How Creators Earn 85% Per Course Sale: The Sikho.ai Marketplace Model

Online course creators have always faced a brutal tradeoff:

Sell on Udemy / Skillshare — 50-70% platform fee after discounts, zero control over pricing.
Self-host — you keep 100%, but you also build the LMS, handle payments, support, hosting, DMCA, refunds, analytics...

We've spent the last 18 months building a third option: Sikho.ai — an AI-native LMS + course marketplace where creators keep 85% of every sale. Here's the real math of how it works.

The 85% Revenue Share

Platform fee is a flat 15% of every sale. No tiered pricing, no fine print. If your course is $100, you net $85. If it's $20, you net $17. Payouts go through Stripe Connect — so you get paid instantly when a student checks out, not on a 60-day cycle.

Compare this to:

Udemy: you keep 50% if you brought the student, 25% if Udemy brought them (usually after a 90% discount coupon, so your "full price" is meaningless)
Skillshare: royalties based on watch minutes, not sales — creators make cents per class
Teachable / Thinkific: you keep 100% but pay $30-$300/month in subscription fees plus transaction fees

For a creator shipping 2-3 courses a year, Sikho's 85% is meaningfully higher take-home than any of the above.

The "AI Builds the Skeleton" Part

The time cost of making a course is why most creators never ship.

Sikho's Course Generator takes that from weeks to minutes:

Feed in your topic and target audience
It researches the web, pulls citations, structures modules and lessons
You get a full course skeleton: 3-5 modules, 8-20 lessons, quiz ideas, example problems
Edit, refine, record your own video where you want to add personality
Publish

Cost: 35 credits per course (included in the $15/month Learner tier, which gets you 1,000 credits = about 28 course generations per month if you're going fast).

Four Course Creation Modes

Not every creator wants AI to do all the work. Sikho gives you four modes:

AI Generated — full course from a topic (above)
Your Materials — upload your existing PDFs / videos / docs, platform structures them
Materials + AI — your content + AI fills in gaps, generates quizzes, etc.
Manual — full control with the course editor (for creators who want traditional authoring)

And three course length types: Micro (60-80 min, 5 lessons), Intensive (4-10 hrs, 8-20 lessons), Custom (define your own).

The AI Tutor is Bundled With Every Course

Every course you publish comes with a free 24/7 AI Tutor attached — no extra work from you, no extra cost to students. The tutor knows the course content and answers student questions in-context. This means:

Fewer refund requests ("I didn't understand" → tutor explains it three ways)
Higher completion rates (students don't get stuck at 2am and quit)
Better reviews (students finish and rate 5 stars)

All of this drives your sales without you doing support.

What You Actually Ship

To make money as a Sikho creator:

Sign up (free)
Upgrade to Learner ($15/month) to sell courses — you get 1,000 credits, Guru AI access, AI Books, Community Forum
Generate or build your first course (one evening)
Publish it on the marketplace
Promote wherever your audience lives (LinkedIn, YouTube, newsletter)

With 85% take-home, you need to sell $18/month to break even on the subscription. Most creators who ship one course clear that in week one.

Is This "Better Than Udemy"?

For some creators yes, for others no. Udemy has more traffic. Sikho has better economics + AI tools + tutor-per-course.

The creators who do best on Sikho:

Technical niches (AI, coding, data, cloud) where the AI tutor is genuinely useful
Creators with existing audience (LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube) who don't need platform discovery
Teachers migrating from "I have 50 students per cohort" to "I have a course that sells 24/7"