Where every dollar goes
Complete public accounting of the Lesson Complete marketplace. Creator payouts, platform fees, and the real infrastructure costs behind the platform. Updated daily.
Why we publish this
This isn’t a VC-backed company extracting value. This is one person maintaining a public good. Music educators deserve to know where their money goes — and students deserve to know that the creators they’re buying from are actually getting paid.
Marketplace totals — all time
Every marketplace purchase since launch, broken down by where the money landed.
Paid to creators
$192
79.6% of gross revenue
Total purchases
20
$241 gross
Platform fee
$36
Covers hosting, Stripe reserves, maintenance
Breakdown by content type
Different content types have different fee structures. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Community scores
Original compositions and public domain arrangements
To creators
79.6%
- Creator payout
- $191.69(79.6%)
- Stripe processing
- $12.96(5.4%)
- Platform fee
- $36.15(15.0%)
Purchases
20
Gross
$240.80
Teaching materials
Worksheets, exercises, and pedagogical resources
To creators
—
- Creator payout
- $0.00(0.0%)
- Stripe processing
- $0.00(0.0%)
- Platform fee
- $0.00(0.0%)
Purchases
0
Gross
$0.00
Courses
Video lessons and structured curricula
To creators
—
- Creator payout
- $0.00(0.0%)
- Stripe processing
- $0.00(0.0%)
- Platform fee
- $0.00(0.0%)
Purchases
0
Gross
$0.00
Our fee policy
- Creators keep ≥ 95% of the net price after Stripe processing. Our platform fee is 2% or $0.10, whichever is higher.
- Stripe processingis approximately 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. We don’t mark this up — it’s exactly what Stripe charges.
- Courses (when available) carry a higher platform fee of 5–8% to cover video hosting and CDN costs. Still dramatically lower than Udemy (37–63%) or Teachable.
- Public domain scores are always free — no platform fee, no creator payout, just a free library.
Infrastructure costs
What it actually costs to keep the marketplace running. These are the real monthly bills.
Attributed monthly cost
June 2026
$286.09/ month
Infrastructure costs cover: Cloudflare R2 storage for sheet music PDFs, server hosting, Stripe Connect platform fees, CDN bandwidth, email and SMS delivery, and the single developer maintaining the platform. Updated monthly by hand — no automated markup.