bye gumroad

I’ve been using Gumroad as a digital asset store for years now, as well as for some of my physical goods. But I’ve been wanting to extricate myself from it for a while now, and recent developments have finally pushed me all the way there, and the timing was good given I’ve gotten a Dealer’s Den booth at Furality Somna.

My digital assets are now primarily on itch.io, and physical goods are now just on Etsy for now, although I’m not a huge fan of Etsy either, and my physical books aren’t currently available anywhere (not that they ever sell to begin with). I guess I should look at my ko-fi shop as an alternative for that stuff.

Anyway. I’ve already sent (manually-generated) itch.io claim keys to everyone who paid for my VRChat assets, and for folks who bought my books on Gumroad they can request a download key as well if they want to be able to redownload it from itch.io for some reason.

Now to figure out if I can sell my shares in the company…

On bandcamp, gumroad, and itch.io

So, recently there’s been a lot of upset in the world of independent creation, because of some very questionable moves taken by Gumroad and Bandcamp, two of the beloved platforms for sharing download-based content.

I’ve already written some of my thoughts about Gumroad, but the recent Bandcamp announcement is still very much in the gnashing-of-teeth phase.

As is the case for both platforms, the general consensus should be that everyone using those platforms should move to itch.io. While itch is a pretty good platform for a lot of things, it’s not a perfect replacement for Gumroad or Bandcamp, and I don’t think that making it a good replacement for those things would be very well-aligned with what itch excels at.

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An immediate addendum

So, I was willing to give Sahil the benefit of the doubt; I thought he might have simply been NFT-curious or keeping his options open. But that’s just because I wasn’t looking.

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An open letter to Sahil Lavingia re: NFTs

I am against NFTs.

I am an investor in Gumroad, not because I expect my shares to ever be worth anything but because I love Gumroad’s mission. It’s probably the best place online for independent creators to sell both digital and physical goods. Every now and then I look to see what other merch-fulfillment options exist out there, and none of them are nearly as fair to creators as Gumroad. The next-best one is Etsy, which charges monthly per-item listing fees and is part of a bigger problem with long-tail economics in this day and age. I do not have an Etsy store, or any plans to open one. (Most of my physical merch I sell on Storenvy just because I’ve been too lazy to migrate it over to Gumroad. Storenvy is pretty awful too, although for different reasons than Etsy.)

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