We take 0% of your revenue, and that is an architecture decision
"0% platform fee" is the easiest promise in this category to make and the easiest to quietly walk back. It is a number on a pricing page. Numbers on pricing pages change.
So here is the version that is harder to walk back: we do not take a percentage because the money never arrives anywhere we could take it from.
What happens when a member pays you
When someone joins your community on a paid plan, this is the actual sequence:
- You connect your own Stripe account to your community once, from the admin panel. Klaas creates a Stripe Express connected account that belongs to you, not to us.
- A member clicks through to checkout. The Checkout Session is created on your connected account — not on ours with a note attached.
- Their card is charged. The funds land in your Stripe balance.
- Stripe pays you out on Stripe's schedule.
There is no step where the money sits in a Klaas balance waiting to be forwarded. There is no weekly payout run, because there is nothing for us to run.
The technical detail that matters: Stripe Connect offers a mechanism called an application fee — a platform can skim an arbitrary percentage off every charge made on a connected account, automatically, invisibly to the member. It is one parameter. Our billing code does not set it. Not set to zero as a configuration choice that a future pricing meeting could revise upward — absent. There is no application fee, no transfer_data, no destination charge. Adding one would be a code change, a deploy, and a thing we would have to say out loud.
Why platforms take a percentage in the first place
It is worth being fair about this. A percentage is a genuinely good business model if you are the platform. It grows without you doing anything. A community that goes from 100 members to 1,000 pays you ten times as much, and your costs go up by approximately the price of a database row.
It is also, from where you are standing, a tax on your own success that you cannot negotiate down and cannot leave without migrating every member you have.
There is a second, subtler cost. When a platform takes a percentage, it must be in the payment path. When it is in the payment path, it becomes a merchant of record or something close to it, and now its risk team has opinions about what you are allowed to sell, its compliance calendar is your compliance calendar, and a chargeback dispute is a conversation with them rather than with Stripe.
We would rather charge you a flat monthly amount for the software and stay out of it.
What we do charge
A flat subscription, in four tiers, billed to you — not to your members:
| Plan | Monthly | Billed annually | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launch | $12 | $9/mo | 200 members, 5 channels, 10GB |
| Grow | $32 | $24/mo | 1,000 members, 20 channels, 50GB |
| Scale | $72 | $54/mo | 5,000 members, 50 channels, 200GB |
| Organization | $192 | $144/mo | 20,000 members, unlimited channels, 500GB |
0% on every tier, including the cheapest one. There is no tier where the percentage comes back.
Right now all of it is free. Klaas Academy is in early access — no card, no trial clock. When platform billing switches on you will get warning, and nothing gets deleted for not paying.
The part we don't control
Stripe still charges its card processing fee. That one was always Stripe's, it is the same fee you would pay taking payments on your own website, and no platform can make it go away — including the ones whose pricing pages imply otherwise.
The honest limitation
Taking 0% means our incentives and yours are only mostly aligned. A platform on a percentage has a real, mercenary reason to care whether your members renew. We have a flat fee and a churn number, which is a weaker signal.
We think that trade is worth it, and we would rather tell you about it than pretend the incentive problem does not exist. But it is the reason we spend our effort on the things that make a member come back — the feed, the courses, the calendar, the lock screen that explains itself instead of throwing a 403 — rather than on the billing page.
Your money is not our product. The software is.