Let me start with the number, because it's the thing creators actually want to know and most platforms bury it three clicks deep. You keep 70%. We keep 30%. That's the deal, and the rest of this piece is me explaining why it's that split and not a worse one.
Where 30% sits on the map
Take-rates tell you what a platform thinks it's worth. Here's the landscape every expert is already navigating.
The app stores and course platforms sit around a third, sometimes much more — Kindle can take well over half depending on how you price. The creator-first platforms, Gumroad and Substack, take a tenth and have moved hundreds of millions to creators by doing it.
We sit at 30% — the same headline rate as Apple. So the fair question is: why aren't we at 10% like the creator platforms? The answer is in what the 30% actually buys, because we're doing dramatically more than hosting a file.
What the 30% pays for
Gumroad and Substack are, essentially, distribution and payments. You make the thing; they help you sell it. That's a real service and a 10% one. What we do sits between "you made a book" and "the book applies itself to a stranger's specific problem, faithfully, on demand." That gap is full of hard, expensive engineering.
Every one of those is work a course platform never touches. Extraction is the hardest cognitive job in the pipeline. Testing is what separates a real skill from a vibe with a price tag — methodology fidelity, multi-turn journeys, the lot. Delivery means your judgment runs against each user's actual problem. Protection means your method never leaves the server to be copied. Evolution means the thing stays alive as your thinking moves.
What that actually earns you
Numbers in the abstract are useless, so here's the mechanism. Usage runs on credits — a credit is ten cents. A skill costs somewhere between one and eight credits to run, depending on depth, and there's a premium when it carries someone all the way through a real piece of work rather than answering a quick question.
You take 70% of that, every time, across every situation your expertise touches — while you sleep, speak, consult, or write the next thing. The reason this beats the old model isn't the percentage. It's that the percentage applies to usage that doesn't cost you an hour. A consultant at the best day rate still trades time for money one client at a time. A skill earns from a thousand people at once and never gets tired.
The honest comparison
So weigh it properly. A course platform takes 10% but leaves you with a static artifact that makes the buyer do all the work — which is why most never finish it and why you can only charge so much. We take 30% and turn your methodology into something that does the work for the user, runs at scale, protects your IP, and improves over time.
I'd rather take 70% of something that actually gets used than 90% of something that sits on a hard drive. The split isn't the headline. What the split is attached to is. You keep the majority of the revenue from the one thing only you could ever provide — and we carry everything else.
Cheers, Adam