Sell digital products with just Stripe + GitHub. No platform, no monthly fee, no server.

HonorBox turns a GitHub repo into an unattended store, a roadside honor box for the internet:

• Storefront: a static site built by a zero-dependency Node script and hosted free on GitHub Pages. No framework, no build step you have to run, and nothing loaded from anyone else's server: zero external scripts, styles, fonts or images. The only scripts on a built page are first party and inline, about 5 KB unminified and mostly comments: the JSON-LD block search engines read, plus a theme toggle and a scroll reveal. Both degrade to a fully readable page with JavaScript switched off.
• Checkout: Stripe Payment Links on your own Stripe account. Buyers pay you directly; you pay Stripe's processing rate and nothing on top of it.
• Fulfillment: a scheduled GitHub Action polls Stripe, invites each buyer's GitHub account to your private product repo, and keeps your books. GitHub expires an unaccepted invitation after seven days, so it re-issues before that happens, and sooner if GitHub is ever seen to expire one sooner: a buyer who missed the email does not quietly lose what they paid for. No webhooks required, no database, no server to babysit (opt-in webhook mode available when you want near-instant delivery).

Already selling through a private repo? If you take the money on your own Stripe account and add each buyer as a collaborator by hand, or with glue you wrote, the fulfillment bullet above is the part you are doing manually, and it runs without the rest: scripts/fulfill.js reads one config file mapping each payment link to the repo it grants, and needs no theme, no products/ directory and no site. Your checkout and your storefront stay where they are. docs/bring-your-own-store.md traces that setup module by module, including which parts of the paid suite run on a store you already have and which step aside.

Live demo: the HonorBox store. This repo is a working store selling HonorBox Pro. The checkout you see there is the engine in this repo, unmodified.

Why

	Gumroad	Lemon Squeezy	Polar ³	HonorBox
Platform fee	10% + 50¢ ²	5% + 50¢	5% + 50¢ free tier	0%
Monthly cost	$0	$0	$0 on the free tier	$0
Private-repo delivery	no	no	yes, instant	yes, usually minutes
Handles VAT for you	yes	yes	yes	no; you're the merchant ¹
Server to maintain	n/a	n/a	n/a	none
Who holds the money	the platform	the platform	the platform	you

Read that table honestly. If you are selling a handful of copies a month, use a merchant of record. The fee you would save is roughly 81¢ a sale, about $8 a month at ten sales, and for that they do your VAT; EU digital goods have no registration threshold for non-EU sellers, so that job starts at your first sale. HonorBox earns its keep at volume, or when you specifically want the Stripe account and the customer relationship to be yours.

¹ HonorBox is not a merchant of record. docs/tax.md spells out the trade-off. ² Plus card processing (2.9% + 30¢), charged on top per Gumroad's fee page. Lemon Squeezy's and Polar's fees include processing; with HonorBox you pay Stripe's standard rate and nothing else. Fees as published July 2026. ³ Polar is the closest comparison: private GitHub repo access is a built-in benefit that grants instantly and revokes on refund, and they are a merchant of record. If you want that job done for you rather than run by you, use Polar. Fees from their docs, checked July 20, 2026.

How it works

buyer ──▶ storefront (GitHub Pages, static)
              │  "Buy" = a Stripe Payment Link (custom field: GitHub username)
              ▼
        Stripe Checkout ──▶ money lands in YOUR Stripe balance
              ▲
              │ polled on a schedule (no webhooks/server; opt-in webhook mode = instant)
        GitHub Action ──▶ invites buyer to your private product repo
                     ──▶ appends your (private) sales ledger

The fulfillment path is two dependency-free Node files: a 403-line driver on a 593-line pure logic core (which is why it can be unit-tested without a network). Read both: scripts/fulfill.js and scripts/lib/fulfill-core.js.

