Revenue-share partnership vs. agency vs. course platform

The three questions that actually separate them

Most comparisons of this kind turn into a fee table. Fees matter, but they are the smallest of the differences, and they are the one thing you can look up in five minutes. The structural differences are these:

• Who funds the build? Someone has to pay for the product to exist — in cash, in your own hours, or both. This is the question that decides how much you risk before you know anything.
• Who does the work? Not just making the product, but the pricing page, the checkout, the delivery, the email sequence, the refunds, the tax handling, and the fixing of whatever breaks at 11pm on launch day.
• Who loses if it does not sell? This is the one that reveals whose incentives genuinely match yours, and it is worth being unsentimental about.

Ownership and control sit underneath all three. As a rough rule, the more of the funding and work you take on, the more control and upside you keep — and the more you lose if the bet does not pay off. There is no arrangement that gives you all of the upside, none of the work, and none of the risk.

Course platforms: you do the work, and what you keep depends on the type

"Course platform" covers at least three different businesses, and conflating them is the most common mistake in this comparison.

Hosted platforms

You rent software. It handles hosting, checkout, student accounts, and delivery; you supply the product, the pricing, the audience, and the marketing. You typically pay a monthly subscription, sometimes plus a transaction percentage, and always plus card processing fees.

As of 18 September 2026, Teachable publishes plans at $39, $89, and $189 per month, with a 7.5% transaction fee on its Starter plan and 0% on Builder and Growth when using Teachable Payments, plus card processing of 2.9% + 30¢ on U.S. cards. Kajabi publishes plans at $179, $249, and $499 per month, states that it "does not take a revenue share as a platform," and charges payment processing of 2.9% + $0.30 on its Basic plan, with an additional 0.5%–2% if you use a third-party processor. Check both directly — published pricing changes, and these figures are a snapshot.

Marketplaces

A marketplace also brings buyers, and charges accordingly. The important detail, which is often missed, is that the split usually depends on who brought the customer.

Udemy's published instructor terms are a clear illustration: instructors receive 97% of revenue when a student buys using the instructor's own coupon or referral link, and 37% when the sale comes through Udemy without one — calculated on the net amount after taxes and fees, including the 30% charged by Apple or Google on mobile purchases.

Read that as a structure rather than a price. A marketplace is cheap when you bring the buyer and expensive when it does. If you already have an audience, you are often paying marketplace rates for distribution you do not need — and accepting its constraints on pricing and customer relationships as part of the deal.

Storefronts and checkout tools

The lightest option: no monthly fee, a percentage per sale. Gumroad, for example, publishes 10% + $0.50 on sales you drive yourself and 30% on sales made through its Discover marketplace. These are the fastest way to start charging money and the least amount of infrastructure you get.

What is true across all three: the platform is a tool, not a partner. It does not decide what to build, write your offer, or take responsibility for whether it sells. You keep the product and, subject to the platform's terms, the customer relationship — and you carry the work and the risk.

Two things vary a great deal by type, and they are worth separating. How much of the revenue you keep ranges from nearly all of it on a hosted platform whose sales you drive yourself, to a smaller share on a per-sale storefront, to a minority share on a marketplace sale you did not originate. When you start paying varies too: a subscription plan bills you every month from the day you sign up, whether or not anything sells, while a percentage-only storefront or marketplace charges nothing until a sale actually happens. Card processing applies to each sale either way.

Agencies: you buy capability and carry the risk

An agency sells you work you cannot or do not want to do yourself. That is a genuinely valuable thing to be able to buy, and for many creators it is the right answer.

It is worth being accurate about compensation here, because "agencies charge retainers" is too blunt. Agencies are paid in several different ways, and the arrangement matters more than the label:

• Retainer — a recurring fee for ongoing availability and work.
• Project or fixed fee — an agreed price for a defined deliverable.
• Performance or commission — a percentage of sales, ad spend, or measured uplift. Some agencies work this way, and some blend it with a base fee.
• Hybrid, or fee plus equity — a reduced fee alongside a share of revenue or ownership.

So the honest generalization is narrower than the usual one: in the most common arrangements, an agency is paid for delivering work, and that payment is due whether or not the product sells. Where the agency takes a performance component, its exposure moves closer to yours — but that is a specific deal to negotiate, not a default to assume.

You keep ownership and control. You direct the work. You also fund it up front, and if the launch fails you have spent the money and still own the problem.

Revenue share: the partner funds it and is paid from results

In a revenue-share partnership, the partner invests the work and usually the cash cost of building and launching, and is compensated by an agreed percentage of what the product earns. If nothing sells, they are not paid for what they spent.

The structural consequences are worth spelling out, in both directions.

