Inside the 80/20 split: what tutors actually take home
Every course sale on StackGrasp splits 80/20 — the tutor keeps 80%. That headline number is simple, but it's only half the story: Marketplace service orders (consultations, live classes, skill services, digital products) run on a completely different split, tiered by the seller's own plan, and understanding both is the difference between guessing at your take-home and actually planning around it.
Two different splits, on purpose
Course sales pay out 80/20 flat, no matter which plan the tutor is on, and the payout is queued the moment the sale clears — not held for a billing cycle, not batched into a monthly run. Marketplace service orders work differently on purpose: because a service order can be disputed or never delivered, the seller's payout is held until the buyer explicitly accepts delivery, the same escrow-by-payout-timing model applied to the same payouts table courses use, just gated on a different trigger.
The service-order split is also tiered by the seller's plan rather than fixed:
- Seeker (free plan): 90% seller / 10% platform
- Explorer ($9/mo): 91% seller / 9% platform
- Scholar ($29/mo): 93% seller / 7% platform
- Apex ($129/mo): 97% seller / 3% platform
That's a real, structural reason to upgrade beyond the usage-allowance bumps every plan tier gets elsewhere on the platform — a working tutor doing meaningful service-order volume keeps meaningfully more of every sale on Apex than on Seeker.
Where the platform's cut actually goes
The 20% on course sales (and the 3–10% on service orders) funds the parts of the platform that don't show up as a line item anywhere else: the AI compute behind syllabus generation, lecture and avatar-video rendering, and live AI Tutor sessions; the human moderation queue every AI-generated course passes through before it's publishable; and real payment-processing fees on every Paystack transaction and every payout transfer. None of that is free to run, and the split is the mechanism that pays for it without charging tutors a separate subscription just to sell.
Featured placement is a separate lever, not part of the split
Tutors who want more visibility than organic ranking gives them have two additional, opt-in ways to pay for reach — neither of which touches the 80/20 split itself. A flat fee ($9 for 7 days, $29 for 30 days) buys guaranteed homepage placement for a listing. Separately, a real per-impression auction — the same generalized-second-price mechanism eBay and Google Ads use — lets a tutor set a floor bid, a ceiling, and a total budget, and only pays for impressions actually served, with a 30-minute cooldown so a single repeat visitor can't drain a campaign's budget by refreshing.
Getting paid out
A payout can only be requested once a tutor has a real, Paystack-verified bank account on file — that's the actual gate, not a fixed payment schedule. Once pending payouts exist and a bank account is verified, a tutor can request a transfer any time; there's no waiting for a monthly cutoff. Payouts convert automatically into the tutor's own local currency at settlement, since the platform's real Paystack merchant account settles in Nigerian naira by default regardless of the USD price a buyer saw at checkout.
Pricing your own time
For service orders specifically, the plan-tiered split means the effective price a buyer needs to pay for you to net a given amount is lowest on Apex and highest on Seeker — worth factoring into how you set your hourly rate if you're doing consistent Marketplace volume rather than the occasional course sale. Course pricing doesn't have that complication: 80/20 applies uniformly, so the only real lever there is the price itself.