Quickstart

1. Use this template, edit store.config.json: name, copy, your URLs, and repo (your own owner/name). Then delete products/honorbox-pro.md and products/crew.md and write your own: they carry HonorBox's real checkout links, and a store that keeps them sells our product into our Stripe account. The build stops you and names every leftover, but it is faster to just delete them now. pages/ is our store's own prose (guides, terms, refunds, support), so rewrite or delete those too; the build warns about every link they leave dead.

2. One command creates your product on Stripe: Product, Price, and a Payment Link with the delivery field, wired straight into your config:

   STRIPE_SECRET_KEY=rk_... node scripts/init.js \
     --name "My Tool" --price 2900 --repo you/my-tool-access

   (rk_ = a temporary restricted key; scopes in docs/least-privilege.md. Prefer clicking? The manual dashboard steps are in docs/setup.md.)

3. Pages: copy setup/workflows/deploy.yml into .github/workflows/, enable GitHub Pages (Actions source), push. The store deploys.

4. Fulfillment: create a private ops repo. Copy in scripts/ and your store.config.json (the engine reads its grants from it), and setup/workflows/fulfill.yml.example renamed to .github/workflows/fulfill.yml. Add STRIPE_SECRET_KEY (restricted key recommended) and a GH_FULFILL_TOKEN PAT as secrets.

5. Sell things.

Full walkthrough: docs/setup.md · Architecture and threat model: docs/how-it-works.md

Scared of "secret key in a GitHub Action"? Good instinct. HonorBox needs neither your full Stripe key nor a broad GitHub token: a restricted Stripe key with one read-only permission and a fine-grained PAT scoped to the product repo alone run the whole engine. Exact toggles, what breaks if you over-cut, and what a leaked key could and couldn't do: docs/least-privilege.md.

Optional: a public ledger

The fulfillment engine keeps an anonymized sales ledger (date, product, amount, country, hash; never names or emails) in your private ops repo. If you want radical transparency, drop that ledger/ledger.json into your storefront repo and the builder adds a public /trust page for it. Off by default.

The themes

The free core ships stand (monochrome and centred, the theme this repo's own store runs on) and terminal (phosphor on glass, for CLI tools). Both carry a light and a dark palette built as mirrors, and a toggle that remembers the reader's choice. Pro adds rail, a fixed left navigation column, switchable with one config line:

Free core vs Pro

The free core is a complete store: two themes, checkout, fulfillment, docs.

When a new store makes no sales, "nobody came" and "my store is silently broken" look exactly the same from where you are standing. Both are a quiet dashboard and an empty ledger. HonorBox Pro is mostly one answer to that: a conformance suite that checks your store against the known ways this architecture loses money quietly, on every push, and fails the build when it finds one. Most of its checks fire with zero orders in your account, which is when you need them. A deactivated payment link still answers its URL with HTTP 200 and the ordinary checkout page, so a link checker, an uptime monitor and a curl in CI all report your dead buy button as healthy; the suite asks the API instead. The failure catalogue behind it is published here in full, free, and is worth reading even if you never buy anything.

Pro also adds a store doctor, reconcile (which pairs every paid order back to whether that buyer has access right now), a refund guard and support bot, tracker-free stats, the rail theme, an offline ed25519 license-key module, and a commerce playbook. One-time: $29 for one developer, $99 for a team of up to five, $249 for a company. Buying it funds the free core.

Stability promise

store.config.json, the product frontmatter, and the fulfillment grant format are stable: breaking changes only in a major version, always with an UPGRADING note and a migration path. The internals move fast; the format holds still.

Development

npm test                                # the whole suite (what CI runs)
node --test scripts/test/core.test.js   # one file, while iterating
node scripts/build.js                   # build storefront -> dist/

No dependencies. Node ≥ 20. CI runs the suite on Linux, Windows and macOS, across Node 20, 22 and 24.

Support

honorbox@proton.me · issues

License

MIT for everything in this repo. Pro content is licensed separately.