ByteSell vs Podia

Podia runs three plans. Mover is $49 a month and takes 5% of every sale. Shaker is $99 and Earthquaker is $179, and those are the two plans where Podia charges nothing on a sale. The cheapest way onto Podia is also the only one that meters your revenue.

This page runs Podia Mover against ByteSell Free, because those are the plans a seller arriving from search lands on. Mover costs $49 a month before the 5% comes out of the sales. ByteSell Free costs nothing, takes nothing, and carries unlimited products where Mover stops at 50. Our free plan’s ceiling is space: 500 MB, with a 50 MB largest file, which a course seller with video passes on the first upload. Shaker and Earthquaker sit in the calculator’s dropdown.

Podia’s pricing page prints Mover at $49 a month, or $42 a month billed annually. What the plan card does not carry is the rate. That lives in the help centre.

Paying a year up front does not change it.

The 5% is easy to miss because it never lands on a bill you read.

So the subscription line reads $49 every month while the rate comes out of each sale on its way past. Getting Podia itself to 0% means Shaker at $99. ByteSell is 0% on the free plan and on both paid ones, so there is no rate to grow out of.

Podia bundles email marketing, and email marketing is priced by the size of the list. Mover includes 100 contacts. Taking that list to 10,000 contacts is an add-on of $70 a month, or $56 a month billed annually, charged on top of the plan. A Mover seller with a working mailing list is paying the add-on as well as the $49 and the 5%.

Products are metered too. Mover holds 50 of them, Shaker 150, and unlimited products arrive on Earthquaker at $179 a month. ByteSell Free has no product limit.

ByteSell does not sell email marketing, so there is no contact allowance to outgrow and nothing there for you if the mailing list is why Podia was in the running.

Podia has the seller connect their own gateway, and on the entry plan that choice is narrower than the pricing page suggests.

PayPal is not a niche request for digital goods, and on Mover it sits behind the same $99 upgrade as the 0%. The same article sets the outer limit of the choice.

One more line in that article is worth reading before you build anything outside the US and Europe.

Podia does not say what follows for a seller based in one of those five countries, so put that question to them before you commit a store. ByteSell connects the Stripe or PayPal account you already own on every plan, and crypto settles to your own wallet.

Podia sets out its own position in the help centre, and it is the same position ByteSell takes.

There is no payout schedule to wait on, no minimum balance to reach and no fee to be paid out, because the money was never in Podia’s hands to release. ByteSell takes the identical position. Sales land in the account you connected and we never hold a cent. The two products agree on custody, so what moves money between them is the 5%.

Podia is a courses, community and email product with a store attached. If you teach for a living, that bundle is a real convenience: four tools collapse into one login and one bill.

ByteSell is built around the goods themselves. Software sells as license keys handed over at checkout. Every PDF can be stamped with the buyer’s identity, so a leaked copy names whoever leaked it. Checkout filtering turns away VPN, Tor and proxy traffic and blocks disposable email domains. Paid Discord and Telegram access is granted when the subscription starts and revoked when it lapses. Affiliates, resellers, coupons, upsells and live chat are all on the free plan.

The honest limit on that free plan is size. It holds 500 MB, the largest file you can sell is 50 MB, and analytics keep seven days of history. Video passes all three on day one, and the answer there is Pro at $29 a month, which holds 50 GB with files up to 10 GB. That is below Mover’s $49 with no 5% behind it.

Podia is the better choice if any of this describes you.

• You want to try it properly first

  Podia asks for no card and no plan choice for 30 days.

• You teach, and you mail a list

  Courses, community and email marketing ship together. ByteSell sells none of them.

• Your files are large

  ByteSell Free holds 500 MB with a 50 MB largest file, so video starts on Pro.

• It never holds your money

  Podia states payments go straight through the accounts you connected.

• You are already above $99

  Shaker and Earthquaker carry no Podia fee on a sale.

If you teach, run a community and mail a list, Podia puts all of that in one product, and the 30-day trial lets you find out for free whether the bundle suits you. On Mover that convenience costs $49 a month and 5% of everything you sell, with PayPal and Podia’s own 0% both waiting at $99.

ByteSell Free costs nothing, takes nothing, holds nothing and caps no products, and it stops at 500 MB with a 50 MB largest file. For a catalogue of downloads, keys and memberships, the free plan is the whole product. For video, Pro at $29 is where to start. The calculator shows what the 5% is worth at your own volume.