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.