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Comment by yessirwhatever | Hacker News Reader

Interesting course. I'm not sure if you're affiliated with tigyog.app owners or not, but 20% commission on paid courses is too much. The platform looks neat and interesting, but I wouldn't pay 20% of whatever I'm charging for a course to be able to use a platform that self describes as a "blog with buttons".

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Hi! I'm the solo developer of TigYog.app. I've been working with Andrew to build out the course. What percentage would you consider appropriate? It's set at 20% essentially because I have rent and bills to pay :-)

I get that, and I wish you the best with it. It's definitely interesting like I said. I'm not sure what financial model would make it seem less intimidating, but I'd imagine as a indie course-maker-on-the-side it'd be too expensive. Maybe a different pricing scheme for corporations.

(not the person you're responding to) If you're offering free, perpetual hosting, I think it's worth 20% of sales for the creator (who doesn't know if they're even going to sell much, or if the material will become outdated and stop selling in a few years)

I wondered how the creator of this course could guarantee the course would be available forever, and what a headache it must be to continue to maintain the hosting/content if sales taper off. Outsourcing that job to a service which is hosting many such courses (and with new ones continually added) makes a lot more sense here, and of course you have bills to pay too. That 20% commission isn't just covering the cost of time you put into the course builder and hosting now, it covers hosting in perpetuity.

I'd assume 20% covers payment processing fees, collecting VAT/etc where appropriate, and so on.

As a comparison, Leanpub charges 20% for books/courses (not sure if those courses are on par with the features offered by tigyog). You'd get better pricing with Gumroad, but no interactive features on that platform. 20% is more than fair in my opinion.

I feel the same way. I believe 20% is very reasonable if it drives traffic. So it's a chicken and egg problem. Right now, due to it not having much courses there, the value isn't there.

Side note on nav UX. I expect a right click on logo to be able to open up the tigyog landing page, not save image dialog.

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