It’s hard to overstate just how much my opinion on Gumroad has changed since the beginning of 2025. I’m not mad, just disappointed. Incredibly disappointed.

Strike One: Unintended Consequences

Let me preface this by saying I get problems with email delivery. There’s a whole system of checks and ranking that is based almost entirely on reputation. And it goes layers deep: bad behavior by one entity can risk the reputation of a provider serving thousands of people.

So I understand why Gumroad made the change they did: sometime after December 1, 2024, Gumroad instituted a new policy: only sellers with $100 in sales could send emails:

A reasonable position. Gumroad provides a lot for free, and while they have a lot of features related to email marketing (which might have gotten them into trouble), it mostly exists for creators on other platforms.

But this decision failed to consider the product holistically. See, Gumroad has another feature called memberships. Someone subscribes for a recurring fee and gets access to a pool of content that creators can consistently update, most similar to another platform that misspells “patron.” A creator can create a post on a membership, and members can comment on those posts.

Except… for Gumroad, posts are emails. So are notifications. In fact, there is literally no other way to alert members of new content in the membership except through email. Email that is now off limits to new creators.

This policy change hit me three months into a new membership project I was attempting. I was treating my membership product like a newsletter which—as far as I can tell—is how it’s intended to be used. I was putting out regular content and trying to build value over time. And overnight, my sole ability to connect with my customers was yanked away.

To add insult to injury, despite the error message saying “$100 in sales,” the actual threshold was $100 in payouts. Which means the actual threshold was more like $115 in sales once Gumroad and credit card fees were taken care of.

Now, I’ll admit that all of this is just based on my experience with the product. I’d love to link to a page documenting the change, but…

Strike Two: This Isn’t Helping

I couldn’t find Gumroad’s comprehensive help site. I’d previously read through it to get a feel for what was and wasn’t allowed on the site and to make sure that my plans for my project fell within scope for the platform. But now, when I needed information on a new policy, it was nowhere to be found.

Eventually, by going to a completely separate page (payment info?) in the Gumroad admin, I stumbled upon an AI chatbot. With nothing else to lose, I asked how to send emails. It pointed me to buttons that didn’t exist. I then asked more specifically about the new policy, and it told me what I already knew. (It did not tell me about the sales v. payouts threshold.) It did provide some color as to why the policy was implemented, but it suggested building my audience organically through social media.

Social media I couldn’t tell my customers about because Gumroad had taken away my only means of contact!

Finally, I asked how to contact Gumroad support. It pointed me to the help site that didn’t exist and the contact form within. I eventually found an email on another page and sent a message there; the response was very obviously from the same chatbot.

Chatbots are fine as one of many options to access support information. But as the only option? When it’s been trained on a help site that references itself (and therefore references a site that doesn’t exist)?

Strike Three: It Doesn’t Mean That…

I’ll admit, this one’s pedantic. But I got this email this morning:

Except… it’s not. Not technically.

Looking at the GitHub repo, the code is released under the Gumroad Community License 1.0, a custom license. This is usually frowned upon, but not necessarily a dealbreaker for an open source release.

What is a dealbreaker is this condition:

You may use the software under this license only if (1) your company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or government entity.

This conflicts with article 6 of the Open Source Definition (emphasis mine):

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

Now, to be fair, they didn’t capitalize “open source” in the email. But the point remains: The Gumroad Community License is, by definition, not Open Source.

Is this a big deal in the broad scheme of things? No, not really. But it speaks to how I’ve been feeling about Gumroad as a whole…

Who Cares?

I think what is disappointing me about this whole thing is the lack of care for the product. The changes to email causing memberships to be unusable speaks to an organization that doesn’t have someone watching over the product as a whole. These seem like short-term decisions that hurt the product’s reputation more than solve whatever problem they were intended to solve.

For a product that I was excited to find reasons to use, this hurts. Like I said, I’m not mad; just disappointed.

And I’d tell them to their face if they had a working support email.

Edit: 24 hours later, I’ve closed my account. A bad product is disappointing; working with the current US administration to “cut costs” is unacceptable.