I recently pulled all my 128 books (actually I just published two new ones, so 130) off of Gumroad. I’ve been a vocal user and supporter of the platform for years, especially for selling ebooks. But after finally digesting recent changes to their payout scheme (you now have to pass $100 in earnings… which may happen… never? in some cases), and other changes they made in the not too distant past to raise their fees per sale… Well I decided that was enough.

But also, I seem to have missed this product update, but apparently now the whole service is run by an “AI agent?”

Meet Gumclaw

Gumroad is run by an agent.

Gumclaw is the autonomous AI agent that runs Gumroad, handling support, operations, and engineering end-to-end.

On antiwork.com which they apparently own, they further brag:

Running the company takes the founder about one hour a week. He reads what the agent escalated, signs what only a human can sign, and closes the laptop.

The rest of his week goes to his day job. He is a full-time employee of the Internal Revenue Service. That is not a joke.

The founder has also enjoyed previous stints for the Veterans Administration, and more importantly DOGE. It’s hard for me to personally accept the gee-willickers notion presented in the media about how goshdurnit he just wants to make a difference in government efficiency. Maybe that’s true, but *whose government*? I always felt dicey about all the founder’s role there before, but taking it all in combination with the fees and the automating away all the human service jobs at gumroad, well. I don’t know, it all sounds too shitty to me to continue. And you can’t even complain about it to their AI agent, cause it does not give a shit either.

Payhip, on the other hand, was happy to have a real human interact with me, and they assisted me with some of the base level migration work to switch off Gumroad, to make the task a bit less herculean. And they were super nice about it, and I don’t think they are also working for DOGE (?)

So anyway, yeah, see ya later Gumroad. I know ultimately I should have taken the plunge and set it all up myself on my blog with WooCommerce or something, which maybe I will do some day down the road, but for now this seemed like the easier lift. Especially since I had to manually go through every single volume and update all the many hyperlinks out to the old store, to replace to corresponding volumes in the new one. But anyway, that task appears to be finished.

One note, I decided to only continue supporting .EPUB files as my exports out of Vellum (which is where I do my editing work for manuscripts). It was always annoying to also have a .MOBI file in there, especially since EPUB is the more open and universal format (not owned by Amazon), and if necessary, Kindle owners I think can find ways to get it onto their systems. For me it was a question of reducing product surface area and complexity.

Right now, I’m experimenting with using ChatGPT’s “Work” and/or Codex to something something agentic writing. I’ve had some swings and some misses, but also some I think smashing successes in that new direction. And it’s helping me a lot to think through more clearly the production pipeline from book brief all the way through to finished ebook file. And of course it’s giving me plenty of new content ideas and execution methods to explore. I will do separate write-ups for the new volumes shortly.

Anyway, here’s the new Payhip storefront, which also features a new special edition of The Quatria Conspiracy that has a fresh new cover, and now includes images from the French print edition.