In your favor: your cash risk at the start is low or zero. The partner has a direct financial reason to care whether the product actually sells, not just whether it ships — because shipping is the point at which they have spent money and earned nothing. And because they are exposed, they have a reason to tell you when an idea is weak, which a vendor paid on delivery does not.

Against you: you are giving up a share of the upside, potentially for a long time, in exchange for someone else taking the early risk. If the product sells well, an ongoing share can add up to more in absolute terms than paying for the same work outright would have — though whether it does depends on the percentage, how long the share runs, how much the product actually earns, and what funding and executing it yourself would have cost you. You are also accepting a dependency: your product's operation is entangled with another business's competence and continuity. And because the partner is investing, they will reasonably want influence over what gets built — which means less unilateral control than hiring a vendor gives you.

The deal is therefore only as good as its written terms. The percentage is the least interesting part; duration, ownership, what happens on termination, and what each side is obliged to do are where the real differences live.

Side by side

This table scrolls sideways on narrow screens.

Who each model can suit

A course platform can suit you if you already know what to build and who it is for, you have the time and the skills to build and market it, and you would rather keep more of it than move faster. It is also the lowest-commitment way to get evidence: a small product sold on a cheap storefront answers questions no amount of planning will.

An agency can suit you if you know what you want, you want it done to your specification, and you can fund it without the outcome being existential. You are buying speed and capability while keeping control, and paying for the privilege of not sharing the upside.

A revenue-share partnership can suit you if the gap is capital and execution rather than ideas, you are willing to trade a share of the upside for someone else carrying the early cost, and you are comfortable being a genuine partner rather than a client — including giving up some unilateral control.

None of them suits you if the audience evidence is not there yet. All three assume there is something worth building. If you are not sure there is, work out what your audience is actually asking for before choosing anyone to build it with.

What revenue sharing does not protect you from

Because we operate this model, we have an obvious incentive to oversell it. So here is the case against, stated plainly.

• It does not eliminate your risk — it changes its shape. Your cash risk drops. Your time, your credibility with your audience, and the opportunity cost of everything you did not do instead are all still fully exposed.
• Your audience's trust is the asset actually at stake. A weak product launched to people who trust you costs something that does not appear on any invoice, and is the slowest thing to rebuild.
• A partner can simply be wrong. Sharing risk does not confer accuracy. Someone confident and invested can still pick the wrong product.
• Misaligned terms undo the alignment. A share that runs indefinitely, on revenue you would have earned anyway, is a worse deal than a one-off fee — whatever the percentage says.
• It can cost you more over time. If the product sells well, an ongoing share may add up to more than a one-off fee for the same work would have. Whether it does is not a given — it turns on the percentage, how long the share runs, how much the product earns, and what it would genuinely have cost you to fund and execute yourself. That is the trade, and it is a rational one, but it should be a conscious one.

Where Team Strategy sits

We are the third model. We fund the analysis, the build, and the launch infrastructure ourselves, and we are paid an agreed share of the revenue from what we build together. There is no fee for the initial analysis and no retainer.

What we will not do here is quote you a split. We do not publish one, because the scope of a partnership determines it and we do not know the scope before we have looked at your work. Revenue share, ownership, duration, termination, approval rights, and each side's obligations are all set out in a written agreement that both parties review before any build work begins — that is where those answers belong, not on a marketing page. Our partnership terms page sets out what is settled before work starts and what we will not do.

We are also selective, for arithmetic rather than marketing reasons: every partnership costs us real money before any revenue exists. And if a product does not sell, we have spent our own resources for nothing. We would rather say that plainly than imply a certainty that does not exist. We do not promise or project income.

Questions to ask before you sign anything

These apply to us as much as to anyone else. A partner who cannot answer them clearly, in writing, is telling you something.

• What exactly is being built, and what counts as delivered?
• What is the revenue share, what revenue is it calculated on, and when is it paid?
• How long does the share last? Does it end, and on what?
• Who owns the product, the content, the customer list, and the domain — during, and after?
• Does this cover only what we build together, or does it touch revenue I already have?
• Is it exclusive? What am I prevented from doing elsewhere?
• What am I obliged to do — promotion, appearances, approvals — and what happens if I cannot?
• Who has final approval over the product, the copy, and anything sent to my audience?
• What happens if it does not sell? Who keeps what, and how do we end it?
• What happens to my customers if your business stops operating?

Get the answers in the agreement rather than in an email. This is the part of the decision that actually determines the outcome, and it is the part most people skim.

Sources

Published terms cited above were checked on 18 September 2026. Pricing and revenue shares change; verify current terms directly before making a decision.

• Teachable, Pricing
• Kajabi, Pricing
• Udemy, Instructor revenue share
• Gumroad, Pricing

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