I couldn’t find a related topic, but with COVID unlikely to go away anytime soon, I’m thinking of hunkering down over the winter to create some production tools to share with others. Thinks like a sample pack or two, synth/FX patches for Bitwig’s Grid, SysEx dumps for Analog Rytm Sounds, etc etc. But (aside from creating a whole e-commerce website) what’s the best way to host these things where people can download the files and choose to pay a couple of euros or else enter 0 and get the stuff for free? Any advice from others who have done something similar in the past would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!
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As a buyer, not a seller, I see gumroad looks like a popular option. I have purchased from @wavparty and I notice @cuckoomusic and others use it.
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Keep it simple. Use Youtube and give an email link to your patches. Ask people to pay with Paypal to your email address. No need for anything more these days. Unless your high retailer using a third party is a waste of money.
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Good suggestions. I would use a Shopify solution, selfhosting would be too time consuming, if you want to keep up with the main focus: create.
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Depending on how much time/energy/money you want to invest in the project as a whole, many services make hosting websites arbitrarily easy. If I were doing this I’d host from the website and provide an embedded “Donate Here” paypal button or something to that effect. There are many other options but for the compromise of professional/legit and lowish effort I’d go with a hosted website solution. Additionally it can double as a landing page/redirector/etc for your other content (music/social media/etc).
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If something costs a little investment to get going the motivation stays longer and I am more focused to make it happen. YMMV
Many people hate/dislike PayPal so I would implement Stripe for sure.
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It’s not a waste of money when you suddenly get 50 people wanting your product and you need to reply to them all manually with a link.
Obviously it depends on how much you may end up selling/want to sell, but something like Gumroad definitely automates a lot of things that I never thought would benefit from automation. Like being able to update a pack if there was an error, and then email everyone who has bought that pack to say they should download it again… which I’ve had to do!
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Thanks! Do you know if Gumroad has ‘pay what you want’? I couldn’t see it mentioned in the sign-up materials.
A very good point!
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Another excellent point 
It has “name a fair price” and it appears you can set the minimum to ‘free’.
E.g. https://wavparty.com/downloads/model-cycles-sound-pack-01/
EDIT: and that appears to combine the approaches where you commented “good point” 
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I‘ve seen some folks selling sample packs on Bandcamp which has the „pay what you want option“. Not sure if that’s something Bandcamp actually wants people to sell through their site but so far it seems possible. Not really an option for anything other than sound files I guess unless you‘d bundle them like 1 sample pack plus SysEx file per purchase/release.
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I’d rather manually reply to each and every person interested. Thats a much better way to develop from grass roots.
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You can still do that while their purchase is automated
That way they don’t have to wait for the thing they want. They have a frictionless transaction, and you can communicate with them as a personal thank you when you have the time.
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If there is no charge for this service then i think your right.
I’ve been doing it on Bandcamp for quite some time now with my label. It work quite well and it’s also a good way to have a few exemple tracks to go with it.
Here is the last one we did :
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Nice tunes too!
Enjoying these tunes
A basic Wordpress website with a few purchased WooCommerce plugins would help to keep the money in your own pocket for your plugins and sample banks.
Although it’s a little more work there are plenty of templates available to start from.
There’s the cost of hosting too though so it really depends on your needs and any plans you might have to expand in the future.
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Grass roots? I’m selling sample packs, not homemade jam 
Gumroad is a tool/service. I pay for it because it provides hosting, payment processing, and customer support, as well as analytics and basic CRM tools.
Paypal takes a cut. Private web hosting will cost you money too. Replying personally to every request for a sample pack, even if someone doesn’t want to pay for it, takes time.
I’m running a business (while studying full time at that), there are some things I just don’t have time for. If my business grows and I need to hire an accountant, would that be wasting my money?
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