Sell Study Guides Online: NoteTube vs. Teachers Pay Teachers, Stuvia, and Gumroad

When you decide to sell study guides online, four platforms come up in almost every conversation: Teachers Pay Teachers, Stuvia, Gumroad, and NoteTube.

They're not interchangeable. Each one was built for a different kind of educator with a different kind of audience. The "best" platform for your fifth-grade math packets is not the best platform for your university lecture notes, and neither of those is the best platform if you already have 50,000 YouTube subscribers waiting to buy from you.

This is an honest comparison. We built NoteTube, and we'll tell you where the other three win — because they do, and pretending otherwise is the fastest way to lose your trust before you've finished the post.

At-a-glance comparison

Platform	Best for	Audience	Fee structure	Auto-generated study assets	Audience-building features	Cost to sell
Teachers Pay Teachers	K-12 worksheets, lesson plans, classroom resources	Very large US K-12 teacher base	Seller keeps 55% (Basic) or 80–85% (Premium tier with annual fee)	No	Basic storefront, follower system	Free Basic; Premium is paid
Stuvia	University-level lecture notes, summaries, study guides	Strong in Europe, especially the Netherlands	Platform takes roughly 10–25% depending on document and region	No	Basic profile, document ratings	Free to sell
Gumroad	Anyone with their own audience	Audience-agnostic (you bring traffic)	10% flat platform fee, plus payment processing	No	None — it's a storefront, not a marketplace	Free to sell
NoteTube	Educators wanting AI-generated study kits and a creator profile with indexed discovery	Students using NoteTube for AI-assisted learning	Creator keeps 80% after Stripe's processing fee	Yes — flashcards, quizzes, summaries, notes, roadmaps from a single upload	Creator profile, follower count, indexed content, in-app discovery	Pro subscription required to publish

Numbers for each platform come from their published seller documentation. NoteTube's fee math lives in apps/web/lib/marketplace/fee-math.ts and is verified by the test suite in the same directory.

A note on the table: the columns that matter most depend on what you're selling and who you're selling it to. A worksheet author and a university note-taker will read the same row very differently. The next section walks through which platform genuinely wins for which kind of seller.

When each platform wins

TPT wins when you teach K-12

If you're a US K-12 teacher with a folder full of worksheets, lesson plans, anchor charts, and unit assessments, Teachers Pay Teachers is where your buyers already are. It has been the default marketplace for classroom resources for over a decade, and that gravity is real.

The audience is the moat. Other teachers come to TPT specifically looking for grade-level, standards-aligned classroom materials. You don't have to explain what a guided reading group is or why differentiated instruction matters — the buyers already know. That alignment between what you make and what they search for is the highest-leverage variable in any marketplace decision.

TPT's seller payout depends on your tier. On the free Basic plan, sellers keep 55% of each sale after the transaction fee. On the Premium plan (which carries an annual seller fee), the cut rises to 80–85%. The math means Premium pays off above a certain sales volume, and most full-time TPT sellers run on Premium. Their fee structure is documented at their seller help center.

If your material is a printable worksheet for a third-grade class, list it on TPT first. The alternatives won't reach those buyers.

Stuvia wins when you teach at university level

Stuvia was built for university students selling lecture notes, exam summaries, and study guides to other university students. It's especially strong across Europe, with a large user base in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and surrounding markets. If you've taken meticulous notes through a degree program and want to sell them to the next cohort, Stuvia is the natural fit.

The platform fee depends on the document category and the region, but the published range sits around 10–25% taken by Stuvia per sale. Sellers keep the rest. The full fee structure is on Stuvia's seller information pages.

Where Stuvia really wins: students searching for course-specific notes by university name and course code. That search behavior doesn't really exist on TPT, doesn't exist on Gumroad, and isn't yet a primary discovery surface on NoteTube. If your buyer is going to type "Erasmus University Rotterdam economics 101 lecture notes" into Google, Stuvia indexes that better than the alternatives.

If you sell university-level notes to a European audience, Stuvia should be your first listing — or at least your second.

Gumroad wins when you already have an audience

Gumroad's design philosophy is "we get out of your way." There is no marketplace browsing, no recommendation engine, no platform-curated discovery. You bring the audience; Gumroad handles checkout, file delivery, and a clean storefront.

That model is correct for one specific kind of seller: someone who already has traffic. A YouTube educator with a loyal subscriber base, a Substack writer with paying readers, a Twitter/X account with reach — for these creators, Gumroad's lack of audience features is a feature, not a bug. You don't want to share your buyers with anyone else's promoted listings.

Gumroad's fee structure is straightforward: a 10% flat platform fee on each sale, plus standard payment processing through Stripe or PayPal. There are no tier upgrades to wrestle with and no minimums. Their pricing page documents the current rate (it has changed historically and is worth checking).

If your traffic strategy lives entirely off-platform and you just need a checkout link to share, Gumroad is the path of least friction.

NoteTube wins when you want AI-generated study kits and a creator profile

NoteTube is the only one of the four that generates a full study kit — flashcards, quizzes, summaries, notes, roadmaps — from a single upload. You publish a lecture, a PDF, or a set of notes, and the platform builds the study assets your buyers actually use to learn from your material. Then those assets become part of your publishable inventory.

The other side of the platform is creator identity. Every NoteTube creator gets an indexed public profile with a handle, bio, follower count, and a feed of everything they've published. Students who clone your free content stay connected to your published work. That layer doesn't exist on Gumroad at all and only weakly exists on the other two.

