How to sell software from your own website in the UK: licence keys, downloads and monthly plans
App store, merchant of record or your own shop: what each costs on its published fees, the VAT rules for UK, EU and business customers, how licence keys and plans work on Orbit, and 100 licences a month worked through. Checked 8 November 2026.
This guide is for a UK developer, small software company or type foundry selling a desktop app, a plugin, a font family or a monthly plan through an app store, Gumroad, Paddle or Lemon Squeezy, and weighing a shop of its own. It covers what each route costs on its published fees, how VAT works on software, how licence keys, downloads and plans are set up on your own shop, and where the shop stops and your app takes over. Disclosure: we build Orbit Commerce, a UK hosted ecommerce platform, so weigh the Orbit parts accordingly. Every figure was checked at its source on 8 November 2026; the tax sections are general information to confirm with your accountant, not advice.
In short
- Three ways to sell: an app store (Apple 15% or 30%; Google Play UK 10% plus a 5% billing fee), a merchant of record (Paddle and Lemon Squeezy 5% + 50¢, Gumroad 10% + $0.50 plus card processing) or your own shop with a card rate.
- Software is a digital service for VAT: 20% to UK customers once registered, the customer’s country’s VAT for EU consumers through the Non-Union One Stop Shop, the reverse charge for business customers abroad.
- On Orbit a digital product carries the installer, a download expiry, version numbers, a free sample build and licence keys, emailed when the order is paid; tiers are variants and plans are subscription products.
- The shop sells and delivers; your app reads the key or the plan’s status over the REST API and webhooks and opens the features itself.
- 100 licences a month at £49: about £148 on Orbit Solo, £282 on Paddle, £692 on Gumroad, £735 at a 15% store rate.
What are the three ways to sell software today?
Three arrangements are on offer, and what differs is who the customer buys from. On your own shop that is you: your price, your customer record, your invoice, one published card rate with nothing added on top, and the VAT.
| Route | Who the customer buys from | Published fee (checked 8 November 2026) | Who deals with VAT |
|---|---|---|---|
| An app store | Apple or Google | Apple 15% (Small Business Program) or 30%; Google Play UK 10% + 5% billing fee | The store collects and remits VAT on UK and EU sales |
| A merchant of record | Paddle, Lemon Squeezy or Gumroad | Paddle 5% + 50¢; Lemon Squeezy 5% + 50¢ plus 1.5% outside the US; Gumroad 10% + $0.50 plus 2.9% + $0.30 card processing | The merchant of record |
| Your own shop | You | Orbit Solo: £25 a month plus 2% + 25p on UK personal cards | You, with your accountant |
App stores
Apple’s standard commission is 30% (Apple newsroom), cut to 15% in its Small Business Program for developers who earned up to $1M in the previous calendar year (Apple, checked 8 November 2026). Google Play’s UK fees changed on 30 June 2026 to a 10% service fee plus a 5% billing fee on the first $1M of annual earnings, with higher rates above that (Google Play Console Help, checked 8 November 2026). Both stores handle the tax. Google says it determines, charges and remits VAT on UK and EU purchases through its billing system (Google Play Console Help). Apple’s Paid Apps Agreement lists the United Kingdom among the regions where Apple collects and remits the taxes on sales to end users (exhibits dated 27 August 2026). A Mac app sold outside the store must still be notarised by Apple (Apple developer documentation) under the $99 a year Developer Program, but pays no commission.
Merchants of record
A merchant of record is the legal seller of your product. Paddle “acts as a reseller of your product, and is, therefore, the seller on record”, and collects and pays the VAT and tax instead of you (Paddle support, checked 8 November 2026). Paddle charges 5% + 50¢ per checkout transaction (paddle.com/pricing). Lemon Squeezy charges 5% + 50¢, plus 1.5% on transactions outside the US, 0.5% on subscription payments and 1% per payout to a bank account outside the US (Lemon Squeezy fees page and pricing page). Gumroad charges 10% + $0.50 through your own links, with card processing of 2.9% + $0.30 on top according to its help centre, and 30% through Gumroad Discover. It has handled all tax obligations since 1 January 2025 (gumroad.com/pricing).
Do I charge VAT on software I sell from the UK?
Software is a digital service for VAT: HMRC’s list includes “supplies of software and software updates” and “other digitised documents”, so an installer, a plugin and a font file all count (gov.uk guidance on digital services, last updated 28 March 2022, checked 8 November 2026).
