Free and Low-Cost Tools to Create, Convert, and Deliver Digital Products

Making a digital product to sell has two separate problems that get conflated all the time: making the thing, and getting it to a buyer reliably after they pay. The first is mostly a matter of picking the right free or cheap tool for the format you’re working in. The second is a delivery problem, not a creation problem — and it’s worth solving once instead of per-product.

This is a working list of what to actually use for common formats, plus where content ends up living and how it reaches a buyer automatically. It’s the tool list the format-specific guides link back to, so it only has to live in one place.

Creating and designing

Canva — the default for anything visual: PDF guides, planners, worksheets, social templates, presentation-style ebooks, cover art. The free tier covers most of what a first product needs; Canva Pro adds premium elements and brand kits if you’re producing a lot of these.
Google Docs / Microsoft Word — for text-heavy PDFs and ebook manuscripts, plain document tools export cleanly to PDF (File → Download → PDF) with none of the layout fuss a design tool adds when all you need is clean, readable text.
Google Sheets — for spreadsheet-based products (trackers, budget templates, calculators), and it exports to .xlsx for buyers who want to open it in Excel instead.
Figma (free tier) — for anyone building more structured templates or UI kits, with real component and auto-layout support Canva doesn’t have.

Converting between formats

Calibre (free, desktop) — the standard tool for converting a manuscript into EPUB and MOBI, the two formats most ereaders and ebook apps actually expect. Write in Google Docs or Word, export to .docx or .epub-ready text, then run it through Calibre to get clean EPUB/MOBI files.
Reedsy Book Editor (free, browser-based) — writes and formats directly in a tool built for book layout, then exports EPUB, MOBI, and print-ready PDF without a separate conversion step.
iLovePDF / Smallpdf — for merging, compressing, or converting PDFs after the fact — useful when a design tool exports an oversized file and you want it smaller before delivery.
TinyPNG — compresses images inside a PDF or template pack so a file full of screenshots or photos doesn’t balloon to an unreasonable size.

Where the content actually lives

None of this needs to be uploaded to a checkout tool. The simplest approach is hosting the finished file wherever you already work — Google Drive, Dropbox, or a published Notion page — and sharing one link. Host your content privately covers exactly how to set the sharing settings so a link works for any buyer without requiring them to request access or sign in.

Notion in particular does double duty here: it’s a genuine hosting option for a published page (guides, templates, resource lists), and it’s also a product in its own right if what you’re selling is a Notion template someone duplicates into their own workspace.

Getting it to a buyer automatically

This is the part that’s easy to solve badly — a manual “I’ll email you the file” process that depends on you being online, or a link buried in a confirmation email that’s easy to lose. On Keepp, a product’s Delivery step lets you paste one private link (and optional instructions) once, switch on automatic delivery, and every buyer gets it themselves seconds after paying — no manual step on your end, ever.

That link isn’t a one-time snapshot, either: the buyer’s purchase page always reads the product’s current delivery link, not whatever was set at the moment they bought. Move the file, fix a typo in the link, or rotate a link that leaked — every past buyer’s access updates automatically, without you tracking down who bought what and re-sending anything.

Selling itself runs through your own connected Stripe account — you’re the merchant of record, so payment lands directly with you, not held or routed through a middleman. Keepp’s cut is a flat percentage of each sale that drops as you upgrade (5% on the free plan, 3% on Pro, 0% on the top tier) — no separate app fee for using automatic delivery, and no listing fee just to have a product live.

Where to go next {#where-to-go-next}

Format-specific guides, each covering pricing, positioning, and the exact selling setup for that kind of product:

Set up automatic delivery for your first digital product at keepp.link — free to start.