HACKER Q&A
📣 grodriguez100

Alternatives to Gumroad for "software licenses"?


I am looking for alternatives to Gumroad to sell “software licenses” / “activation codes” / “serial numbers” online.

I have seen several similar platforms that focus on selling digital assets (files) but not activation codes.

I could either upload a list of pregenerated codes to the platform, or have the platform generate the codes with an API to validate them. Both would be fine.

I need that the platform acts as a merchant of record (to handle VAT in different countries). This basically means that the platform would be invoicing users, and I would be invoicing the platform.

I would also need to be able to translate the product description to different languages (this is something that Gumroad cannot do — they force you to create different products) and also support EUR as a currency.

What solutions have you worked with?

  👤 neontomo Accepted Answer ✓
It's not clear from your post, have you tried Gumroads API? They have an endpoint for verifying licenses that works nicely.

  curl https://api.gumroad.com/v2/licenses/verify \  -d "product_id=SDGgCnivv6gTTHfVRfUBxQ==" \  -d "license_key=YOUR_CUSTOMERS_LICENSE_KEY" \  -X POST
Example in React/TS:

  const checkLicenseKeyWithGumroad = async (licenseKey: string) => {
  try {
    const isValidLicenseRequest = await axios.post(
      process.env.GUMROAD_VERIFY_URL as string,
      {
        product_id: 'SDGgCnivv6gTTHfVRfUBxQ==',
        license_key: licenseKey?.trim()
      }
    )
    const isValidLicense = isValidLicenseRequest?.data?.success ? true : false
    return isValidLicense
  } catch (error) {
    console.log(`Error checking license key: ${error}`)
    return false
  }
}

For your language issue, you could self-host the platform and only run purchases through Gumroad. This is how I do it.

👤 billconan
https://docs.lemonsqueezy.com/help/licensing (I've never used it myself)
👤 GVRV
Long term HN user @ezekg also runs this https://keygen.sh/ if that might suit your needs (i.e. if you want to separate out licensing logic from the payment logic)
👤 devwastaken
Highly recommend implementing accounts for your software and licensing through that, as well as making some features of your app online only (server side), even if they don't have to be.

If your software becomes commercially successful it will eventually get cracked and many corps will use that because licensing in an org setting is messy and who wants to ask for software or deal with the red tape?

👤 fuzztester
>also support EUR as a currency.

Doesn't Gumroad support EU (I assume you mean Euro) as a currency?

EU & UK VAT on Gumroad

https://help.gumroad.com/article/10-dealing-with-vat

👤 DarrenDev
Fastspring or Paddle.
👤 42lux
Steam?