Course Revenue Calculator

Course revenue is a layered subtraction, and the order of the layers matters. Gross billings equal new students times list price. Refunds come off first, because a refunded sale returns the ticket price but not always the fees already paid on it. What remains is net sales, and only then do the platform's cuts apply: a percentage transaction fee charged by the host, a payment-processing charge that in the United States has long been benchmarked at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per successful charge, and a flat monthly subscription that is independent of volume. Marketing spend is subtracted last because it is a discretionary growth input rather than a cost of goods. The structural difference between fee models is what drives the numbers. A percentage-only marketplace scales its take with your revenue, while a subscription platform charges a fixed monthly amount that becomes negligible per sale as volume rises - which is why break-even student count, computed here as fixed costs divided by contribution margin per student, is the decisive figure rather than headline fee percentages. Realistic planning inputs include refund rates of roughly 3 to 8 percent for mid-priced courses, cost per acquisition held under about a quarter to a third of list price, and return on ad spend targets around 3x to 5x. The projection assumes a constant monthly enrolment rate and a static fee schedule; in practice enrolments are seasonal and launch-driven, published platform pricing changes, and chargebacks, currency conversion and sales tax or VAT obligations are not modelled here.

Selling instruction at a distance is an old business. Isaac Pitman taught shorthand by post in England from 1840, and Thomas Foster built the International Correspondence Schools in Scranton, Pennsylvania from 1890 into a mail-order education operation with hundreds of thousands of enrolments, financed by instalment payments. The economics were already recognisable: a fixed cost to produce the lessons, a marginal cost to fulfil each order, and a promotion budget that determined the size of the audience. The modern creator-platform market formed in a short window. Udemy was launched in 2010 by Eren Bali, Oktay Caglar and Gagan Biyani as an open marketplace, and its promotional discounting and revenue-sharing model made instructor take-home depend heavily on whether a sale came through the instructor's own link or through Udemy's own channels. Kajabi began in 2010, Gumroad was founded by Sahil Lavingia in 2011, Thinkific was started by Greg Smith in Vancouver in 2012, and Teachable was founded by Ankur Nagpal in 2013 under the name Fedora before rebranding. Their emergence was made possible by the arrival of developer-friendly payment infrastructure, notably Stripe, which launched publicly in 2011 and popularised the flat percentage-plus-fixed-fee pricing that still appears in every course revenue model. The subsequent split between marketplace models and self-hosted subscription models is precisely the trade-off this calculator quantifies.