Looking for a Etsy alternative

Etsy is not an expensive storefront platform. It is a marketplace, and what you are buying is the hardest thing in retail: people who are already there, already looking, and already willing to buy from a stranger.

That is worth a great deal and it is why the fees are worth paying for a lot of sellers. Any comparison that lines up the monthly figures and declares a winner has missed the entire point of the arrangement.

The shop is a page on their site. The customer is theirs rather than yours, which means you generally cannot email the people who bought from you, and the relationship ends at the sale.

The terms can also change underneath you, and they have. Fee structures, search ranking, advertising policy — none of it is yours to control, and a change you did not ask for can move your revenue in a week.

The fee structure is stacked rather than single: a charge to list an item, a percentage of the order, payment processing on top of that, and an advertising fee on orders attributed to their own ads. Every seller is enrolled in that last one automatically, and once a shop passes a revenue threshold the enrolment becomes permanent for the life of that shop.

Your own domain means the search ranking you build is yours. Every link anyone ever makes to your work points at an address you control, and it keeps working if you change platform later.

The customer is yours too. Somebody who buys from a Stashed shop becomes a contact on your list — 2,500 of them are included on the plan — so the second sale does not require paying anyone to be found again.

And the shop looks like your work rather than like a marketplace listing, which matters more for some trades than others but is very hard to buy back later.

This is the part most comparison pages will not tell you, because they are trying to get you to switch. For a lot of makers the right answer is to keep the Etsy shop and open your own alongside it.

Etsy keeps doing the thing it is genuinely good at, which is putting your work in front of people who have never heard of you. Your own shop is where you send the ones who already have — the people on your list, the ones who found you on Instagram, the repeat buyers who do not need a marketplace to discover you and should not cost you a marketplace fee.

Over time the second one grows and the first one becomes discovery rather than infrastructure. That is a much less risky path than switching in one go.

If you have no audience and no way to reach one yet, a marketplace is the fastest thing that works, and building your own shop first is a slower road with no traffic on it.

We should be straight about the flip side of that: Stashed brings you no customers at all. Everything on this page is about what a shop costs and what you own, and none of it solves the harder problem, which is that somebody has to find you.

The same comparison against Shopify, Big Cartel and Gumroad. For the whole picture rather than one rival, there is what an online shop actually costs, which breaks the bill into the seven places money goes.

Every claim about Etsy was read from their own pricing or fee pages in September 2026 and describes the shape of the bill rather than a price. We do not publish their figures: those are set per country, so any number here would be wrong for most people reading it, and a stale one is worse than none. Our own figures come from the code that charges them. If something here has stopped being true, tell us.