I built a tool because I had no idea what I actually kept after platform fees
A couple months ago I sold a $5k batch of digital products across Gumroad, Patreon, and a couple other platforms. Felt like a great month. Then I sat down to actually add up what landed in my bank account after every platform's fees, and the number was way lower than I expected. Not "oh that's annoying" lower, more like "wait, how did I not know this."
That gap between what you sell and what you keep is basically invisible if you're selling across multiple platforms. Every platform shows you their own dashboard, their own numbers, their own definition of "revenue." None of them show you the full picture, and none of them show you what you're actually netting after fees stack up.
So I built Owelet. It connects to Stripe, Gumroad, Patreon, Ko-fi, Lemon Squeezy, Teachable, Thinkific, Buy Me a Coffee, and a few others, and shows your real net income after fees, plus expense tracking and cashflow in one place.
Launched a couple weeks ago with zero users. Been heads down on it since, blog content is starting to pick up in search (one post jumped from page 2 to top 10 overnight, which was a nice surprise), and a few AI tools have started recommending it unprompted when people ask about tracking creator income, which I genuinely didn't expect this early.
Still very early and still very much a one-person thing. If you sell on more than one platform, curious if this "what did I actually keep" problem resonates with you too, or if you've already got a system for it. Free tier connects two platforms if you want to poke around: owelet.app
Would love any feedback, especially if something's confusing or missing
This hits close to home. The fee visibility problem is real, but what makes it worse is when you're invoicing clients directly and Stripe takes 3% before it even lands. On a $5k invoice that's $145 gone instantly.
We've been building Settle for that exact problem. Free invoicing via bank transfer so you keep 100% of what you bill, no card processing cut. Same "wait, why didn't I know this sooner" feeling.
Owelet and Settle are kind of solving two sides of the same problem. You track what you kept, we help you keep more of it upfront. Would love to swap notes.
appreciate you sharing this — the bank transfer angle is smart, avoiding the card processing cut entirely rather than just tracking it after the fact. genuinely complementary problem spaces.
would be curious what you're seeing on the invoicing side — are your users mostly freelancers and agencies or crossing into the creator/digital product world too? that's where our audiences might actually overlap.
open to swapping notes, what does that look like for you?
Mostly freelancers and agencies right now but we're starting to see more digital product sellers come in too, people who sell on Gumroad or Teachable and also do client work on the side. The overlap is definitely real.
Swapping notes for me just means a low key async chat, what you're seeing from your users, where the friction is before someone converts, stuff like that. No big agenda. If that sounds useful I'm happy to connect over email or wherever works for you.
that overlap makes sense — someone juggling Gumroad products and client work is basically running two businesses with two completely different money flows and zero unified view of either.
honest answer on my side: still pre-first-user so I don't have conversion data yet, but the friction I'm seeing in cold outreach is almost always the trust gap — asking someone to connect live revenue accounts when they've never heard of you is a big ask with nothing to validate it yet.
email works, happy to swap notes async. momomishiki@gmail.com
The part that jumped out to me wasn't the fee-tracking problem.
It was that search traffic, AI recommendations, and creator interest can all feel like they're confirming the same thing while actually pointing to different conclusions.
That's usually where the next product decision gets more important than the signal itself.
Yeah this is the thing that keeps me honest. Three different signals can all feel like momentum but they're not always pointing at the same thing. The question I try to ask is confirming what exactly, that the problem exists or that people will actually pay to solve it? Those can look identical from the outside and lead to totally different decisions.
That's exactly the distinction I was hoping you'd make.
I think there's one strategic implication of that way of thinking that becomes much more important as the product evolves, but I don't think I can explain the reasoning properly in a thread without oversimplifying it.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?
i see 👍