How Much Can You Actually Earn Selling a Course? (Real Maths)

Search "how much can you make selling an online course" and you'll find a lot of confident numbers with no arithmetic behind them: creators supposedly earning "$500 to $5,000 a month," platforms citing billions in aggregate sales with no source, worked examples that show gross revenue and stop there, before any fee gets deducted. None of it tells you what actually lands in your account from a single sale, and none of it can, because none of it starts from a real fee structure.

This post does the opposite. It starts from Lesso's actual numbers, defined in the platform's own pricing constants, and works forward: what a sale costs in fees, what's left for you, and how that changes at different prices and different sales counts. What it will not do is tell you how many people will actually buy, because that depends entirely on your audience and how you market to them, not on any platform's fee structure.

What happens to a sale before it reaches you

Every payment for your course, whether it's a one-time purchase or one month of a subscription, splits three ways. You keep 85% of the price. Lesso keeps 15% as its platform fee. Out of that 15%, Lesso pays Stripe's processing fee (currently 3.4% of the price plus $0.30 per transaction) before covering anything else, including affiliate commissions on sales that come through a referral link.

Here's the same split as a definition you can hold onto: your earnings per sale are 85% of the price the buyer pays, full stop, regardless of price or whether the sale is one-time or recurring.

Take a $29 course, priced the same whether it's sold once or billed monthly. The buyer pays $29. You receive $24.65. Lesso keeps $4.35, and out of that $4.35, Stripe takes roughly $1.29 (3.4% of $29, plus $0.30), leaving Lesso with about $3.06 net before covering anything else it's responsible for. Your 85% never moves regardless of what happens to Lesso's 15%. It isn't a negotiation that happens per sale; it's fixed in the platform's revenue split.

The split at six price points

The percentage is constant, but what it means in dollars obviously isn't. Lesso's minimum course price is $9, so here's the same 85/15 split, with Stripe's cut shown separately, from the floor up to a premium price:

Two things worth noticing here. First, Stripe's fixed $0.30 matters more at the bottom of that range than the top: on a $9 course it's 6.7% of the price on its own, before Stripe's percentage cut is even added, which is part of why a $9 course is a floor rather than a typical price. Second, your 85% scales linearly with price. Doubling your price roughly doubles your per-sale earnings, which is the one lever in this arithmetic you control directly, unlike sales volume.

One-time course or subscription: same split, different maths

Lesso treats a one-time purchase and a month of a subscription identically for revenue share purposes: 85% to you either way. The difference isn't the percentage. It's what you're multiplying it by.

A one-time course earns you 85% once per buyer. A subscription course earns you 85% every month a subscriber stays, which means the same price produces very different totals depending on how long people stick around, and it also means a slow month of new signups still pays out for everyone who joined in earlier months.

Here's the same underlying arithmetic applied to both shapes, using illustrative numbers, not projections of what either model will actually produce:

The one-time model front-loads: you get paid in full the moment someone buys, and you have to keep finding new buyers to keep earning. The subscription model back-loads: a slower start, because $29 recurring is smaller than $49 once, but every subscriber who doesn't cancel keeps paying in month two, month six, and beyond, with no extra selling effort from you. Neither is a fixed answer. A course that teaches a finite skill (a specific technique, a one-off process) usually fits a one-time price better, because the value is fully delivered once. A course that adds new material, ongoing feedback, or evolving content fits a subscription better, because the ongoing payment matches ongoing value. If you're deciding between the two for your own content, that's the actual trade-off, not the percentage split, which stays the same either way.

What it actually takes to reach a few round numbers a month

None of the figures below are typical, average, or predicted. They're arithmetic run backwards from a target, so you can see what the sales or subscriber count would have to be, not a claim that any particular count is realistic for you.

Whether 13 sales a month or 157 subscribers is achievable depends on your audience size, how many of them actually want a paid course from you, and how well you market it once it exists, three variables this post has no way of estimating for you. A newsletter with 300 highly engaged subscribers might convert a meaningful share of them into buyers of a $49 course on the exact topic they signed up to read about. A newsletter with 30,000 passive subscribers who never open the email might convert almost none. List size alone predicts very little; relevance and trust predict most of it.

Is it worth it with a small audience?

Yes, conditionally: it's worth it if your audience, however small, is specifically interested in what your course teaches, because the arithmetic above doesn't require a large number of buyers to produce a meaningful amount, only a price and volume that multiply to something worth the time spent writing and structuring the course. Thirteen sales of a $49 course is not a large number to reach with even a modest, engaged list. What the arithmetic can't do is turn a disengaged or mismatched audience into buyers; that's a marketing and content-fit problem, not a fee-structure problem, and no revenue split changes it. For a fuller look at what actually works with a smaller or newer list, see getting your first customers with zero audience.

The one thing this post can't calculate for you

Every number above is exact because it comes from a fixed rule: 85% to you, 15% to Lesso, and Stripe's fee paid out of Lesso's share, not yours. Sales volume is not a fixed rule. It's the product of how many people see your course, how many of them want what it teaches, and how well the page selling it makes that case, none of which any platform, Lesso included, can predict or promise on your behalf. Treat every dollar figure in this post as "if you sell this many, here's what you'd keep," never as "here's what you will sell."

If you're weighing a text-based course specifically against other ways to earn from your writing or expertise, monetising your writing covers the wider set of options, and side income for consultants and coaches works through the version of this specific to people already charging for their time. For the broader decision between building an audience as a creator or earning from Lesso's affiliate programme instead, see course creator or affiliate: which one fits you.