Selling without Etsy is not a trick. It is a trade: you give up an audience that already exists, and in exchange you keep more of each sale.
Etsy’s fees buy you two things: a listing fee of $0.20 that keeps the item visible, renewed automatically every four months whether or not it has sold — so an unsold listing costs $0.60 across a year — and, on a sale, a 6.5% transaction fee plus 3% and $0.25 in payment processing. Those numbers are the cost of being inside a search engine with existing buyers already typing in what you sell.
Neither fee is optional once you are listed there, and neither is hidden — both are published policy, not a surprise discovered on a statement. The question “sell digital downloads without Etsy” is really a question about whether that specific combination of costs is still worth paying once you have an alternative way for a buyer to find you.
Take Etsy out of the picture and the 6.5% transaction fee disappears along with it, along with the $0.20 recurring listing charge. What remains is whatever marketplace or channel you replace it with. If that is us, listing is 10¢ renewed every four months (30¢ a year), and the only charge on a sale is the card’s own processing cost, passed through, plus 3% — no transaction fee stacked on top of processing.
This is the part a fee comparison cannot fix. Etsy’s fees are partly the cost of its own search traffic; a cheaper listing fee does not generate buyers on its own. Selling without Etsy works best when you already have a way to put the link in front of someone — a social following, an email list, a QR code on something physical — and are now deciding where that click should land. Compare the actual numbers for your price at /tools/fees before deciding where.
Testing whether a different channel works does not require closing the Etsy listing, and it is cheap to try: 10¢ to list with us, renewed at 30¢ a year if nothing sells, against the $0.60 a year Etsy already charges for the exact same unsold item. The downside of trying a second place is measured in dimes, not dollars, which is most of the reason to just run the test rather than debate it.
What actually decides whether the test is worth running is not the fee at all — it is whether there is anywhere to send a buyer who is not already searching Etsy. A listing with nowhere to be found, on any platform, earns nothing regardless of whether it cost 10¢ or 20¢ to put up. The fee comparison only matters once that other question has an honest answer.
Keep the actual numbers in front of you rather than a memory of them: /tools/fees stays current if either fee ever changes, and a page like this one does not get silently rewritten to match.
Yes, if you were relying on Etsy search to find you. If you already have your own way to reach buyers, the discovery problem is already solved and the fee stack is what is actually left to decide.
Not with us - see the separate guide on selling without a business account for what is and is not required.
Yes, though most sellers keep both running rather than closing one - the cost of listing in a second place is small enough that switching is rarely necessary.
Part of our guide to Selling digital downloads.