UK customers
Digital services sold to UK consumers carry UK VAT at the standard rate of 20% (gov.uk VAT rates, checked 8 November 2026). You must register once taxable turnover passes £90,000 in any rolling 12 months, or when you expect to pass it in the next 30 days (gov.uk, checked 8 November 2026); until then you charge no VAT on UK sales. Our post on UK VAT for online sellers has the detail.
Consumers in the EU
For a private customer in the EU the place of supply is where the customer lives, so their country’s VAT is due at their rate. EU VAT is due on all digital sales to EU consumers “regardless of the value of the sales”, now that the EU-wide threshold no longer covers UK businesses (gov.uk, checked 8 November 2026). The route is the EU’s Non-Union One Stop Shop: register in one member state and file one quarterly return for every EU country you sold into (European Commission One Stop Shop portal, checked 8 November 2026).
Business customers, and everyone else
A UK business customer pays 20% and wants a VAT invoice. For a business customer abroad, VAT Notice 741A’s general rule is that the supply takes place where the customer belongs, so you charge no UK VAT and the customer accounts for it at home under the reverse charge (VAT Notice 741A, sections 2.2 and 6.3, checked 8 November 2026). You may presume a customer is in business if it gives you a VAT number (section 2.4), so ask for one when they order and keep it. A consumer outside the UK and the EU is outside the scope of UK VAT, but their own country may tax digital sales, which is the work a merchant of record charges for.
How do licence keys and downloads work on your own shop?
On Orbit, software is a digital product, one of six product types in one editor. Five steps, named as the dashboard names them:
- Attach the installer. Upload the files, set how many days a download stays live, and keep a version number on each file.
- Mark the trial build as a free sample. It appears on the product page under “Try before you buy”, so a visitor tests the app, plugin or trial font before paying.
- Generate or import licence keys. Orbit generates keys or imports a list from your own licensing tool, and a key can carry an expiry in days; when the order is paid the buyer is emailed the download links and the key, which also sit in their account.
- Make each licence tier a variant. Personal, team and studio for an app; desktop, web and app for a font family. Each variant has its own price, and files attach per variant, so the web licence delivers the web fonts and the desktop licence the OTFs.
- Add your VAT number. If you are registered, every paid order gets a VAT invoice by email the moment the payment is captured.
Fonts are the special case: a foundry rarely needs keys. The order is the licence, the confirmation email the proof, and the terms sit on the product page; say on the trial fonts’ page that they are for testing and pitches, not finished work.
Can I sell a monthly or yearly plan without an app store?
Yes. On Orbit a plan is a subscription product. A plan sets how often the product’s price is charged, so a monthly plan and a yearly plan priced for the year are two products. The customer pays by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay on a Stripe-hosted card step, then pauses, resumes, cancels at the end of the current period or changes the quantity from their own account. Pausing, resuming and cancelling each email the customer in your branding, and customer pausing and cancelling are switches in Subscription settings that start switched on. The installer can be attached to the subscription product too, so a new subscriber gets the download link by email.
A subscription here is the recurring charge; what it opens inside your app is your app’s decision, read from the plan’s status over the API, covered below. The free trial is a free sample build on the product page, so a visitor tests the app before the plan starts.
Where do the changelog, the docs and the pricing page live?
The built-in blog runs on your own domain with no post limit and more than one blog if you need them, so a Changelog blog sits beside a Guides blog, each post tagged by version, with a Blog Listing block putting the latest release notes on the homepage. Documentation is ordinary pages in the page builder: tabs, a code block for snippets, custom CSS per page, and your own fonts uploaded to the page builder, so a foundry’s site is set in the typefaces it sells. A pricing table block whose buttons link to each plan’s product and a comparison table block cover the plans page.
Where does the shop stop and your app take over?
A shop sells and delivers; your app decides what a paid customer may do. Three hand-offs follow.
- The paywall is a link to your product page. Your app sends the customer there, and the purchase comes back as a key or a download by email and in their account.
- A plan bills a fixed amount every week, month, quarter, six months or year, times a quantity, so sell usage as tiers (Personal, Team, Studio) and let your app apply each tier’s limits.
- Your app checks the key. Orbit issues keys and bills plans; your app or your licensing server reads the key or the plan’s status and opens or closes the features, so a lapsed plan is handled where the software runs.
Your licensing server can stay in step: webhooks fire on order and payment events such as payment.succeeded, signed with HMAC-SHA256 and tried up to four times. Subscriptions and plans are on the public REST API with their own scopes, so your server can ask whether a plan is still active. A public licence API activates, deactivates or validates a key, and each product’s key settings include an activation limit and an expiry in days.
