What does COPE cost?
COPE costs 3.6% + $1 per sale, charged only when a payment settles. There is no monthly fee, no setup fee, and no charge for building your products.
That single fee covers everything: checkout, online courses, paid communities, your affiliate program, invoicing and tax handling. There is no separate plan to upgrade to and no feature locked behind a higher tier.
What does a €1,000 course actually net?
€963.
Course price €1,000.00
COPE fee (3.6% + €1) −€37.00
You receive €963.00
The fixed part of the fee follows the region you sell from, not the buyer's currency: €1 if you are in the euro area, $1 if you are in the US. So a $1,000 sale by a US-based seller is $1,000 − $37 = $963.
At €100 the fee is €4.60 and you receive €95.40. At €5,000 the fee is €181 and you receive €4,819. The percentage never changes.
Is there a monthly fee?
No. Signing up is free, building your products is free, and setting up your course area, community and affiliate program is free. You are charged the first time a sale settles, and never before.
This is the practical difference from a subscription platform: if you sell nothing in a month, you pay nothing. If you have a launch month, the fee scales with what you actually earned.
What is included in the fee?
Everything COPE does:
Checkout - order bumps, upsells, instalment plans, buy now pay later, cards, bank transfer, and local payment methods
- Online courses - hosting, video and text lessons, per-student progress
- Paid communities - sold on their own or bundled with a course, sharing one login with the purchase
- Affiliate program - recruiting partners, tracking referrals, paying commissions
- Invoicing and tax - the correct rate applied per buyer, invoices generated automatically, credit notes issued on refunds
- Payouts - pending, available and reserve balances, on a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly schedule
None of these is a paid add-on.
Is one platform cheaper than separate tools?
It depends on what you would otherwise pay, so here is the arithmetic rather than the claim.
A typical stack for selling an online course is a checkout tool, a course platform, a community tool, and an affiliate tool. Most of those charge a monthly subscription whether or not you sell anything, and several add their own transaction fee on top of your payment processor's.
COPE replaces all four for 3.6% + $1 per settled sale. Whether that is cheaper for you comes down to one question: do your fixed monthly costs exceed 3.6% of your revenue? Below roughly €2,000 a month in sales, a per-transaction fee is almost always cheaper. Above that, it depends on how many subscriptions you are carrying.
When is the fee charged?
When the payment settles - not when the order is placed, and not when a payment fails. On an instalment plan, the fee applies to each payment as it settles rather than to the full order value up front.
Do I pay the fee on refunds?
No fee is charged on a sale that never settles. Where a settled sale is later refunded, the buyer is refunded in full and a credit note is issued automatically.
Who handles VAT and sales tax?
COPE calculates the correct rate for each buyer at checkout across all 27 EU countries and applicable US jurisdictions, generates the invoice, and issues credit notes on refunds.
You remain the supplier to your buyer. COPE acts as agent of the payee, collecting payment on your behalf, and takes on the supplier or collector role only where a statute assigns it - for example an EU deemed-supplier rule or a US marketplace-facilitator law. COPE is not a reseller of your product.
What currencies can I sell in?
You can price in multiple currencies, and your buyers pay in theirs. Your fee does not change with the buyer's currency: the percentage is always 3.6%, and the fixed part is set by the region you sell from - €1 in the euro area, $1 in the US.