The Gumroad API for SaaS Creators

When I started building web projects, Gumroad quickly became the obvious choice for handling payments:

• Gumroad acts as not only a payment processor, but also as a merchant of record. This hugely reduces your tax reporting and headaches!

• Gumroad makes it easy to bring in partners. The ease at which you can offer affiliate links to others, offering them the case to promote your product and make income of their own based on a fraction of the total sale price, is easiest on Gumroad.

• Email marketing is built-in.

So where did Gumroad fail me? While it was incredibly easy to get payment set up on their own landing pages or through the widget and pop-up buttons, it took me close to a week to figure out how I could extend Gumroad’s capabilities into letting me manage all of my user interactions, seamlessly, through my own website!

For example, adding the pop-up payment button on my website home page makes it easy to let people pay and sign-up, but what happens if they cancel their monthly subscription to my SaaS?

For a piece of digital media hosted on Gumroad this is no real issue since the product gets removed from their catalogue. But since I am building small SaaS projects on top of Gumroad, I needed an alerting system running in the background that told me when a user canceled so that my software could feed that alert into a script to end that user’s access to my SaaS. Otherwise, they would continue to get access without Gumroad collecting any payment!

I spent the time figuring out the details behind the Gumroad API to get this all set up so that you don't have to!

Contents of this guide include...

• Why I picked Gumroad

• Creating a product

• The Gumroad API

• Creating your application

• Resource Subscriptions

• Seeing all the Resource Subscriptions you have activated

• Deleting a Resource Subscription you have activated

• Confirming that you received a Resource Subscription

• Subscription ID vs Sale ID

• Common issues to debug

• The Gumroad Ping

• The Final Section: Building one backend page to handle every possible client interaction

• Revisions, update plans, and contact details

• Index

  
  

Testimonials

Updates are expected, planned for, and will be included in the future - this is only the start!