What does it cost to sell 100 licences a month at £49?
Assume 100 sales a month of a £49 licence to UK customers on UK personal cards, no refunds, every fee as published on 8 November 2026, and dollar fees converted at HMRC’s November 2026 rate of $1.3396 to £1 (HMRC monthly exchange rates), so 50¢ is 37p and 30¢ is 22p. VAT is left out: if you are registered it comes off the top whichever route you take; the routes differ in who sends it to HMRC.
| Route | How the fee is worked out | Cost on £4,900 of sales | Share of sales |
|---|---|---|---|
| Orbit Solo | £25 plan plus 2% + 25p on 100 card payments (£98 + £25) | £148 | 3.0% |
| Paddle | 5% + 50¢ a sale | £282 | 5.8% |
| Lemon Squeezy | 5% + 50¢ a sale, plus 1.5% outside the US, plus 1% on the payout | about £400 | 8.2% |
| Gumroad, your own links | 10% + $0.50 a sale, plus card processing at 2.9% + $0.30 | £692 | 14.1% |
| App store, reduced rate | Apple Small Business Program 15%; Google Play UK 10% + 5% billing fee | £735 | 15% |
| App store, Apple standard rate | 30% | £1,470 | 30% |
The merchant of record’s percentage pays for tax in every country, invoices and chargebacks, work that is yours and your accountant’s on your own shop, so price a quarterly One Stop Shop return into the comparison. From about 16 sales a month of a £49 licence the fixed plan costs less than Paddle, and it wins by more with every sale, with nothing added on top of the card rate. A card issued outside Europe costs 3.65% + 25p on Solo, and a payment in another currency is converted to pounds by Stripe with a conversion fee on top (card rates); our guide to payment gateway costs for a UK small business compares the processors.
Where Orbit fits
Orbit Commerce is a hosted UK ecommerce platform, and everything in this post is on the Solo plan at £25 a month (£19 a month billed yearly, ex VAT), with a 14-day free trial and no card. Digital products with files, download expiry, version numbers, free samples and licence keys are on the products page; monthly and yearly plans and the account page on subscriptions; the changelog on the blog; the docs and plans page in the page builder.
The theme store lists free and premium themes by industry; pick one for a software or type shop and change its colours, fonts and logo in the dashboard. A team that runs a licensing server, or wants one built, starts at custom development, where the in-house team quotes a fixed price in writing before any code. For downloads, subscriptions and gift cards together, read our guide to selling digital products in the UK.
Read next: Patreon and Gumroad fees against your own shop, selling e-books and templates online and the new UK rules for selling subscriptions.
Questions people ask about selling software from your own website
Do I need an app store to sell a desktop app in the UK?
No. A Windows or Mac app can be sold from your own website as a download with a licence key, with no app store commission on the sale. A Mac app sold outside the Mac App Store must still be notarised by Apple under the $99 a year Developer Program (Apple developer documentation, checked 8 November 2026).
What is a merchant of record, and do I need one?
A merchant of record resells your software to the customer and becomes the legal seller: it charges and pays the VAT or sales tax in every country, issues the invoice and takes the chargebacks, for a percentage of every sale (Paddle, checked 8 November 2026). If your customers are mostly in the UK and the EU, you can handle VAT yourself with an accountant and the Non-Union One Stop Shop.
Do I charge VAT on software sold to customers in the EU?
For a private customer in an EU country, yes, at that country’s rate: the place of supply of a digital service is where the consumer lives, and UK businesses have no minimum sales threshold (gov.uk, checked 8 November 2026). The Non-Union One Stop Shop lets you register in one member state and file one quarterly return for all of them; a business customer with a VAT number pays no UK VAT and accounts for it under the reverse charge.
How does my app know when a subscription is cancelled?
Orbit issues keys when an order is paid and bills plans on their schedule. Your app or your licensing server reads the plan’s status through Orbit’s REST API and webhooks, or validates the key through Orbit’s licence API, and opens or closes the features itself, so the decision sits where the software runs.
Can I offer a free trial of my software on Orbit?
Yes, as a free sample build on the digital product, shown on the product page under “Try before you buy” and downloaded without card details. Make it a time-limited build, let your app enforce the limit, and the paid plan starts the day the customer subscribes.
Set up one product with a free sample and one plan in the 14-day free trial, no card required, and see what lands in a customer’s email and account.