8 best SamCart alternatives compared for 2026

SamCart is a strong checkout platform, but its pricing gets harder to justify as you need more than the basics. Core costs $79 a month, while features such as one-click upsells, order bumps, A/B testing and the affiliate center are reserved for Pro at $199. For sellers who want a full-featured checkout without paying for features they may not need, that can make alternatives worth considering.

This article compares eight SamCart alternatives on pricing, features, and where your payments are processed.

Quick answer: Most SamCart alternatives fall into three groups. Some give you a checkout that runs on your own Stripe account, so payouts and customer data stay with you, and Checkout Page and ThriveCart both work this way. Others bundle courses, email and a storefront with the checkout, which suits creators selling a single catalog. The third group acts as merchant of record and handles sales tax for you, charging a percentage of every sale instead of a monthly subscription.

Why look for a SamCart alternative?

Checkout Anywhere is SamCart's name for the different ways one checkout can be put in front of a buyer: as a hosted page, as an embed inside your own sales page, or as an express link you can share anywhere. There are ready-made templates to start from, and cart abandonment recovery comes with both paid plans. SamCart also handles physical products, which several of the platforms below do not. It builds pages as well, including sales pages, lead pages, link-in-bio pages and microsites, and Smart Upsell Funnels lets you branch a post-purchase sequence depending on whether a buyer accepts each offer. Those funnels run after the purchase rather than before it, which is the difference our SamCart and ClickFunnels comparison works through.

Two key things send sellers looking elsewhere: what the plans cost, and how payments are set up.

What the plans cost. Upsells, order bumps, A/B testing, the affiliate center, advanced analytics, the subscription saver and API access are all Pro features, along with processors beyond Stripe and PayPal. Most sellers who pay for a checkout platform want those features, so in practice that means the $199 plan rather than the $79 one. There is 25% off either plan on annual billing and our guide to SamCart pricing has the fuller breakdown.

How payments are set up. SamCart has its own processor, SamPay, at 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, though SamPay opens a new Stripe account rather than connecting the one you already use. You can connect your own Stripe or PayPal account on Core, and only the further processors (Braintree, Authorize.net and Easy Pay Direct) require the Pro tier.

Turning on tax collection adds 0.5% of each sale on Core, or 0.35% on Pro. The feature works out the tax due on an order and collects it at checkout, but registering with the tax authorities, reporting the tax and paying it over remains your responsibility. The merchant of record platforms further down this list work differently: the platform becomes the seller on the transaction, so those obligations sit with it rather than with you.

SamCart's pricing information is not entirely consistent across its website. One page says that all features are included, while the plan comparison assigns features such as upsells, order bumps, A/B testing and the affiliate center to Pro. If you're considering SamCart, it's worth checking the current plan details before signing up.

How to choose a SamCart alternative

Start by working out what you are trying to change about SamCart, because some of the differences below are reasons to switch platform and others are only reasons to change plan.

Start with what you need the checkout to do. If you are selling a course, a download or another digital product through a simple checkout, you may not need a platform built around conversion features at all. If your sales depend on order bumps, one-click upsells, subscriptions or A/B testing, those features matter a great deal when you compare platforms, and they are the reason most sellers pay for a dedicated checkout in the first place.

Work out who is responsible for tax. With a conventional payment setup you remain responsible for working out where you need to register, collecting the right tax and paying it over. A merchant of record takes those responsibilities on within the scope of its service, usually in exchange for a percentage of each sale. Those are materially different arrangements, so comparing platforms on price alone will mislead you about what you are buying.

Work out the cost at the sales volume you expect. A monthly subscription and a percentage of every sale behave very differently as revenue grows, and the platform with the lower headline price is not always the cheaper one. Take the figure you expect to sell each month and work each option out against it, including processing fees and any charge for the features you need. The table further down does this at four monthly sales levels.

Then ask whether you need a different platform or just a different plan. If SamCart suits you and you simply do not use its more advanced features, moving to another platform adds work without solving anything, so check whether a lower SamCart plan covers what you need first. An alternative makes more sense when you need something SamCart does not offer at any price: a different payment model, a merchant of record arrangement, a storefront, support for a product type it does not handle, or a feature that is simply missing. Our roundup of platforms to sell digital products covers the storefront-led options in more depth.

The table below sets the eight platforms against those considerations, so you can see where each one differs from SamCart and whether that difference matters to how you sell.

