Online course platform profit calculator

How the number is built

For each platform, what you keep in a month is your gross sales (course price times number of sales) minus three things: payment processing (a percentage of each sale plus a flat fee per transaction, the Stripe and PayPal style default is 2.9% plus 30 cents), any platform transaction fee the plan charges on top, and the monthly plan price itself. The effective fee percent rolls all three into a single number so you can compare a high plan price with no per-sale fee against a free plan that skims 10% off every sale.

The breakeven sales count is the plan price divided by what you keep on a single sale after processing and any platform fee. Below it, the plan has not yet paid for its own monthly cost. It is the quickest way to see whether a $199/mo all-in plan is sane at the volume you actually expect, or whether a leaner plan keeps more in your pocket until you scale.

Every plan price and fee is an editable input pre-filled with a published mid-2025 list figure, so you can match the exact quote in front of you and nothing here is a number you cannot check. Plan prices shown are the lower, billed-annually rates; confirm the current figure on each platform's pricing page before you decide.

Why the cheapest plan is not always the winner

The plan tier you actually need is driven by features, not price. If you need a built-in email marketing tool, memberships, or a community, that requirement can push you up a tier or rule out a free plan entirely. The calculator picks the cheapest tier on each platform that still covers the features you tick, then prices the comparison on those tiers, so you are comparing like for like instead of a stripped-down free plan against a full suite.

Kajabi is the all-in-one end of the market: it bundles email, memberships and communities and charges no platform transaction fee, so its tiers scale by contact and product limits rather than features. Teachable and Thinkific are leaner and cheaper at the entry level, with Teachable's free plan taking a 10% cut per sale and Thinkific charging no platform fee even on its free tier. Which of those wins depends entirely on your price, your volume and the features you cannot live without, which is exactly what the tool computes.

The line this calculator does not compute: the tax on the sale

The take-home figure above stops at three deductions: processing, any platform fee, and the plan price. It leaves out the tax on the sale itself, and for a digital course that is rarely nothing. Selling to a consumer in the EU means charging VAT at the buyer's own country rate, which runs from 17 percent in Luxembourg to 27 percent in Hungary and is 21 percent in Belgium, and remitting it through the One Stop Shop return; a buyer in the United States can owe state sales tax on digital goods in the states that tax them. Because EU rules require consumer prices to be shown inclusive of VAT, that tax comes straight out of the single headline price you advertise, so it lands on exactly the take-home line this tool computes.

What makes it a real gap rather than a footnote is that the three platforms handle the tax very differently, and the calculator treats them the same. On Teachable's native payment gateways (teachable:pay or the Monthly Payment Gateway) Teachable acts as the merchant of record: it charges, collects and remits EU and UK VAT through the VAT OSS system, and US sales tax, on your behalf, so the compliance is off your plate, though a custom payment gateway pushes that duty back onto you. Thinkific Payments manages US and Canada sales tax only, which leaves EU VAT for you to charge, register for and remit, usually with a bolt-on such as Quaderno. Kajabi does not apply VAT natively at all, so you add it to your price and file it yourself or connect a tax tool. None of that shows up in a revenue-minus-fees number.

Treat the tax as a separate line, and before you commit, confirm each platform's current tax handling for the countries you actually sell into: who charges the VAT, who remits it, and whether a business buyer with a valid VAT number shifts the sale to a reverse charge. The take-home figure here is what you keep before the tax authority takes its share, not after.

Who this is for

Creators about to launch a first course and choosing where to host it, and established course sellers wondering whether they have outgrown (or overpaid for) their current platform. For why the cheap entry plan often keeps less than a fee-free tier, read the course platform cheap-plan trap.

Course platform fee questions, answered