Gumroad appears to be a fairly dicey platform, run by a kind of dodgy guy (Sahil Lavingia). TrustPilot rating is 1.9 star. Still there’s some good software there. Many creators joined five years ago during an initial wave of positive reviews.
Some of the software there is very popular, take for instance MacWhisper. There’s 223,515 sales. There’s 1715 ratings. The first five pages are all five star which seems a bit suspicious. Load more only loads reviews ten at a time. Clicking through reveals a total of 349 reviews. The first five pages were all five star.
Initially, I didn’t want to have to click 34 times to have a sense of the product, with a balance of positive and negative reviews.
I asked first Perplexity and then Grok for tips on how to uncover the negative reviews on Gumroad without having to click through all the positive reviews.
Here’s the essence of Perplexity’s answer:
All reviews are displayed in chronological order, with the most recent appearing at the top by default. This means that, unless a negative review is recent, you will have to manually scroll through all reviews to find those with lower star ratings…. There is no technical feature on Gumroad to surface negative reviews first. You must manually scroll or use browser tools to find them. For broader negative sentiment, third-party review sites can be helpful.
It turns out that the ratings does not mean reviews. Of the 1715 ratings, only about 400 of them are reviews. I was able to manually click through them all.
Perplexity is wrong about the order of reviews. Gumroad reviews are not sorted by most recent. It is positive reviews first with no way to see negative reviews for a popular product except clicking and clicking and clicking. This is what I meant about a fairly dodge platform. Sahil Lavingia has set up Gumroad to make it very difficult for potential buyers to even see negative reviews.
Grok’s answer suggests the review situation at Gumroad is even shakier than this looks:
Limited Review Visibility: Gumroad’s review system has been criticized for poor user experience, making it hard for customers to leave or find reviews. Only one out of 21 customers successfully left a review in one reported case. Review Removal Policy: Sellers can remove negative reviews by refunding purchases or revoking access to free downloads, which may hide some negative feedback. No Direct Negative Review Filter: Gumroad doesn’t offer a way to filter specifically for negative reviews, so you’ll need to manually scan reviews or rely on external sources. Creator Control: Since creators can moderate reviews or disable them entirely, negative feedback might be suppressed on the product page.
For my MacWhisper potential purchase, MacWhisper has a full five star rating (clearly rounded up). Here’s the actual numbers in terms of visible reviews:
Table of Reviews by Star Rating
| Star Rating | Count |
|---|---|
| 5 Stars | 259 |
| 4 Stars | 31 |
| 3 Stars | 22 |
| 2 Stars | 4 |
| 1 Star | 33 |
According to an unbiased aggregated review calculation, the aggregate score should be 4.37. Rounding that up to five full stars is misleading at best.
There’s also about 22 anonymous reviews which are very repetitive and look astro-turfed (not all of them will be, perhaps some of the real looking reviews are also astro-turfed). From what I gathered on Reddit, Jordi Bruin has refunded/closed the accounts of negative voices so these numbers are lower than reality.
But the real blame here lies with Gumroad. In short, Sahil Lavingia has done everything he can to make the review section at Gumroad nearly unuseable and even deceptive.
Be very cautious making any purchases on Gumroad, as the platform itself is extremely creaky, no longer accepts Paypal with many creators ignoring refund requests. Don’t expect any supervision or support from Gumroad itself. Basically, you should accept that any money you spend on Gumroad, regardless of the nominal guarantee or the quality of the product is lost.
For creators the situation is not much better, as Sahil Lavingia always seems to have an excuse to delay payments to creators and take additional fees. Creators have complained that the cumulative fees are over 30%, which makes Gumroad as creator unfriendly as Apple’s App store (a story for another day). It’s hard to imagine a lose-lose platform (for consumers and creators). It appears that Gumroad is just such a shopping platform.
To answer the initial question, how to see negative reviews on Gumroad: click a lot. It would be possible to write a GreaseMonkey script to do this. In fact here’s a bookmarklet to do just that!
Drag this link to your bookmarks bar to add the bookmarklet:
If you don’t see your bookmarks bar, press Ctrl+Shift+B (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Shift+B (Mac) to show it.
To use this bookmarklet open the Gumroad page and then click on the bookmarklet in your bookmarks bar.
Alec Kinnear
Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.
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