0% Platform Fees vs. Teachable’s Cut: The Real Math for Course Creators
Teachable’s pricing page is easy to skim past, and course creators comparing 0% platform fees against Teachable’s cut rarely run the actual numbers before choosing a plan. A monthly number, a short feature list, a “most popular” badge on the middle tier, it reads like a straightforward subscription decision. What it doesn’t make obvious on first glance is the transaction fee sitting underneath that monthly number, quietly taking a percentage of every sale on top of what you’re already paying to be there. For a course creator doing real volume, that second number ends up mattering more than the first one.
This isn’t a hit piece on Teachable. It’s a genuinely popular platform for a reason, and for someone launching their first course with zero infrastructure, the trade-off it offers, pay us, and we handle hosting, checkout, and delivery, is a reasonable deal. The math changes once volume grows, and most creators never actually sit down and run the comparison against a self-hosted alternative until a payout report makes them curious enough to check.
What Teachable actually charges
Teachable’s current plan structure runs Starter at $39 a month ($29 a month if billed annually), which carries a 7.5% transaction fee on every sale. The Builder plan runs $89 a month ($69 annually) and drops that transaction fee to 0%, and Growth runs $189 a month ($139 annually), also at 0%. An Advanced/Custom tier exists above that for larger operations, priced by consultation. Teachable no longer offers a free plan, that tier was retired, so Starter’s 7.5% fee is effectively the entry point for anyone trying the platform without committing to a higher-cost tier.
On top of whatever tier you’re on, every transaction also runs through standard payment processing at the typical online-payments rate, around 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction for US cards, similar to what Stripe or PayPal charge anywhere. That processing fee stacks on top of Teachable’s own platform fee rather than replacing it, and it applies at every tier including the ones with 0% platform fees. It’s not fair to count that baseline processing cost against Teachable specifically, since it’s a cost of card payments generally. What is fair to count is the platform-level fee layered on top of it, because that layer is Teachable’s own revenue, not a pass-through processing cost.
The practical read: a creator on Starter pays $29-39 a month plus 7.5% of every sale plus standard card processing. A creator who upgrades to Builder or Growth specifically to escape that 7.5% cut pays $69-189 a month instead, plus standard card processing with no additional platform percentage. Either way, there’s a cost beyond simple payment processing that a course creator on Learnomy simply doesn’t pay.
Why the transaction fee is the number that compounds
A monthly subscription is a fixed cost, annoying, but predictable, and it doesn’t change whether you sell one course or a thousand. A transaction fee is different: it scales with your success. Every dollar of additional revenue brings a proportional cost with it, which means the platform earns more exactly when you’re doing better, and that dynamic never resolves itself the way a fixed cost does. A creator who doubles their sales on a subscription-only platform keeps the full upside of that growth. A creator who doubles their sales under a transaction-fee model gives up a consistent slice of that growth to the platform, indefinitely.
What 0% platform fees actually means with Learnomy
Learnomy connects directly to Stripe and PayPal for course checkout, and that connection runs at 0% platform fees, there’s no percentage of your course sales going to Learnomy on top of what you’re already paying Stripe or PayPal for standard card processing. The free tier itself costs nothing, so a creator using Learnomy pays exactly what Stripe or PayPal charges for processing a card, and nothing else layered on top for the privilege of using the course platform.
This isn’t a promotional rate or an introductory offer that changes at a certain volume threshold. It’s the standing model: Learnomy’s business isn’t built around taking a cut of course sales, so there’s no tier where that changes as your revenue grows. A creator doing $2,000 a month in course sales and a creator doing $50,000 a month both pay Stripe’s standard processing rate and nothing else specific to the platform.
Running the actual numbers across a few volume tiers
Comparisons that stay abstract are easy to nod along with and forget. Here’s what the math looks like at three different monthly revenue levels, using Teachable’s actual published rates against Learnomy’s flat processing-only cost.
At $3,000 a month in course sales, a reasonable number for a creator a few months into building an audience, Starter’s 7.5% transaction fee alone takes $225, plus the $29-39 monthly subscription, plus roughly $87-115 in card processing (spread across however many individual transactions made up that total). All told, somewhere around $340-380 disappears before it reaches the creator’s account, out of $3,000 in gross sales. On Learnomy, the same $3,000 loses only standard processing, landing around $87-115, since there’s no platform percentage and no subscription cost at all. The gap here is already a couple hundred dollars a month, which is real money for a creator this early in building a course business.
At $15,000 a month, a genuinely successful independent course creator, staying on Starter would mean $1,125 lost to the 7.5% fee alone, plus the subscription and processing, pushing total platform cost well past $1,600 a month. Upgrading to Builder at $69-89 a month to eliminate the percentage fee is the obvious move at this volume, and it clearly pays for itself, but that upgrade itself is a cost that exists specifically because of the fee structure, roughly $69-89 plus standard processing of $450-500, landing total platform cost around $520-590. On Learnomy, the same $15,000 costs only standard processing, around $450-500, with nothing else layered on top.