Prices taken from each platform's public pricing page and verified on September 15, 2026. Annual rates are shown where a platform offers one.

8 best SamCart alternatives

The list starts with checkouts that run on your own Stripe account and ends with platforms that act as merchant of record.

1. Checkout Page

Checkout Page is a highly customizable no-code checkout builder for sellers who already use Stripe. Payments go straight to your own Stripe account and you stay the merchant of record, and unlike SamCart's own SamPay option it connects the Stripe account you already have rather than opening a new one. You can sell digital products, subscriptions, payment plans, event tickets and physical goods. It focuses on the checkout itself rather than being an all-in-one platform, so there is no storefront or email marketing, and sellers keep their existing tools for those.

Key features:

• Hosted pages, embedded checkouts, payment links and pop-ups
• Subscriptions, payment plans and donations
• One-click upsells, order bumps and cart abandonment recovery on Scale
• Digital products, event tickets and physical goods with inventory and SKUs
• Product variants, coupons and bulk discounts
• A white label customer portal, and a custom domain and email domain on Scale
• Custom CSS, tracking pixels, webhooks and an API

Pricing: Free up to $3,000 a month in sales, with Checkout Page branding and a single user. Launch at $24/mo billed annually covers the same $3,000 and removes both. Scale starts at $83/mo billed annually for sales up to $10,000 a month and rises on a volume slider to $583 at $150,000 a month. No plan charges a platform transaction fee.

Best for: Sellers who want control over the checkout design and their own customer data.

2. ThriveCart

ThriveCart is the closest like-for-like replacement for SamCart, built around the same job of turning a checkout into a funnel. The cart builder covers modal, single-page and multi-step checkouts, and the upsell, order bump and A/B testing tools cover much of what you would move to SamCart's Pro plan for. Courses and communities come through the bundled ThriveCart Academy, so it reaches beyond the checkout itself. A seller who only wants a checkout still pays for those course features, and several of the tools that matter most sit on Pro+ rather than Standard.

Key features:

• Embedded and hosted checkouts in modal, single-page and multi-step formats
• One-click upsells and downsells with automated pro-rating
• Order bumps, with multiple bumps per checkout on Pro+
• Cart abandonment recovery and A/B testing of checkout pages
• Subscription management with plan switching and failed payment recovery on Pro+
• Affiliate and joint venture management with revenue splits on Pro+
• Global tax automation for VAT, GST and sales tax on Pro+

Pricing: Standard is $37/mo billed annually or $47 monthly, and Pro+ is $67/mo billed annually or $87 monthly. A lifetime license is still sold through a link below the monthly plans, though ThriveCart no longer publishes a single list price for it, and our guide to ThriveCart pricing covers the change in full.

Best for: Sellers who want checkout, funnels, affiliates and courses on one subscription.

3. Podia

Podia puts a storefront, online courses, memberships, digital downloads and email marketing behind one subscription, which makes it a different proposition from a dedicated checkout. Sellers choose it when they want one place to build the site, host the content, take the payment and mail the list. It does have upsells, downsells and order bumps, so the checkout is not bare, though it is simpler than SamCart's. The base subscription does not rise with sales volume, though plans differ on how many email subscribers and products they include, and extra subscribers cost more.

Key features:

• Drag-and-drop website builder with built-in themes and unlimited pages
• Online courses with video lessons, downloads, quizzes and completion certificates
• Drip content and scheduled release of course sections
• Memberships and community with paid tiers, group chat and member messages
• Email marketing with campaigns, automations, segmentation and opt-in forms
• Sales funnels with upsells, downsells and order bumps
• Affiliate program and PayPal on Shaker and above

Pricing: Mover is $49/mo monthly or $42 billed annually and adds a 5% transaction fee. Shaker is $99/mo or $84 annually with no transaction fee, Earthquaker is $179/mo or $150 annually, and every plan comes with a 30-day trial.

Best for: Course creators who want selling, hosting and email handled in one place.

4. SendOwl

SendOwl is built around getting a file to the buyer safely, and it goes considerably further on that than SamCart does. License keys, PDF stamping that marks each copy with the buyer's details, document locking, download limits and expiring links are all part of the product, alongside a hosted or embedded checkout with upsells and cart recovery. Since February 2026 every plan has included the full feature set, so the tiers differ on order volume and bandwidth rather than capability. The price still rises with sales volume even though the features do not change.

