Guides 7 min read
How to price a digital product
How to choose a price for a digital product, on any platform: what the buyer is actually paying for, how to price against free alternatives, what each price band demands of you, when free, discounts and bundles are the right tool and when they are not, and how fees change what you keep.
- Price the outcome, the time saved or the thing they could not make, not the hours you spent or the size of the file.
- Your competitor is the free version plus the buyer's time. Be more complete, better made or more convenient, or no price will save you.
- Low prices are easy to say yes to but need volume and lose more to fixed card fees. Higher prices need proof. Most products belong in between.
- Start with a figure you can defend out loud, change it on evidence, and never run a discount permanently.
What the buyer is paying for
The hours you spent are real, but the buyer is not paying for them, and they are not paying per page or per megabyte either. They are paying for what the file does for them: an afternoon saved, something they could not make, a decision taken off their plate, a problem gone. A one-page template that saves an afternoon is worth more to its buyer than a hundred pages of notes nobody needed.
So the price is anchored to the alternative, not to your effort. Three questions get you close:
Usually time: three hours building their own spreadsheet, a weekend planning meals, a month of trial and error.
A free template plus the hours to fix it, a monthly tool, hiring someone, going without.
If you would add "but I can do it cheaper" in the same breath, either the price is wrong or the product needs to be better.
The free version is your competitor
Almost every digital product has a free version somewhere. People pay anyway, for four reasons: the paid one is complete rather than a fragment; it is done properly, with instructions; it comes from someone they trust to have got it right; or it is simply faster than sorting through the free ones. Your price is justified by one of those four. If your product is not better than the free option in at least one of them, the price is not the problem, and lowering it will not fix it.
What each price band demands
There is no right price for a type of product, but each band asks something of the listing.
An impulse. Works for small single-purpose things: one template, one model, a short checklist. Nobody reads much before buying at this price, so the title and the cover do all the work. You need many sales for it to add up, and fixed card fees take a bigger share of each one.
Where most digital products sit. The buyer pauses, reads the description, looks for a preview. The listing has to answer what they get, who it is for and what it looks like.
The buyer wants proof: sample pages, a screenshot of it in use, a line from someone who used it, a specific promise about what it covers. Right for things that save real hours or that few people can make.
The buyer is paying for your reputation as much as the file: a course in PDF form, a complete toolkit, a professional resource. This band needs an audience that already knows your work.
A common mistake is pricing from fear: choosing the lowest number so that nobody can object. Nobody objects to a low price, but nobody takes it seriously either, and you have left yourself nowhere to go.
When free helps, and when it hurts
Free works as a sample of something paid: a chapter of the ebook, three presets out of thirty, one model from a set, the first week of a program. The buyer sees the quality without having to trust you first, and it gives strangers a reason to visit.
Free "to build an audience", with nothing paid behind it, builds an audience of people who do not pay. And making the free thing deliberately worse backfires, because it is the only thing most people will ever see of your work. Give one good sample; sell the rest.
Discounts
A discount moves the timing of a purchase for someone who already wanted the thing. It does not create the want. Use one for the people who follow you, for a launch week with a real end date, and let it end; share the code in every place you shared the product, because a code nobody sees does nothing. If you find yourself running a discount all the time, your price is wrong: change the price instead, and keep the word "sale" for when it means something.
Bundles and ladders
A bundle groups products at one price. It works when the items belong together and the bundle is noticeably cheaper than buying them one by one; otherwise there is no reason to choose it. Do not use a bundle to hide a weak product among good ones; the buyer finds out and remembers.
Over time, prices form a ladder: a free sample, a small paid product, a main product, a bundle of the set. Each rung is a reason to come back. Nobody starts with a ladder; everybody starts with one rung.
Changing the price later
Raising a price as a product proves itself is normal, and the people who bought earlier keep what they bought. On a site like troimarket the price is changed from an edit sheet without touching the file, so there is no reason to agonise over the first number. If you lower it, do it once, deliberately, and leave it for a week before judging the result. Changing the price every two days teaches you nothing, because every other thing changes in the same week.
The last digit
$6.99 or $7 is a matter of taste. What matters is that the product is plainly worth the number next to it, and that your prices make sense next to each other. Put the effort into the title, the preview and the description, which decide far more sales than the last digit.
What platforms take, and what you keep
Wherever you sell, two kinds of cost come out of a sale. Card processing is charged by the payment company, usually a percentage plus a fixed amount per transaction; the fixed part is why very low prices are expensive to sell. The platform's own cut is either a percentage of each sale, a monthly plan, or both. Here is what the common places to sell digital products charge, and what a seller keeps at three prices, as of October 29, 2026:
What each platform takes out of one $20 sale, and what you keep. Shorter bar, more kept.
Card processing of 2.9% + 30¢ is assumed where a platform charges it separately; Etsy uses its own 3% + 25¢ US rate. Read from each company's own pricing page on October 29, 2026. Fees change; check before you decide.
How to read it: "keep" is the price minus the platform's fee and card processing, per sale, before any payout fees or taxes. Where a platform charges card processing separately, the chart uses the standard 2.9% + 30¢ those companies tell sellers to expect; Etsy's processing is its own 3% + 25¢ US rate, and Lemon Squeezy's fee includes processing. Some platforms sell a monthly plan with a lower per-sale fee instead; a plan is not spread across sales, so it costs the same whether you sell one thing or a hundred. Fees change; check the company's own page before you decide.
Two patterns are worth seeing in the numbers:
On a $5 sale, a 10% + 50¢ fee plus processing takes nearly a third; a 1% fee plus processing takes about a tenth. If you sell small things, the fixed amounts matter more than the percentages.
A $29-a-month plan with no per-sale fee beats a 5% fee once you sell more than $580 a month ($29 divided by 5%), and beats a 1% fee only above $2,900 a month. Below that, the plan costs more than the percentage, and a slow month still costs $29.
Two more things come out of the seller's side on any platform. A refunded or charged-back sale comes back out of your earnings. And tax on your earnings is yours to handle; some platforms collect sales tax or VAT at checkout, some do not, and none of them does your income tax.
Sources, each company's own page, read on October 29, 2026:
On troimarket
troimarket was built by creators, for creators, and priced to take as little as possible:
Plus card processing of 2.7% + 30¢. No monthly plan, no listing fee.
On a $5 sale, $4.51. Free products carry no fee.
Without touching the file.
Come out of your earnings.
troimarket does not give tax advice.
Next guide
How to make your first digital saleMore guides
If you are not on troimarket yet, What is troimarket? explains how it works and what it costs, and Sell on troimarket is where a store starts.