At $50,000 a month, the range where a course business is genuinely a full-time livelihood, even on Growth at $139-189 a month with 0% transaction fee, total platform cost lands around $1,590-1,690 once standard processing (roughly $1,450-1,500) is added in. On Learnomy, the same $50,000 costs only that same $1,450-1,500 in standard processing, since there’s no subscription tier fee stacked on top. At this volume the gap is smaller in relative terms than at $3,000 a month, but it’s still a real $140-190 a month, or upwards of $1,700-2,300 a year, going to a subscription cost that Learnomy’s model doesn’t require at all.
The honest caveat: subscription tiers change this math
It’s worth being precise here rather than making Teachable look worse than it is. Builder and Growth do fully eliminate the percentage-based transaction fee, so a creator on those tiers isn’t bleeding 7.5% on every sale, they’re instead paying a flat monthly cost that becomes proportionally smaller as revenue grows. The real comparison isn’t “Teachable always takes a cut,” it’s “Teachable’s model requires paying a subscription specifically sized to escape a percentage cut, and Learnomy’s model never charges that percentage or that subscription cost in the first place.” A creator doing modest volume on Starter pays the percentage. A creator doing high volume on Builder or Growth pays a flat fee instead. Either way, there’s a cost structure attached to using Teachable that Learnomy’s checkout simply doesn’t carry at any tier.
What a full year looks like
Monthly figures understate the decision because course creators tend to think in annual terms when evaluating whether a platform choice was worth it. Take the $15,000-a-month creator from the example above and annualize it: $180,000 in yearly course revenue. Staying on Teachable’s Builder tier at $69-89 a month billed annually costs roughly $828-1,068 for the year in subscription fees alone, on top of roughly $5,400-6,000 in standard card processing that would exist on any platform. Total platform-specific cost for the year lands around $828-1,068 that wouldn’t exist on Learnomy at all.
For the $50,000-a-month creator, annualized to $600,000 in yearly revenue, Growth’s $139-189 monthly cost billed annually runs $1,668-2,268 for the year, again on top of standard processing that would apply regardless of platform. That’s over $2,000 a year, every year, for as long as the creator keeps selling courses through that platform, a recurring cost with no natural end point, since the fee doesn’t decrease over time or get paid off like a one-time expense.
These aren’t dramatic numbers relative to $600,000 in revenue, and it would be dishonest to frame them as make-or-break. What they represent is a cost with no offsetting benefit for a creator who already has the infrastructure a self-hosted platform requires, money spent specifically to be on a hosted platform, recurring every single year, that a creator already running a WordPress site doesn’t need to spend at all.
Costs that don’t show up on the pricing page
Platform comparisons that stop at the headline subscription and transaction fee miss a category of cost that shows up after signup rather than before. Custom domain connection, certain app marketplace integrations, and advanced features on some hosted platforms carry their own add-on pricing beyond the base plan, which means the effective cost of running a course business on a hosted platform can exceed the advertised tier price once a creator wants functionality beyond the basics.
A self-hosted setup has its own version of this same dynamic, hosting costs, a domain (which most creators running any kind of site already have), and potentially a premium theme or additional plugins for functionality beyond what a course platform provides natively. The difference is that these costs exist independent of course revenue. A $10-a-month hosting plan costs $10 a month whether the course sells $500 or $50,000 that month, which is a fundamentally different cost structure than a fee that scales with sales.
Where the free plugin cost fits in
Learnomy’s free tier isn’t a stripped-down trial designed to push you toward a paid upgrade before you can do anything useful. Unlimited courses, the full checkout flow at 0% platform fees, quizzes, and certificates are all included at no cost. Learnomy Pro exists for features beyond the checkout itself, Learning Paths, Content Drip, Cohorts, advanced quiz types, Stripe Connect instructor payouts, and detailed analytics, none of which change the 0% platform fee on checkout. A creator can run Pro-tier operational features while still never paying a percentage of course revenue to the platform, which is a genuinely different structure than a hosted platform where the fee schedule and the feature tier are the same lever.
What the fee savings actually change in practice
The dollar figures matter, but what they enable matters more. Money that isn’t going to a platform’s transaction fee is money available for the things that actually grow a course business: ad spend, better production value, hiring help with support or marketing, or simply higher margin on a business that took real time to build. A creator saving several hundred dollars a month in fees at moderate volume, or several thousand at higher volume, isn’t just seeing a bigger number in a bank account, they’re seeing a materially different amount of capital available to reinvest.
There’s also a pricing flexibility angle worth naming. Because Learnomy doesn’t take a percentage of sales, a creator can price aggressively for a launch promotion or a bundle deal without the platform quietly taking a bigger absolute cut of an already-discounted sale. On a percentage-fee platform, discounting your own product means the platform’s take shrinks proportionally too, which sounds fair until you realize it means every promotional decision is partially made on the platform’s behalf rather than entirely on yours.