Key features:

• License key generation and management for software
• PDF stamping with the buyer's details, and document locking
• Download limits and expiring download links
• Drip-released files and audio or video streaming at any file size
• Hosted, overlay and embedded checkouts with custom fields
• Upsells, cross-sells and cart abandonment recovery emails
• Affiliate program with automatic commission tracking

Pricing: Launch is $32.50/mo billed annually, Grow is $72.50 and Scale is $132.50, with no transaction fees. Plans carry order and sales limits of $10,000, $36,000 and $100,000 a year, measured over a trailing twelve months, and Business plans start at $299/mo above that.

Best for: Sellers whose files are the product and who need delivery protected.

5. Payhip

Payhip is a storefront and checkout that costs nothing to start. The free plan gives you the whole product with a 5% fee on sales, and the paid tiers reduce that fee rather than unlocking anything new. Payments settle into your own Stripe, PayPal or one of eleven other gateways, and Payhip still takes the tax on: it becomes the merchant of record for EU and UK VAT, which it calls acting as your reseller, and since July 1, 2026 it has collected and remitted US and Canadian sales tax as well. Quebec's provincial sales tax, QST, is the one exception. Support for sellers is by email only, with no phone or live chat.

Key features:

• Store builder with a free custom domain and embeddable buy buttons
• Digital downloads, physical products, courses and memberships
• One-to-one coaching with Zoom, Skype and Calendly integrations
• PDF stamping, software license keys and download limits
• Affiliate program, coupons, cross-sells and upsells
• Customer referrals and verified customer reviews
• EU and UK VAT and US and Canadian sales tax collected and remitted

Pricing: Free Forever costs nothing plus a 5% transaction fee, Plus is $29/mo plus 2%, and Pro is $99/mo with no transaction fee. All three include unlimited products and unlimited revenue.

Best for: Sellers testing a product who want no fixed monthly cost to start.

6. Gumroad

Gumroad is the quickest of these to set up, and you can list a product and take payments the same day. It has been the merchant of record since January 1, 2025, so sales tax and VAT are collected and remitted for you worldwide, and the Discover marketplace puts your product in front of buyers who were not looking for you. There is no monthly fee at all, which is why it suits sellers who are starting out or selling occasionally. What makes it expensive at volume is the fee itself: 10% plus 50 cents on direct sales, with card processing charged on top.

Key features:

• Product listings for downloads, subscriptions and memberships
• License key generation and lightweight DRM for software
• Multiple file versions per product, such as PDF, ePub and Mobi
• Pay-what-you-want pricing and multiple currencies
• Custom storefront with a page editor, custom colors and custom domain
• Email broadcasts, automated workflows and list import or export
• Gumroad Discover marketplace for reaching new buyers

Pricing: Gumroad charges 10% plus $0.50 per direct sale, and card processing of 2.9% plus 30 cents is charged on top rather than included. Once your paid sales pass $20,000 in a calendar month, new direct sales that month drop to 5% plus $0.50. Sales that come through Discover are a flat 30% which does include processing, and our guide to Gumroad fees works through what it means at different volumes.

Best for: New sellers who want to list quickly and be found, without a monthly bill.

7. Lemon Squeezy

Lemon Squeezy is aimed at software and digital businesses, and it acts as merchant of record, so sales tax registration, collection and filing sit with the platform rather than with you. Around that it offers hosted checkouts and overlays, subscriptions, usage-based billing and license keys for software. It suits sellers who would rather pay a percentage than deal with cross-border VAT themselves, though you give up the direct connection to your own Stripe account that the platforms above offer. It is being folded into Stripe Managed Payments during 2026, so it is worth understanding what that migration involves before you build anything around it.

Key features:

• Hosted checkouts and checkout overlays you can add to any page
• Recurring billing on weekly, monthly or yearly cycles
• Usage-based billing that charges on consumption
• License key generation and management for software
• Affiliate program tools
• Discount and coupon codes
• Sales tax and VAT collected and remitted as merchant of record

Pricing: Lemon Squeezy charges 5% plus $0.50 per transaction with no monthly platform fee. Card processing and tax compliance are included, and some international payments carry a small additional charge.

Best for: Software and digital sellers who want someone else responsible for sales tax.

