For students who build things
Build it because you need it. If it is good, your course pays for your coffee.
Somewhere on your laptop is a script that fixes the citations, or renames the lab files, or turns the syllabus into calendar entries. You built it for you. Other students keep building the same thing from scratch: GitHub holds 128 separate syllabus-to-calendar projects, many from the last two years, because there was nowhere to put one.
We are building that somewhere. You set what it costs to run. It will not pay your rent — it might cover your coffee. Anyone promising you more than that is selling something.
How it works, end to end
Four planned steps. Building and testing are in development; publishing and payments are not available yet.
Build it for yourself firstIn development
The tools worth selling are the ones you already needed. A formatter that matches your department's lab-report spec. A reading pack that turns a seminar PDF into something you can listen to on the bus. You describe what it should do, wire the steps together, and test it against real work — yours.
Make it properly, not just onceIn development
A tool someone pays for has to survive being used by a stranger on a document you have never seen. That means a fixed version, a named set of inputs, checks that run, and honest behaviour when something fails. The Build Inspector shows the workflow, the files, what the tool expects to return and what it actually returned.
Publish a version and set your own priceNot built yet
You price it. Per run, or per use, piece by piece — not a subscription someone has to justify to themselves every month. A tool that saves forty minutes of formatting can be worth a couple of pounds; a tool that answers one small question should cost about as much as a message.
It keeps working after you stop thinking about itNot built yet
A tool that solves a real recurring problem gets used again next term, by the year below you, in a course whose reading list has not changed. You built it once and moved on. That is the genuinely good part — not the amount, which is small, but that it keeps being used by people you never had to convince.
The money, at its real size
We went and looked at what people actually earn on platforms like this before writing this section. The answer is small, so this page says small. None of it is live yet.
On Gumroad — the closest thing to a public dataset on independent creators — 77% of the people who earned anything in a month earned under $100, and that excludes everyone who earned nothing at all. On Stuvia, where students already sell to students and set their own prices, the average seller makes about $76 a month. We have no reason to think we would beat those numbers, and we are not going to imply otherwise to get your email address.
You set the price. Not us.
A tool is priced per use, by the person who built it. There is no platform-wide subscription that your tool gets buried inside, and no revenue pool that gets divided by a formula you cannot see. If you price a lab-report formatter at $0.40 a run, that is what it costs, and the split is the same whether ten people use it or ten thousand.
What comes out before you get paid
Two things, and we will show both on every statement:
- What the tool costs to run. If your tool calls a model, that costs real money per run. A tool that does one tidy pass over a page costs a fraction of a penny. One that reads a hundred-page PDF costs meaningfully more. You will see this figure while you are building, before you choose a price — pricing below your running cost should be a decision, not an accident.
- Payment processing and the platform share. Card processing is charged by the processor, not by us. The platform share is not set yet, and we are not going to invent a number on a marketing page. When it is decided it will be published here with the reasoning.
What is left is yours — and what it is actually for
Treat it as what it is: a small, recurring amount that makes building the thing feel less like unpaid labour. Coffee, a takeaway, the subscription you were going to cancel. If it grows past that, good — but plan for coffee.
The thing actually worth having is the other output: a tool with your name on it that strangers chose to use, a version history that shows you maintained it, and a real answer to "tell me about something you built." That is worth considerably more than $76 a month, and it is the part we are most confident we can deliver.
The numbers below are arithmetic from assumptions we made up so the model is legible. They are not typical earnings, not a forecast, and not a claim that anyone has earned anything — nobody has, because the marketplace does not exist. Change any assumption and the answer changes.
- A tool you price at
- $0.40 per run
- Students in your course who use it
- 35
- Times each uses it in a term
- 4
- Runs in a term
- 140
- Gross, before costs
- $56.00
- Less what the tool costs to run
- depends on your tool
- Less processing and platform share
- not yet set
That is one tool, on one module, for one term. The case worth building for is the second term, when you change nothing and it runs anyway — and the year below you arrives needing the same thing.
What makes a tool worth paying for
Most things people build for themselves will not survive a stranger. These are the differences.
It does one job completely
"Format a lab report to the Physics department spec" beats "help with lab reports". A narrow tool that finishes the job is worth money. A broad one that gets you halfway is worth a bookmark.
It behaves on inputs you did not imagine
Someone will feed it a scanned PDF, a file in the wrong language, or nothing at all. A paid tool says what went wrong and what to do next, instead of producing confident nonsense.
It is honest about what it did
If it skipped a page or could not read an equation, it says so. Tools that quietly drop things get one use and a bad reputation — on a course where everyone knows each other, that spreads faster than any listing.
It is pinned to a version
Someone who paid for a result last week should get the same behaviour this week. You improve it by publishing a new version, not by editing the one people are relying on.
Where this actually is
Because a page about getting paid should be the most honest page on the site.
- In developmentBuild and test tools locallyIn development. Building and testing are not publicly available yet.
- In developmentPublish a versioned toolIn development.
- Not builtSet your own priceDesigned, not built. No payments exist yet.
- Not builtReceive moneyNot built. See the plain answer below.
We cannot pay anyone today. There is no marketplace, no payment processing, and no payout. Before there can be, we have to settle the platform share, publish it, build the accounting so you can check every statement, and handle tax and identity checks — which are genuinely harder for students, and harder again for students outside the country we bill from. Early access is for adults, 18 and over, and our current rules do not let anyone under 18 sell a tool. None of that is exciting, all of it is real, and we would rather say so than take your email on the strength of a number we invented.
What you can do today
Use a finished one
Symbols & Characters is done and free — 241 entries across Greek, maths, IPA and pinyin, copied exactly. It is deliberately small, and it is the shape of thing we mean.
Open Symbols & Characters →Tell us what you would build
The most useful thing right now is knowing which tool you would make first, and what it would have to do to be worth $1 to the person sitting next to you. Join early access, pick the tool you would build, and we will write if and when publishing opens.
Join early access →