What this doesn’t account for
A fair comparison has to include what a hosted platform’s fee actually buys. Teachable’s cost includes hosting, video delivery infrastructure, uptime management, a support team, and a marketplace-adjacent set of tools that a self-hosted setup on WordPress has to either replicate through other means or accept responsibility for directly. That’s not nothing, for a creator with zero technical comfort and no existing website, that bundled infrastructure has real value, and it’s fair to weigh it against the fee savings rather than treating the fee comparison as the entire decision.
For a course creator who already runs a WordPress site, particularly one already selling digital products through Easy Digital Downloads, that infrastructure argument mostly evaporates. The hosting, the domain, the existing traffic, and often the existing checkout relationship with Stripe or PayPal are already in place. In that specific situation, the fee comparison isn’t offset by anything meaningful on Teachable’s side, because the infrastructure premium Teachable’s fee partially covers is infrastructure the creator doesn’t need to buy again.
A break-even way to think about the decision
Rather than treating this as an all-or-nothing platform decision, it’s worth calculating a rough break-even point specific to your own numbers. Take your current or projected monthly course revenue, estimate what Teachable’s transaction fee and subscription tier combination would cost at that volume, and compare it against Learnomy’s cost, which is simply standard payment processing regardless of volume. If the gap is a few hundred dollars a month, the decision might come down to how much you value not managing your own WordPress infrastructure. If the gap is a few thousand dollars a month, the infrastructure argument gets harder to justify no matter how much you’d rather not think about hosting and updates.
Why this fee structure exists at all
It’s worth understanding why Learnomy can afford to run at 0% platform fees when so much of the course-platform industry is built around taking a percentage. The business model isn’t subsidized by venture funding chasing growth at any cost, and it isn’t a loss-leading free tier designed to convert creators into a paid percentage later. Learnomy’s revenue comes from the plugin license itself, primarily through Pro tier subscriptions for features like Spaces, Learning Paths, and advanced analytics, which is a fundamentally different relationship than a platform whose revenue is directly tied to how much money flows through your checkout.
That distinction matters for how the incentives line up. A platform earning a percentage of your sales has a business reason to want you to sell more through their checkout specifically, which can subtly shape feature decisions, marketplace visibility, or upsell pressure. A platform earning a flat license fee regardless of your sales volume has no such incentive baked into the relationship, its revenue doesn’t move whether your course sells five copies or five thousand, so there’s no structural reason for feature decisions to be shaped by your checkout volume rather than by what actually helps you sell.
Frequently asked questions
Does Learnomy really take 0% on every sale, with no volume threshold?
Yes. The 0% platform fee applies to checkout through Stripe or PayPal regardless of sales volume, there’s no tier or threshold where that changes. Stripe and PayPal’s own standard processing rates still apply, since those are payment processor costs rather than a Learnomy fee.
Is Stripe or PayPal’s processing fee different on Learnomy than on Teachable?
No, standard card processing rates are set by the payment processor, not the course platform, and apply at roughly the same rate regardless of which platform is initiating the charge. The difference between the two platforms is entirely in what gets added on top of that baseline processing cost.
Does Learnomy Pro add any percentage-based fees?
No. Pro adds features like Learning Paths, Cohorts, and Stripe Connect instructor payouts for a flat annual license cost, but it doesn’t introduce a percentage cut on course sales at any tier. The 0% platform fee on checkout applies whether you’re running the free tier or Pro.
At what point does switching from Teachable to a self-hosted platform make financial sense?
There’s no universal number, but the fee gap becomes harder to ignore once monthly course revenue reaches a point where a percentage-based fee, or the cost of a higher subscription tier specifically to avoid it, represents a meaningful dollar amount relative to what running your own site would cost. For creators who already have a WordPress site and existing infrastructure, that break-even point comes much sooner, since there’s no separate hosting cost to weigh against the fee savings.
Do I lose any features by avoiding a platform that charges transaction fees?
Not from a checkout standpoint, Learnomy’s free tier includes direct Stripe and PayPal checkout, coupons, and an auto-generated pricing page. What you don’t get automatically is Teachable’s built-in audience or marketplace-adjacent tools, since Learnomy is a self-hosted platform rather than a hosted marketplace, which is a meaningfully different trade-off than a missing feature.
Does upgrading Teachable tiers ever fully offset the fee savings?
At high enough volume, yes, a creator doing very large numbers can reach a point where Growth or a custom Advanced plan’s flat cost becomes proportionally tiny relative to revenue. That point still requires paying a real, ongoing subscription cost that a platform with 0% fees never charges in the first place, so “eventually small as a percentage” isn’t the same as “free.”
How does this compare to Udemy’s revenue share model?
Udemy’s model is structured differently again, with revenue splits that vary heavily based on how a sale originated (organic marketplace traffic versus your own referral link), and is covered in more detail in our piece on selling courses from your own site instead of renting space on Udemy or Teachable.
Platform fees are easy to underestimate because they’re taken automatically, a little at a time, out of money that never fully registers as yours in the first place. A subscription bill arrives and gets noticed. A percentage quietly subtracted from every sale before the deposit lands rarely gets the same scrutiny, even though over a year it’s often the larger number. Running the actual math against your own revenue, rather than trusting a pricing page’s framing, is the only way to know which side of that gap you’re actually standing on.
