Etsy digital download calculator
Digital products have no materials and no shipping, so Etsy's fees are nearly your only cost. On a cheap file they take a bigger bite than most sellers expect. Enter your price to see the fees, what you keep, and how many sales a month your income goal needs.
Edit fee rates
Fees by price point
| Price | Fees | Fee % | You keep |
|---|
Get the Seller Profit Sheet, $14 one-time. Launch price: 50% off with FIRST10, first 10 buyers.
US Etsy rates as of October 2026: 6.5% transaction fee, 3% + $0.25 payment processing, $0.20 listing fee charged again each time a digital listing sells, Offsite Ads 15% (12% over $10k/yr) on ad-driven sales, 2.5% currency conversion when your listing and bank currencies differ. One item per order. Sales tax and VAT that Etsy collects from buyers are left out, as is income tax.
That's one product. Which of yours lose money?
The Seller Profit Sheet does this math for every product at once. Paste your Etsy or Shopify sales export (or type in Amazon and eBay sales) and it shows net profit per product after fees, labels, discounts, returns and ad spend, with a red LOSING MONEY flag on anything underwater. Excel and Google Sheets, one-time $14, no subscription.
Get the Seller Profit SheetPrices sorted? The next fix is getting found: I rewrite Etsy titles, 13 tags and descriptions on Fiverr, from $5. See the offer on Fiverr
What Etsy charges on a digital download
A digital listing pays the same fees as a physical one: the 6.5% transaction fee, 3% + $0.25 processing and the $0.20 listing fee, which Etsy charges again every time the listing sells and renews. There is no shipping and no label, so the fees are usually your only cost per sale.
You keep per sale = price × (1 − 9.5%) − $0.45
Sales per month = (income goal + monthly costs) ÷ what you keep per sale
Worked example
An $8 printable. Etsy takes $0.52 in transaction fees, $0.49 processing and $0.20 for the listing: $1.21, or 15.1%. You keep $6.79. To take home $500 a month after $10 of software costs, you need 76 sales a month.
If 20% of your sales come from Offsite Ads and you're paid in a different currency, fees rise to $1.65 a sale (20.6%), you keep $6.35, and the same goal takes 81 sales.
Why cheap downloads lose so much to fees
The $0.45 of fixed fees per order is the same on a $2 file and a $20 one. The table under the calculator shows the effect: at $2 Etsy takes 32.0% of the sale, at $5 it takes 18.5%, at $10 it's 14.0%. At $3, the 133 sales you'd need for a $300 month means fees eat almost a quarter of everything buyers pay.
Three ways around it:
Bundle. Ten $2 coloring pages sold separately pay the fixed fees ten times. As one $12 bundle they pay it once.
Encourage multi-item orders. The $0.25 processing fee is per order, so a buyer who adds three files to one cart pays it once. A shop coupon for 3+ items can pay for itself.
Price on value, not effort. A file costs nothing to copy, so the price should reflect what it saves or gives the buyer, not how long it took you this one time.
With a large catalog of low-priced files, the per-listing view in your sales export shows which designs actually carry the shop.
Questions
How much does Etsy take from a digital download sale?
In the US, 6.5% transaction fee, 3% + $0.25 processing and $0.20 listing fee. On an $8 download that is $1.21, leaving you $6.79.
Do I pay the listing fee every time a digital item sells?
Yes. Each sale renews the listing for another $0.20, even though the file never runs out. That is why the fixed fees matter so much on low prices.
What's the cheapest price that makes sense for an Etsy digital download?
There is no hard floor, but at $2 Etsy takes 32.0% of each sale and at $5 it takes 18.5%. Many sellers bundle small files to get the price up and the fee share down.
Do Offsite Ads apply to digital products?
Yes. If a buyer comes through an Etsy ad on another site and buys within 30 days, the 15% fee (or 12%) applies to digital items too. Enter your share of ad sales to include it.