SMF·PAYHIP
Can a prompt replace Payhip?
Online stores & courses — digital products, courses and memberships
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
A Stripe Checkout storefront that delivers a file after payment is a weekend, and the licence-key and revoke-on-refund parts are an afternoon on top. The thing you cannot code around is Payhip acting as merchant of record: it collects and remits EU and UK VAT for you, which is a tax registration in each jurisdiction, not a rate table. Sell one ebook to a buyer in Germany and that liability is yours the moment Payhip is out of the loop.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a digital-goods storefront for one creator: files and licence keys, no physical inventory.
Catalogue: products with a name, description, price, currency, and one or more attached files stored in S3-compatible object storage. Support a pay-what-you-want minimum and time-limited discount codes.
Checkout: Stripe Checkout in hosted mode, so no card data touches the application. Create the session server-side with the product and price, and set an idempotency key. Handle fulfilment exclusively in the webhook handler, never on the success redirect — verify the signature, check the event has not already been processed, and only then grant access.
Delivery: on a confirmed payment, create an order with the buyer's email, generate a signed download URL valid for 24 hours and a limited number of uses, and email it. The buyer can request a fresh link from a page that verifies their email by one-time code, so a lost email is not a support ticket. Files are never served from a public URL.
Licence keys: for products marked as licensed, generate a key per order and expose a verification endpoint that a desktop app could call, returning valid, revoked or unknown. Store issuance and every verification attempt.
Refunds and chargebacks: the charge.refunded and charge.dispute.created webhooks must revoke the entitlement, invalidate outstanding download links, and mark the licence key revoked. This is the part most storefront builds skip and it is why the entitlement table exists.
Operator views: orders with search by email, resend delivery, manual revoke, an immutable event log, and a CSV export of orders.
Tax: do not calculate, collect or remit VAT. Put a prominent note in the README and in the admin interface stating that the operator is the merchant of record and is responsible for their own tax obligations, including EU and UK VAT on digital goods, and that this is the specific reason platforms like Payhip exist.
Out of scope: physical products, shipping, affiliate tracking, a course player, and any marketplace or discovery surface.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 VAT collected and remitted for you across the EU and UK
- B.2 the affiliate programme with its own tracking and payouts
- B.3 the hosted course player with lesson progress
- B.4 PayPal alongside Stripe, which some buyers still insist on
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: payments, tax, distribution, and operations
Because merchant of record is a legal position, not a feature toggle. Payhip taking on the VAT registration means a solo creator can sell into twenty countries without twenty tax filings, and no amount of code replaces that.
Questions
Can I move my Payhip products and customers across?
Products and files, yes, by hand — there is no bulk export of files. Customer records export as CSV so you keep the list, but existing entitlements do not transfer, so past buyers have to be granted access manually or given a fresh link.
What actually happens about VAT?
It becomes yours. Payhip acts as merchant of record and remits EU and UK VAT on digital sales; a self-hosted storefront makes you the seller of record, which in the EU means registering for VAT OSS once you sell there at all. Stripe Tax can calculate the rate for you but it does not file anything.
What does it cost to run?
Stripe's per-transaction fee, a small VPS with PostgreSQL at five to ten dollars a month, and object storage measured in cents. Against Payhip's monthly plan this is cheaper above a modest sales volume and more expensive below it.
What is the one thing that does not survive the rebuild?
Selling internationally without thinking about it. Every other feature here is code you can write in a weekend; the tax position is a registration in another country, and that is the whole reason this entry is a kinda rather than a yes.
Related tools
Receipt