Payhip vs Beamly

Payhip is a popular ecommerce platform for creators who want a simple way to sell digital downloads, courses, memberships, coaching, and even physical products. It is especially known for straightforward setup, a clean checkout experience, and built-in handling for EU and UK VAT on digital goods.

Beamly is an all-in-one creator platform built around an owned website. It is designed for versatile creators who want to publish and monetize podcasts, videos, blog posts, courses, memberships, and digital downloads on a fully customizable site under their own brand and domain.

Both platforms can help you get paid online and grow a business, but they are built around different strategies. Payhip is storefront-first. Beamly is website-first and content-first, with monetization layered on top of a content library that can grow through SEO, podcasts, and video.

What's the difference between Beamly and Payhip?

Payhip is designed to help creators sell products with minimal friction. You connect Stripe and/or PayPal, create product pages, and start selling. It supports common creator business models like digital downloads, memberships, and courses, and it also has useful operational features like embedding checkout on an existing website and simplifying VAT handling for EU/UK digital sales.

Beamly starts from a different place: the website is the core asset. It helps you build an owned content hub that can include podcasts (imported via RSS), videos (including YouTube channel and playlist sync), long-form posts and landing pages, and structured courses. Monetization runs through Stripe with 0% Beamly platform fees (Stripe fees apply), and you can apply memberships and paywalls across different content types so the paid experience feels cohesive for your audience.

If you mostly need a lightweight store to sell digital goods, Payhip can be an excellent fit. If you want your website to be the long-term home for everything you publish and sell, Beamly is the stronger Payhip alternative.

Best option for creators

Payhip tends to be a great fit when your business is primarily a store and when VAT compliance is required.

Beamly is designed for creators who publish across formats and want everything to live under one brand and domain. It’s a great choice if:

You grow through content: podcasts, YouTube, courses, SEO, and long-form writing.
You want a full website that can evolve with your business model, not only a storefront.
You want to gate premium content across formats: member-only posts, private podcast feeds, premium video libraries, paid courses, and more.
You want predictable monetization with 0% platform fees and Stripe running the billing relationship.
You want your audience experience to be unified, so members do not need to jump between a website, a store tool, a course portal, and a separate membership platform.

Pricing, fees, and payouts

Payhip uses a simple tiered model:

A free plan with a 5% platform transaction fee.
A mid-tier plan (2% transaction fee) for a $29 monthly subscription.
A top plan ($99/month) that removes Payhip’s transaction fee.

Beamly charges a predictable subscription for the platform (starting at $30/month) and takes 0% platform fees on sales (Stripe fees apply).

For creators building recurring revenue, predictable platform costs can feel significantly better than a model where the platform takes a growing cut of every sale.

Switching from Payhip to Beamly

If you are considering switching, the goal should be to avoid losing momentum and to keep the audience experience clean.

Here are the most important considerations:

Domain strategy: decide whether your Beamly site becomes the primary domain, while Payhip is retired, or whether you keep Payhip as a backend store for a period during transition.
Product mapping: map each Payhip product to its Beamly equivalent (download product, course, membership tier, or paywalled content area).
Member access: decide how existing paying members will be onboarded and granted access on Beamly, and plan the communication sequence so nobody is surprised.
SEO and redirects: if you have store pages already ranking, plan URL structure and redirects so you do not lose search traffic.
Email and announcements: notify customers, share a clear timeline, and highlight what improves for them (a single login, a better site experience, premium feeds, and so on).

Switch to Beamly today

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