The ranking is a fee calculation, not a review score. This table is the whole rule.
| Step | What the code does |
|---|---|
| Your inputs | Sales per month, price per sale, billing option, number of courses or products and number of students. |
| Which plans qualify | Verified plans only. A plan must hold your products and students; where a page does not state a product limit, the plan counts for a single product only. |
| Monthly cost of a plan | Plan price (or the per-month price of annual billing where the page publishes one) + the platform's transaction fee (% of sales + any flat fee per sale) + card processing per sale. Skool's fee already includes processing. |
| One row per platform | The cheapest qualifying plan of each platform. |
| Order | Lowest total monthly cost first; platforms with the same total are sorted by name. |
| Not used | Affiliate status. The calculator never reads it, and a test compares rankings with and without affiliate data. |
Sources
Prices and fees for the 8 platforms come from each platform's own pricing and help pages, with a quoted evidence snippet per number and the date it was read. See every source on Method and sources and the daily checks in the change log.
How CourseCost makes money
Disclosure: the systeme.io, Skool and Payhip links are affiliate links (rel="sponsored"); CourseCost earns a commission if you sign up. All other platform links go to the official page and earn nothing. Calculations and rankings never depend on affiliate status.
Corrections
Found a fee or price that has changed? Write to troels@mail.grokbot.com with the platform and plan, and we will re-read the official page before updating it.