Gross is price times students
Gross is the course price multiplied by the number of students. A $299 course sold to 500 students grosses $149,500, which is the figure on the launch leaderboard and the base every deduction is taken from.
Gross is what happened, not what you keep. The page starts there because refunds and platform fees are percentages of it rather than flat amounts, so the whole calculation below that line is a subtraction from one number.
A price of zero or a student count of zero returns zero, and the page does not invent a plausible launch size. The estimate is only as good as the count you bring to it, which is why both figures are inputs rather than assumptions.
Refunds and the platform cut come out
Refunds come off first at the rate you expect: 5% of $149,500 is $7,475, which leaves $142,025. The platform fee is then charged on what survives, so 15% of that is $21,304 and $120,721 is what stays.
The order matters, and the page applies it deliberately. A fee charged on the post-refund amount is smaller than the same percentage charged on gross, because a refunded sale does not pay a platform fee under most contracts.
Each percentage point is worth knowing in dollars. One point of refund rate costs 1% of gross, while one point of platform fee costs 1% of the post-refund figure: at these defaults that is $1,495 against $1,420.
Refund rates cluster around 3% to 8% for a launch with a reasonable window. A rate far above that usually traces back to an overpromised outcome or a confused buyer journey rather than bad luck, and fixing the cause beats budgeting around the loss.
The per-student number is the honest unit
Net divided by students is what each buyer is actually worth: $120,721 across 500 students is $241.44 a head, well below the $299 sticker.
That is the figure to compare against the cost of acquiring a student, whether the acquisition came through ads, affiliates or a launch sequence. Budget against the net per student, and a campaign that looks marginal against the price can clearly lose money.
It is also the number for comparing two launches. A cheaper course with many more students can bank more in total while being worth less per buyer, and only one of those answers the question of whether the next enrollment is worth buying.
The platform fee belongs in the price, not after it
A 10% to 20% platform cut changes what a launch must gross to hit a target net, so the fee belongs in the price from the start rather than being discovered at payout. The reverse sum is short: divide the net you need by one minus the fee, then by the share that survives refunds, and the gross the launch has to reach falls out.
Comparing a managed platform against native checkout with a raw processor is part of that pricing decision. The cheaper route usually carries more of the operational work - tax, delivery, refunds - and the fee difference is what you pay to avoid it.
The calculator applies whichever fee you enter, which makes platform and price-point trade-offs easy to compare side by side. Payment plans, upsells and affiliate payouts are left out of the model, since each would be a guess dressed up as an input.
An early-bird tier makes the launch a weighted average
Most launches are not sold at one price. An early-bird tier at $199 for the first hundred buyers followed by $299 for the rest is one launch with two prices, and the number that decides the payout is the weighted average: a hundred at $199 plus four hundred at $299 is $279 across the cohort. That $20 gap is the whole distance between the headline the launch can quote and the price on the sales page.
Run the tiers through the same arithmetic rather than guessing at a blended price. On a single course the platform fee and the refund rate apply to the blended total, so a weighted average fed through this page once gives the same answer as two separate runs, provided the refund rate is the same for both tiers - and it usually is not, because early buyers are the most committed and refund least. Weighting the refund rate down for the early tier is the part of the model that most repays the effort.
The tier decision is also a margin decision, but not in the way the discount implies. With percentage fees only, a 33% price cut cuts the net by about 33% too, because gross and fee shrink together. What makes early-bird pricing expensive in real launches is everything this page does not model: per-transaction processing cents, ad spend that does not shrink with the price, and affiliate cuts. Those are fixed against a smaller gross, so the net falls faster than the price did - which is why a sell-out launch can bank less than a smaller one at full price.
Danfio