A $200 course sold to 100 students sounds like a clean $20,000 launch. It isn't. Your platform takes a cut before the money ever hits your bank account, and a share of those buyers will ask for a refund inside your guarantee window — both of which quietly shrink the number you actually keep. This calculator walks your list price and expected student count through both of those deductions so you can see gross revenue, net revenue, and revenue per student side by side, instead of anchoring on the headline sales figure.
How it works
Start with gross revenue: course price multiplied by expected students, the number a sales page banner would brag about. From there, the calculator applies your refund rate first — refunds are money that left and came back, so they come off the top line before anything else touches it. Only the revenue that survives refunds is subject to your platform's fee, since a refunded sale never generates a transaction fee in the first place; the platform can't take a cut of money it already returned.
What's left after both deductions is net revenue — what you actually keep. Divide that by your expected student count and you get revenue per student, a useful sanity check for whether your price point and platform combination is actually worth the effort of running a launch, or whether fees and refunds are eating a bigger bite than you assumed.
Worked example
Say you price a course at $200, expect 100 students, your platform charges a 10% fee, and you're budgeting for a 5% refund rate.
- Gross revenue: $200 × 100 = $20,000
- After a 5% refund rate: $20,000 × 0.95 = $19,000
- After a 10% platform fee: $19,000 × 0.90 = $17,100 net revenue
- Revenue per student: $17,100 ÷ 100 = $171
That's $2,900 gone before you ever see it — $1,000 to refunds, $1,900 to the platform's cut of what survived them. None of that is a hidden fee; it's the arithmetic every course creator eventually runs into the first time a payout lands short of what the sales dashboard implied.
How to interpret your result
Net revenue is the number that matters for deciding whether a launch was worth the time it took to build and market the course — not gross revenue, which is really just a vanity metric until fees and refunds are subtracted. If your revenue per student looks thin, the fix isn't always a higher price; it's often a lower refund rate through a tighter guarantee window, or a platform switch once your volume justifies a plan with a smaller transaction fee.
Watch the gap between gross and net closely if you're comparing platforms. A course priced identically on two different platforms can produce meaningfully different payouts purely because of fee structure — some platforms charge a flat percentage regardless of how the sale happened, while others vary wildly by channel. Udemy is the extreme case here: its list prices are largely theoretical, since courses are discounted to $9.99–$19.99 during near-constant sale periods, and the revenue share Udemy keeps depends entirely on whether a sale came through its marketplace or your own promotional link — plug in your actual expected sale price and real fee, not the list price on your course page, or this calculator will overstate what you'll collect.
Refund rate is the input worth stress-testing the most, since it's the one you're guessing at before you have real launch data. Run the numbers again with a refund rate a few points higher than you expect — if net revenue still looks acceptable, you have real margin for error; if it doesn't, your price or your guarantee terms may need a second look before launch.
Methodology & sources
The formulas: grossRevenue = coursePrice × expectedStudents; afterRefunds = grossRevenue × (1 − refundRate / 100); netRevenue = afterRefunds × (1 − platformFeePercent / 100); revenuePerStudent = netRevenue ÷ expectedStudents (0 if expectedStudents is 0). Every dollar output is rounded from its own unrounded intermediate, so gross revenue, net revenue, and revenue per student stay internally consistent with each other.
Platform fees genuinely vary this widely: Teachable's own pricing page shows a 7.5% transaction fee on its entry-level Starter plan, dropping to 0% on its Builder tier and above — meaning the exact same course, on the exact same platform, nets a meaningfully different payout depending purely on which subscription tier you're paying for. Always check your specific platform and plan rather than trusting a rounded default, and remember that most platforms also layer a separate card-processing fee (commonly around 2.9% for US cards) on top of their own transaction cut, which this calculator's single platform-fee input doesn't break out separately.