Fee math, exact: a $5 sale pays out $3.64 to the creator, $0.45 to Stripe, and $0.91 to NoteTube. A $50 sale pays out $38.60 to the creator, $1.75 to Stripe, and $9.65 to NoteTube. These numbers come straight from the test cases in apps/web/lib/marketplace/fee-math.test.ts — they're what the system computes, not a marketing rounding.

NoteTube wins when the things you sell benefit from being a kit — a deck plus a quiz plus a summary plus a roadmap — and when you'd rather build a small audience inside an active learning platform than ship a checkout link cold.

The fee math compared

The honest way to compare fee structures is to walk a specific dollar amount through each platform. Below is what a creator keeps from a single sale at three common price points, using each platform's published rates. Stripe's standard US-card processing fee (2.9% + $0.30) applies on Gumroad and NoteTube; TPT and Stuvia bundle their own transaction fees inside their published seller payout.

$5 sale — the impulse buy

TPT Basic (55%): roughly $2.75 to the seller before TPT's transaction fee. TPT Premium ($80/year, ~85% cut) would pay roughly $4.25, but the annual fee has to be earned back first.
Stuvia (~80% net, varies): roughly $4.00 to the seller after the platform cut.
Gumroad (10% + Stripe): 10% Gumroad = $0.50, Stripe ≈ $0.45 = roughly $4.05 to the seller.
NoteTube: $3.64 to the creator, $0.45 to Stripe, $0.91 to NoteTube. (From fee-math.test.ts.)

At $5, every platform's flat per-transaction fee bites hard. This is the price range where NoteTube takes its biggest relative cut, because the AI generation and platform infrastructure are funded mostly through the higher percentage at smaller prices.

$15 sale — the considered purchase

TPT Premium (~85%): roughly $12.75 to the seller.
Stuvia (~80%): roughly $12.00 to the seller.
Gumroad: 10% = $1.50, Stripe ≈ $0.74, leaves about $12.76 to the seller.
NoteTube: applying the same 80% post-Stripe split, roughly $11.40 to the creator on a $15 sale.

At $15, the differences narrow. The platform you choose stops being about the percentage and starts being about which buyers will actually find your work.

$50 sale — the course bundle

TPT Premium (~85%): roughly $42.50 to the seller.
Stuvia (~80%): roughly $40.00 to the seller.
Gumroad: 10% = $5.00, Stripe ≈ $1.75, leaves $43.25 to the seller.
NoteTube: $38.60 to the creator, $1.75 to Stripe, $9.65 to NoteTube. (From fee-math.test.ts.)

At $50, NoteTube's cut is the highest of the four in absolute terms. That's the honest tradeoff. The platform's bet is that the AI-generated assets and the creator profile produce enough discovery and repeat sales to make the higher cut worth it. If they don't for your work, one of the other three is the better answer.

Always check each platform's official seller documentation before pricing — Gumroad's fees have changed historically, TPT periodically adjusts its tier structure, and Stuvia's cut varies by region and document type. The numbers above are the published rates at writing, not guarantees.

The Pro-subscription footnote — why NoteTube charges to publish

This is the one row where NoteTube looks worse than the alternatives, so it deserves a direct answer.

NoteTube requires a Pro subscription to publish. TPT, Stuvia, and Gumroad don't. The reason is straightforward: NoteTube generates AI study assets from every upload — flashcards, quizzes, summaries, notes — and that generation costs real money in model calls. Charging publishers a baseline subscription funds that infrastructure without taking a larger per-sale cut. It also functions as a spam filter: marketplaces that are free to publish on get flooded with low-quality material, and a small upfront cost meaningfully changes the signal-to-noise ratio for the buyers you're hoping to reach.

That's the tradeoff. If your output is high-volume cheap printables and you don't want or need AI-generated study assets, the lack of a publishing fee on TPT or Stuvia is the better deal. If your output is fewer, higher-quality kits that benefit from being expanded into a full study toolkit, the Pro fee is small relative to the lift the platform gives you.

We're not going to argue you out of choosing a free-to-publish alternative. Be clear-eyed about what you're getting in return — that's the only honest framing.

How to choose

Most educators we talk to end up on more than one platform within a year. That's the right answer for almost everyone, because the platforms aren't really competing — they're serving different buyers.

A useful sequence:

Start where your buyers already are. If you teach K-12, that's TPT first. If you teach at university and your students are European, that's Stuvia first. If you have a YouTube audience or a newsletter list, that's Gumroad first.
Add NoteTube when you want the assets. If your material benefits from being a full study kit — and most lecture-based and concept-heavy material does — list a paid kit on NoteTube alongside whatever else you're doing. The AI generation does work you'd otherwise pay a designer or do at 1am yourself.
Don't list the same file in five places and call it strategy. Each platform's audience has different expectations. A TPT lesson plan is not a NoteTube study kit. A Gumroad PDF is not a Stuvia lecture note set. Reshape the material for the audience that platform actually serves.

NoteTube is additive, not a replacement. If you walk away from this post thinking "I should try NoteTube alongside TPT" or "alongside my Gumroad shop," that's the conversation we'd like to be having. If the honest answer is one of the other three serves your work better, that's a fine answer too.

If you want to try us, the creator wizard takes about ten minutes and lays out exactly what's involved before you commit to anything.

Start your creator profile →

For more depth on the broader landscape, see how to monetize your teaching in 2026 — the hub post that covers all four monetization models, not just marketplaces. For specific dollar projections at different price points and volumes, read how much can you earn selling study materials. For the full creator-program details, the creator page walks the fee math, the roadmap, and what "founding educator" actually means.