Udemy instructor fees: what you keep per sale
Udemy is free to publish but keeps up to 63% of marketplace sales and 3% of your coupon sales. Worked examples, blended rates, and when self-hosting wins.
Udemy charges instructors nothing to publish. There is no monthly fee and no setup cost. It makes its money from a revenue split on every sale, and the split depends on who found the buyer: Udemy keeps up to 63% of sales that come through its marketplace, and only 3% of sales you bring in yourself through your own coupon links. So on a marketplace sale you keep as little as 37 cents of every dollar, and on your own coupon sale you keep 97 cents.
That gap is the whole story of Udemy’s fees. The same course, at the same price, earns you between 37% and 97% of the sticker depending on where the click came from.
All pricing below comes from each platform’s listed plans; verify current pricing on the vendor’s site before you commit. Our Udemy record has no recent verification date, so treat the 63% and 3% as the listed figures, and check your instructor dashboard for the split that actually applies to you.
What you keep on a single sale
Here is what lands with you at a few example prices. These are hypothetical prices for illustration, computed at the full 63% marketplace cut and the 3% coupon cut:
| Example sale price | Udemy keeps (marketplace, 63%) | You keep (marketplace) | Udemy keeps (your coupon, 3%) | You keep (your coupon) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $15 | $9.45 | $5.55 | $0.45 | $14.55 |
| $50 | $31.50 | $18.50 | $1.50 | $48.50 |
| $100 | $63 | $37 | $3 | $97 |
| $200 | $126 | $74 | $6 | $194 |
The $15 row isn’t arbitrary. Our listing notes that you don’t own pricing on Udemy and that it runs frequent deep discounts, into the $10-$15 range. If your $100 course mostly sells at a discount through the marketplace, the “you keep” column you should plan around is the top row, not the third.
Put another way: one sale you make yourself is worth about 2.6 marketplace sales at the same price ($97 against $37). To earn the same from organic traffic as from your own audience, Udemy has to sell your course to roughly two and a half to three times as many people.
Your real rate depends on the mix
Almost nobody sells 100% one way or the other. Some buyers arrive from Udemy search, some from your newsletter or YouTube channel via a coupon link. Your blended take is a weighted average of 63% and 3%:
| Share of sales from your own coupon links | Udemy’s blended cut | You keep per $1,000 of sales |
|---|---|---|
| 0% (all marketplace) | 63% | $370 |
| 10% | 57% | $430 |
| 25% | 48% | $520 |
| 50% | 33% | $670 |
| 75% | 18% | $820 |
| 100% (all your own) | 3% | $970 |
Every 10 points of sales you move from marketplace to your own links is worth $60 per $1,000 of revenue. That is why instructors with an audience push their own coupon links hard: it is the single biggest lever on what they take home.
What the same revenue costs on a self-hosted platform
The alternative is to host the course yourself on a dedicated course platform. You pay a monthly subscription, the platform takes little or nothing per sale, and nobody sends you buyers. Three useful comparisons, from their listed annual-billing prices:
- Thinkific Basic: $36/mo, 0% platform fee with Thinkific Payments (an outside Stripe or PayPal gateway adds 5% on Basic).
- Teachable Starter: $29/mo plus a 7.5% transaction fee, or Builder at $69/mo with 0%.
- Kajabi Basic: $143/mo, 0% revenue share.
Here is the monthly cost of each against Udemy at four revenue levels. The self-hosted figures are subscription plus platform fee and exclude card processing, which you pay on top (Kajabi, for example, lists 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic):
| Monthly sales | Udemy, all marketplace (63%) | Udemy, 50/50 mix (33%) | Udemy, all coupon (3%) | Thinkific Basic | Teachable Starter | Teachable Builder | Kajabi Basic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $500 | $315 | $165 | $15 | $36 | $66.50 | $69 | $143 |
| $1,000 | $630 | $330 | $30 | $36 | $104 | $69 | $143 |
| $3,000 | $1,890 | $990 | $90 | $36 | $254 | $69 | $143 |
| $5,000 | $3,150 | $1,650 | $150 | $36 | $404 | $69 | $143 |
Where a paid platform beats Udemy
Solve for the monthly revenue where the subscription equals Udemy’s cut:
| Platform | Beats Udemy marketplace (63%) above | Beats a 50/50 mix (33%) above | Beats all-coupon (3%) above |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thinkific Basic ($36) | about $57/mo | about $109/mo | $1,200/mo |
| Teachable Builder ($69) | about $110/mo | about $209/mo | $2,300/mo |
| Kajabi Basic ($143) | about $227/mo | about $433/mo | about $4,767/mo |
Against Udemy’s marketplace cut, the answer is close to “immediately”. Thinkific’s $36 subscription is cheaper than Udemy’s share once you sell about $57 a month, which is four sales at a $15 discount price. At $1,000 a month in organic Udemy sales, you hand over $630; that’s about $7,560 a year, against $432 for a year of Thinkific Basic.
Teachable Starter is the odd one: its 7.5% fee means it still beats Udemy’s marketplace cut above about $52 a month, but it never beats Udemy’s 3% coupon rate at any revenue, because 7.5% is already more than 3% before the $29 subscription. If you go to Teachable, go to Builder.
Against Udemy’s coupon rate, the picture flips. If every sale already arrives through your own coupon links, Udemy’s 3% stays cheaper than Thinkific until $1,200 a month and cheaper than Kajabi until about $4,767. Our record doesn’t say whether that 3% sits before or after card processing, so check that before treating the comparison as exact.
For the full fee picture across the category, see course platform transaction fees explained, or drag in your own numbers in the pricing calculator.
The 63% is paying for customers, not hosting
Comparing Udemy’s cut to a $36 subscription is fair on cost and unfair on what you get. Thinkific doesn’t bring you a single buyer. Udemy’s marketplace does, and its main listed strength is exactly that: a very large built-in audience that can drive sales with no marketing from you.
So think of the 63% as a customer acquisition cost. If you have no audience, $0 a month and 37% of something beats $36 a month and 100% of nothing. Udemy is free until it sells, which makes it a reasonable place to test whether a broad, search-driven topic has demand at all.
What you give up is listed plainly in our record: you don’t control pricing, there is no real branding, and the students belong to Udemy rather than to you. You can’t email them, so you can’t sell them the next course at your own price. On a self-hosted platform, every buyer becomes a contact you own.
Which way to go
The data points to a simple split.
- No audience yet, broad topic. Publish on Udemy. It costs nothing, and the marketplace is the only party in this comparison that will find buyers for you. Budget on keeping about 37% of discounted prices.
- You have an audience that buys. Here the case for leaving is ownership more than fees. On fees alone, Udemy’s 3% coupon rate stays cheaper than Thinkific Basic until $1,200 a month and Kajabi until about $4,767. Past those lines, or as soon as you want your buyers’ emails and your own pricing, host it yourself.
- Both. Plenty of instructors keep a cheaper entry course on Udemy for discovery and sell the flagship on their own platform. If you do this, push your Udemy coupon links to your own audience so those sales land at 97%, not 37%.
If you do move off Udemy, price for it: the self-hosted model only works if you charge what a course is worth to a buyer who found you directly, not what the marketplace discounts it to. How to price an online course covers that. The Udemy alternatives page ranks the other options on price and rating, the course platform comparison lines up fees and features side by side, and our advisor will narrow it to two or three based on your audience and budget.