divided down to multiple decimal places. That's great and all but I can't imagine a 'regular person' being comfortable with the idea that they currently posses .00152 bitcoins. I doubt most people think of a penny as .01 dollars, because fractions are confusing. Plus even if that .00152 bitcoins is enough to buy a car, it still just seems like a minuscule amount.

I don't mean to be a huge downer. I think bitcoins are an interesting idea, but if you want to sell things now a more traditional payment method would probably make sense.

No, it isn't. Bitcoins are clever and all, but how many people would be willing to set it up just to see a link?

Sure, at the moment only nerds use Bitcoins, but this _could_ become as universal as PayPal is today.

But yes, it probably doesn't make much (commercial) sense right now.

> Bitcoins [...] _could_ become as universal as PayPal is today

Putting aside numerous other issues, bitcoin.org states "The total eventual circulation will be 21 million bitcoins".

[EDIT: DanI-S pointed out that bitcoins can already be subdivided. So this was switched from "there are too few bitcoins to support even American e-commerce" to "bitcoins are not valuable enough to support even American e-commerce". The number of fractional bitcoins is still an issue, but less immediately.]

At the current ~$0.70 / bitcoin, this means that every American will be able to have ~$0.05 in his or her electronic wallet, once all bitcoins are generated. Assuming that the rest of the world does not participate at all and that bitcoins are evenly distributed.

Sure, you could imagine an instant dollar-to-bitcoin-to-dollar conversion at the point of payment. Or you could imagine a bitcoin2.org that generates more coins. Or you could hope for a massive surge in the value of the bitcoin.

I'd put my money on Paypal sticking around, though.

The obvious hole in your chain of reasoning is that "$0.70/bitcoin" would obviously change when every American attempted to fill his wallet with bitcoins.

Bitcoins are already subdivisable to a whole bunch of decimal places.

Bitcoins probably won't take off (cf the failures of all the other alternative digital currencies so far), but the whole number of bitcoins is no more a roadblock than the limited number of ounces of gold in the world was to getting everyone using gold as currency. The problems basically lie elsewhere.

I'd put my money on paypal sticking around, but I'd also expect the volume on the Bitcoin/USD markets to increase as the value climbs (presumably from rate of new bitcoins from mining declining). I think we could see services using fractional bitcoins behind the scenes and USD (or euros) end to end.

I bet you could make some money facilitating lower fee transactions backed by bitcoins.

Do you actually believe the price of a Bitcoin would remain statically frozen in the present, if everyone was using it?

Just a crazy idea, when something like NaCl catches on perhaps gumroad could generate bitcoins client-side in lieu of payment?

[EDIT: the text below is correct, but a bit too snarky. My apologies.

Also, the site owner could just trust the client to actually run his/her bitcoin-generating code for a couple of hours and send any generated coins - this should earn him/her ~$0.20/hour, rounded down because lots of people have crufty computers. Still not feasible, and generating bitcoins will only get harder in the future, but not as bad as I suggest below.]

Sure, if you're willing to leave your browser consuming 100% CPU for a couple of weeks. And if you're willing to pay the entire resulting 50 bitcoins (~$40-45) you generated (at the cost of ~$60 in electricty, I'd guess)[1], or trust the site to return you the rest. In either case, you'd need to trust the site code to tell you that it's generated a coin, instead of silently sending it back to the server and continuing to run.

At least, that's my understanding of how bitcoins work.

[1] Only GPU-based generation is currently profitable, and there's no way NaCl can be given full access to the GPU - GPUs typically have DMA access, so being able to run arbitrary code on them is more or less equivalent to kernel-level access. In theory, you could verify the GPU code - but that's an enormous job, and there are lots of GPUs that you'd need to check for security holes. And security was not design criterion #1 for these devices, I'd guess.

Something like DirectX/OpenGL access makes sense, but running crypto algorithms through OpenGL (instead of CUDA or the like) is probably infeasible.

Good points. I figured it was probably totally infeasible, thanks for filling me in on why.

I like that idea. It seems like microgeneration is a feature Bitcoin is currently suffering from a lack of. As competition increases, generation seems to be more and more centralized. A low-traffic way to generate small amounts of Bitcoin in a peer-to-peer network would be a great addition to a future Bitcoin protocol.

This doesn't seem like a good match. With different hardware and prices of electricity out there it would be hard to make the system fair for everyone. Also, although minting coins is an important feature of Bitcoin, it seems there's a certain amount of miners needed to offset threat of fraudulent transactions; going significantly above that amount is just wasting planet's resources.

PayPal has a lower tier for sales under $12: https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render...

Still, you need to take fees into consideration. Also, the seller has to pay another PayPal fee when transferring the money every month.

You definitely don't want to use PayPal for a service like this, unless you want to lose all your un-swept earnings when they catch on.

PayPal's TOS specifically prohibit running a payment gateway or aggregation service, ie collecting payments on behalf of many sellers and then re-distributing the proceeds.

A service like this would almost certainly draw their attention, since one could be selling warez, pr0n, stolen credit card numbers, or any number of other naughty files through this service...

Someone else posted a tale of woe within the last month about their "experience marketplace" getting impounded by PayPal, ostensibly for the same reason.

And it has to be a completely separate account. They basically force you to either pay way too much or violate their terms by having two separate accounts. :/

Paypal released a micropayment platform this year http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/paypals_micropayment_so...

<<The solution was first announced last October when the company said that the upcoming feature would offer "a competitive fee structure for micropayments, with pricing at 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12.">>

It's a weekend project. Implement your own and charge less.

Suggestion: you should now build a second app which generates a stream of single-use urls that are invalidated as soon as they are accessed, and which proxy through to an original base url. Then hook the two apps together and profit.

I would include a sample URL or two on the homepage - I was confused as to how I would get people to buy/what the sales page would look like - but thanks for clarifying with the attached URL.

Cool idea! One quick thing: I would change the "(Minus our cut)" wording to something a little more friendly. Maybe transaction fee or something along those lines.

how are you using stripe already?

I'm friends with one of the founders + I asked repeatedly.

Love the idea! I'd also love a thumbnail/pic for each link, though. Something that might give them a little more evidence of what they're getting into.

What does Stripe's fee structure look like?

Stripe reps have stated repeatedly that whatever their fee structure looks like right now, it's not representative of what it will look like when they come out of beta.

The only thing that I've seen that was commented on, but not objected to, is that it's 'similar to' PayPal fee structures. But even that's up to being refuted.

I've tried it and purchased on my own link.

1) How soon until the money reaches PayPal? 2) There are no assurances that the CC data is safe. It looks to be sent over HTTPS, but you're assumed to be trusted.

Awesome! I'm doing Net 60 as that's what Stripe does. The CC data is safe, but of course there's no reinforcement on-site. I'll add something.

Net 60 days? I would assume that users expect near real-time if PayPal is the back end. 60 days sounds way too long.

I'd assume it's at least partly to deal with fraud.

Posted on it as well. http://blog.louisgray.com/2011/04/gumroad-launches-to-sell-d...

Wow - that's fast feedback! On a separate side-note would you be interested in early access to apps for similar sort of reviews / blog postings, or is that inappropriate to ask?

That's not inappropriate to ask at all. It's a fun hobby. Look through my site and you'll see I've done this a long time and have some big wins that launched first with me.

(TweetDeck, Beluga two examples)

Gumroad will be another. :)

Could you add the option to let the payee set the price? That would be great for donations and pay-what-it's-worth-to-you transactions. :)

That's one hell of a cut.