A free, step-by-step checklist for moving a digital-only shop off Shopify, Etsy or Gumroad without losing customer downloads, order history or search rankings. It has 14 steps in three stages: what to do before you touch anything, what to build before you leave, and the cutover in the right order.
It is for people who sell courses, coaching, downloads, memberships or software. It does not cover inventory, shipping or fulfillment.
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Shopify put its fees up again in April 2026. Online card processing went to 2.9% plus 30 cents, with another 0.6% added for premium cards and 1% for anything international. The Basic plan went from $29 a month to $39. That's on top of the 2% penalty Shopify still charges Basic plan sellers who use a payment gateway other than Shopify Payments. That's why searches for "Shopify alternative" spiked hard worldwide the same month, and have kept climbing in the UK specifically ever since. I checked this myself rather than just repeating it, more on that below.
Almost every "Shopify alternative" list out there is written for someone selling physical stock: inventory tracking, shipping zones, warehouse integrations, return labels. If you only sell digital products, PDFs, guides, templates, courses, memberships, none of that applies to you. You end up paying for, or configuring around, a mountain of features built for a business you don't actually have. That's the gap this checklist is for: moving off Shopify built for people who only sell digital products, not one more generic list built for people shipping boxes.
I built Djangify because I sell digital products myself, and I was tired of paying for a platform built mostly for people who ship boxes. Inventory tracking, shipping calculators, warehouse plugins, none of that has anything to do with selling a download. What's actually in the eCommerce Builder is a checkout, secure digital delivery, customer accounts, a blog, SEO tools, and AI tools to help you run it.
You can run it two ways. Self-hosted is one payment, you own the complete source code outright, and you never pay a platform fee again. If you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to do something and follow the steps it gives you, you can do this yourself, the setup guide is written for exactly that. Managed hosting means I run the server for you for a flat monthly fee, still with zero commission on what you sell. Neither one takes a cut of your sales, ever. You only pay Stripe's payment processing fee and your email provider.
I didn't write this because "Shopify alternative" sounded like a good idea. I went through real keyword research first, pulled actual search volume, difficulty and real quotes from people complaining about this exact thing on Reddit, then checked Google Trends by hand to see where the interest was really coming from. "Shopify alternative" is overwhelmingly a UK search behaviour right now, spread fairly evenly across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, not a handful of postcodes.
"It's too expensive to have an informative website on Shopify and pay monthly fees."
A small business owner questioning Shopify's cost, r/shopifyDev
That's exactly the seller this checklist is for.
Is this only for people already on Shopify?
No. It fits anyone selling digital products who's currently paying a percentage or subscription to any platform, Shopify, Etsy, Gumroad, Kajabi, whatever it is. The steps are the same shape either way: export everything, build the new shop alongside the old one, then cut over in order.
Do I need to know how to code for the self-hosted version?
No. If you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to do something and follow the steps it gives you, you can do this. There's a written guide built specifically to walk an AI assistant through the whole setup with you.
What's the actual difference between self-hosted and managed hosting?
Self-hosted is a one-time payment and you run it on your own server, so you own the code outright. Managed hosting is a flat monthly fee and I run the server for you. Both mean zero commission on your sales, forever.
Can I sell physical products too?
No, and that's deliberate. Djangify is built only for digital products, downloads, courses, services and events, which is exactly why it doesn't carry the inventory and shipping weight a physical-goods platform like Shopify does.
Written by Diane Corriette, Djangify founder, who runs her own digital shop on it.
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