How does Prolaud make money if it takes 0% commission on course sales?

Prolaud makes money from subscriptions, not sales. Academies pay a flat monthly plan, Pro or Studio, and can add extra capacity or paid modules on top. None of it depends on what you sell. Your students pay into your own payment account, and Prolaud takes 0% of every course, membership or download you sell.

That raises a fair question. Most course platforms that advertise a free or cheap plan earn their money from a percentage of each sale, so a platform that refuses the percentage has to be paid some other way, or it is quietly planning to start taking one. This article sets out the whole model: what we charge for, where a student's money actually goes, what it costs us to run your academy, and the limits that exist because of those costs. It also covers the cases where a per-sale model would honestly cost you less.

Every line of revenue is something an academy owner chooses to pay for and can see on the pricing page or the plugins page before buying it. There is no revenue line that comes out of a student's payment.

Most of the product sits inside the plan: the storefront, courses, live classes, communities with challenges and leaderboards, certificates, the docs editor and the presentation builder. The paid modules are the ones with a narrow audience and real build cost. University handles degree programs, proctored exams and academic records, and Proctoring handles identity and evidence checks for online tests. A solo tutor never needs either, so folding them into every plan would push up the price for everyone.

This is the part that makes 0% commission structural rather than a promise we could quietly break. The money never passes through us, so there is nothing for us to skim.

1. A student buys a course on your academy site and pays at checkout.
2. The payment is taken by your own payment account. You connect your own Stripe account by pasting its API key, or your own Razorpay account in one click, and you can connect both.
3. Your processor deducts its standard processing fee, which it sets and keeps. We don't add anything to it.
4. The processor pays the rest out to your bank on its own schedule. A brand-new processor account can wait a little longer for its first payout while the processor verifies it.
5. The order appears on your Payouts page in Prolaud and, separately, in your own Stripe or Razorpay dashboard, so you can check one against the other.

Because the payment account is yours, the customer relationship is yours too. Refunds are issued from your account, disputes are raised against your account, and if you ever leave Prolaud, your payment history stays where it always was.

A per-sale cut and a flat fee aren't just two ways of charging the same amount. They make a platform care about different things.

A commission grows with your success, not with our costs

Hosting a course that sells for $500 costs us the same as hosting one that sells for $50: the same video storage, the same pages, the same email. A percentage model charges the $500 course ten times as much for the same work. The teachers who do best on a commission platform end up paying the most, which is backwards for a tool that is supposed to help them grow.

It changes what the platform wants from you

A platform paid per sale is paid to push sales. That's not sinister, but it shows in what gets built: upsell pop-ups, discount nudges, marketplace placement. A platform paid a flat fee is paid to keep you subscribed, which means keeping your students coming back and your teaching working. That's why so much of Prolaud is about what happens after the sale: live classes, attendance, communities, challenges and certificates.

You can plan around it

A fixed monthly cost is something you can put in a budget. A percentage moves with every launch, and it is largest in exactly the month you worked hardest for.

The table below compares Studio, our larger self-serve plan at $42 a month billed monthly, with two example commission rates. The rates are illustrations, not any particular platform's; check the pricing page of any platform you are considering, because many charge a different rate on each plan. Your payment processor's fee applies on top in every column, so it is left out of all of them.

At a 5% cut, the flat fee costs less once you sell more than about $840 a month. At a 10% cut, it costs less above about $420 a month. Pro is cheaper again, at $18 a month billed monthly, for academies with up to 1,000 students and 25 published courses. Use the payout calculator to run your own numbers.

Honestly, sometimes. A flat fee is a bet that you'll sell enough for the fee to be worth it, and that bet doesn't suit everyone.

• You are selling very little, or nothing yet. A commission-only plan with no monthly fee costs nothing in a month with no sales. Prolaud has no free plan, so a quiet month still costs the plan price.
• You sell rarely and in small amounts. If your sales stay well below the break-even figures above, a percentage is cheaper in money terms, though you still lose the classroom, community and records that come with the plan.
• You want a marketplace to find students for you. Some platforms take a larger cut in exchange for sending you buyers from their own catalog. Prolaud doesn't run a marketplace; you bring your own audience to your own academy.

We retired our free plan on 19 October 2026, and we'd rather say so plainly than dress it up. Every new academy now starts on a 14-day trial of Studio, with every feature switched on and no card. Publishing your first course adds 7 days and your first student 14 more, up to 35 days in all, so you can test whether the flat fee makes sense with real sales before you pay anything.

Our costs come from the things you use, not the things you sell. These are the expensive ones:

• Live video. Every live class runs on video servers we operate, and the cost grows with how many people are in the room and for how long.
• Video storage and processing. Uploaded lessons and class recordings are stored and converted for playback, which costs us for every gigabyte and every minute of processing.
• AI generation. Drafting a course outline or building a slide deck calls AI models that charge per request. It is the most expensive thing in the product per click.
• Email and notifications. Invites, receipts, reminders and announcements go out through mail providers that charge per message.

A flat fee only works if usage stays within a range the fee can cover, so each plan has limits sized to its price. We publish them rather than leave them to small print.

Participant-minutes are people multiplied by minutes. On Pro, 60,000 covers about 40 one-hour classes a month for a room of 25. On Studio, it covers about 200. There is no cap on the number of classes you schedule; the allowance is on total time.

There are no surprise overage charges. We email you at 80% of a limit and again at 100%, and what happens next depends on the limit:

• Live time is soft. Passing the monthly allowance never cuts off a class that's running. You're warned, and the next session is refused until you upgrade or the month resets.
• Storage is hard. Uploads pause until you add storage or move up a plan. Nothing you've already uploaded is deleted.
• AI limits reset on their own. They're sliding windows per hour, day and week, so a busy afternoon slows you down for an hour, not a month.
• Students on Pro stop at 1,000, and the +500 students add-on ($6/mo) lifts that without changing plan.

We would rather tell you where the edges are than call anything unlimited and then throttle you quietly. That's also why the limits are on usage, which costs us money, and never on sales, which doesn't.

It's the right thing to worry about, because platforms do change their terms once teachers are locked in. Two things stand in the way here.

The first is structural: the money doesn't pass through us. To take a cut, we'd have to rebuild checkout so payments land in our account instead of yours, and you'd see that change in your own Stripe or Razorpay dashboard the day it happened.

The second is written down. Article 1 of the Founder Bill of Rights says we don't take a percentage of course sales, storefront orders, memberships, live-class tickets, certificate fees or any other revenue you run on the platform, and that payment processor fees pass through without a markup.

We've also shown how we handle it when we do break a written promise. When we retired the free plan in October 2026, that went against Article 5, which said legacy customers would stay on their original terms. We didn't edit the old text. The article still shows what we promised, with a dated amendment underneath saying what we did instead. If Article 1 ever changed, you would see it the same way, in public and with a date.

Don't take our word for it. These checks take five minutes during the trial:

1. Connect your own Stripe or Razorpay account, then sell a low-priced test product to yourself.
2. In your processor's dashboard, open the payment. The only deduction should be the processor's own fee.
3. Compare it with the same order on your Prolaud Payouts page. The amounts should match.
4. Refund the test payment from your Payouts page in Prolaud, and check that the refund appears in your processor dashboard too.
5. Read the pricing page and the Founder Bill of Rights for anything that charges per sale. There isn't anything.