8. Paddle

Paddle is built for software and app businesses rather than creators, and one fee covers a wide span of work: localized checkout, subscription billing, global tax registration and filing, fraud and chargeback protection, recovery of failed payments, and support for your buyers when they have a payment question. For a business selling across borders, that removes the need to register for tax in each country itself. The percentage-based fee can be expensive on low-value one-off purchases.

Key features:

• Localized checkout for buyers in different countries
• Multi-product subscriptions and recurring billing
• Automatic global sales tax and VAT compliance
• Automatic dunning that recovers failed payments
• Fraud prevention and chargeback protection
• Recurring, automated B2B invoicing
• Real-time payment and revenue analytics

Pricing: Paddle charges 5% plus $0.50 per checkout transaction with no monthly fee. Products under $10, and businesses at large volume, are quoted separately rather than on the published rate.

Best for: Software businesses selling internationally that want compliance handled for them.

What each SamCart alternative costs at $2,000, $5,000, $25,000 and $100,000 a month

What a platform costs at $2,000 a month and what it costs at $100,000 can be very different. The table below takes each platform's published rates and works them out at four monthly sales figures, assuming an average order of $50, the cheapest plan that covers that volume, annual billing wherever it is offered, and all sales made directly rather than through a marketplace.

Annual billing where a platform offers it, and the cheapest plan that covers each sales volume. Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy and Paddle include card processing in the figures shown; every other row is the subscription alone. Rates verified September 15, 2026.

At $2,000 a month Checkout Page costs nothing, because its free plan covers sales up to $3,000 with no platform fee. Payhip has a free plan too, though its 5% fee works out at $100 on that volume, and SamCart has no free tier at all.

A percentage of every sale keeps rising as sales do. Gumroad drops its direct rate from 10% to 5% above $20,000 a month, and a seller at $100,000 still pays about $10,500. Checkout Page and Stripe together come to roughly $3,900 at the same volume.

Not every subscription rises with volume. SamCart, ThriveCart and Podia charge the same at $100,000 a month as at $2,000. Checkout Page, SendOwl and Payhip step up as sales grow.

SamCart and ThriveCart are shown on their entry plans. Both price by feature rather than by sales volume, so one plan covers every column. The upsells, order bumps, A/B testing and affiliate tools sit on SamCart Pro at $149 a month and ThriveCart Pro+ at $67.

Add your own processing wherever you keep your Stripe account. At Stripe's standard US domestic card rate that is roughly $70 at $2,000, $175 at $5,000, $875 at $25,000 and $3,500 at $100,000 a month. Our breakdown of Stripe fees has the current rates by country and payment method.

If keeping your own Stripe account matters and you would rather not commit to a monthly bill yet, you can start with Checkout Page for free and pay no platform fee on any plan. A few common questions are worth covering before you decide.

SamCart alternatives FAQ

Is there a free version of SamCart?

No. SamCart has no free plan, only a 7-day free trial on its paid tiers, after which Core is $79 a month and Pro is $199, with 25% off on annual billing. If a permanent free tier matters to you, Payhip's Free Forever plan and Checkout Page's free plan both let you sell without a monthly subscription.

How much does SamCart Done For You cost?

SamCart does not publish a price for Done For You. It is quoted individually and sold through a consultation call, so what you pay depends on how much is built and migrated for you. The two published tiers sit well below it, at $79 and $199 a month before the annual discount.

Does SamCart process payments?

Yes. SamPay is SamCart's own processing option at 2.9% plus 30 cents, so you can take payments without bringing your own processor. It runs on Stripe and creates a Stripe account in your name, which is where payouts land. You can connect your own Stripe or PayPal on Core, while Braintree, Authorize.net and Easy Pay Direct need Pro.

Can you move SamCart subscriptions to another platform?

Not automatically. Active subscriptions are tied to the processor that created them, so moving usually means migrating the card tokens with your processor's help or asking existing subscribers to re-enter their details. Plan the switch around a billing cycle and check with both platforms before you cancel anything.

Is SamCart good for beginners?

Yes, if you want to start selling without needing to code. SamCart's Core plan includes unlimited products, pages and checkouts, along with templates, a no-code page builder, coupons and cart-abandonment recovery. The main consideration for beginners is the price: Core starts at $79 a month, while features such as 1-click upsells, order bumps, A/B testing and the Affiliate Center are reserved for Pro at $199 a month.