Pricing
What a 2% transaction fee actually costs you
Platform fees are quoted as small percentages. Here is what they take in real money at $2,000, $10,000 and $50,000 a month, and why the number grows exactly when you can least afford it.
Every creator platform quotes its transaction fee as a small percentage. Two per cent. Half a per cent. Five, on one entry plan. Percentages are easy to skim past, which is rather the point.
So here is the same fee expressed as money.
The arithmetic nobody puts on a pricing page
Take a platform charging 2% on top of your own payment processor, which is what several well-known course platforms do on their entry and mid tiers.
| Monthly sales | 2% fee per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| $2,000 | $40 | $480 |
| $10,000 | $200 | $2,400 |
| $25,000 | $500 | $6,000 |
| $50,000 | $1,000 | $12,000 |
At $50,000 a month you are paying twelve thousand dollars a year for the privilege of using software you are already paying a subscription for.
A 5% fee — which exists on at least one entry plan in this category — turns that $50,000 month into $2,500 gone, monthly.
This is separate from your card processor
Worth being precise, because platforms are sometimes vague about it. Stripe charges roughly 2.9% plus 30¢ on a standard card payment. That fee exists everywhere, on every platform, including ones that take nothing themselves. It goes to Stripe for moving the money.
The platform fee is charged on top of that. So a $197 sale on a 2% platform loses:
- $6.01 to Stripe
- $3.94 to the platform
- $9.95 total, of which $3.94 is optional
The structural problem
The thing that makes percentage fees uncomfortable is not the rate. It is that the cost scales with your success while the service does not.
Serving your thousandth sale costs the platform essentially the same as serving your first. Bandwidth and storage are close to free at this scale. Yet the bill grows linearly with your revenue, and it grows fastest in exactly the months when a launch lands and you would rather be reinvesting.
A flat subscription has the opposite shape. It is at its most painful when you are smallest, and it becomes irrelevant as you grow. That is the correct direction for a cost to move.
What to check on any pricing page
Four questions, and the answers are frequently not on the pricing page itself:
- Is there a fee if I use my own Stripe account? Some platforms only charge when you bring your own processor, which sounds generous until you realise the alternative is letting them hold your money.
- Does the fee drop on higher tiers? Often yes — which means the cheap plan is subsidising the expensive one, and the fee is a lever to push you up the ladder rather than a cost being recovered.
- Does it apply to everything? Courses, coaching, physical products, invoices — check each, because they are sometimes treated differently.
- What happens on a refund? On some platforms the percentage is not returned.
Where we stand
We charge 0% On every plan., permanently. There is no volume threshold that removes it and no higher tier that unlocks a better rate, because there is no fee to remove in the first place.
Your Stripe fee still applies. That goes to Stripe. We add nothing to it.
That is not generosity, it is a pricing decision — we would rather charge a subscription that stays predictable than a percentage that punishes a good month. But it is worth saying plainly what it means in money: at $10,000 a month, it is $2,400 a year that stays with you.