Teachable Revenue Calculator

Course platform plans trade a fixed monthly subscription against a variable transaction fee, and the right choice is a straightforward breakeven calculation rather than a matter of preference. A plan that costs more per month but removes a percentage cut pays for itself once revenue is large enough that the eliminated percentage exceeds the price difference: moving from a plan charging 5 percent to one charging nothing at roughly 80 dollars more per month breaks even near 1,600 dollars of monthly course revenue, below which the cheaper plan wins. Payment processing at about 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction is charged on top of every tier regardless of plan and cannot be avoided by upgrading. The fixed 30 cent component is regressive, so it matters materially on a 19 dollar mini-course and is negligible on a 999 dollar cohort program. Refunds belong at the top of the calculation rather than the bottom, because they reduce the revenue base that every downstream fee is applied to. Course refund rates commonly fall between 3 and 10 percent, and platforms with a mandatory 30-day guarantee sit toward the higher end. The effective fee rate shown here combines refunds, transaction fees, processing, and the plan subscription against gross revenue, which is the honest figure to compare across platforms; headline percentages quoted in marketing material almost always exclude processing. Two limits apply to the output. The additional-courses input assumes each extra course generates about 30 percent of the primary course's enrollments, a rough cross-sell assumption that varies widely, and the tax input applies a single flat rate to net earnings without modeling self-employment tax, deductible business expenses, or jurisdiction-specific brackets.

Teachable was founded in 2014 by Ankur Nagpal, launching under the name Fedora before rebranding to Teachable in 2016. It arrived during a specific gap in the market: marketplaces such as Udemy, launched in 2010, hosted courses but owned the customer relationship, set discounting policy, and took a large share of marketplace-sourced sales, while building an independent course site required real development work. Teachable and contemporaries including Thinkific and Podia sold the opposite arrangement, giving instructors their own branded school, their own pricing, and their own student list in exchange for a subscription fee. The company was acquired in 2020 by the Brazilian digital products company Hotmart. The tiered fee structure that this calculator models reflects a deliberate compromise from that period. Charging a transaction percentage on the free and entry plans let creators with no revenue start at no cost while the platform still captured value from those who succeeded, and removing the percentage on higher subscription tiers gave established instructors a predictable cost that stopped scaling with their sales. Nearly every creator platform converged on some version of this ladder during the 2010s. The underlying payment processing rate of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, meanwhile, is a convention inherited from PayPal's early-2000s pricing and carried forward by Stripe, which has served as the default card processor for this category of platform since the mid-2010s.