How the membership pool paid creators this month

Every figure in this post is a placeholder. Membership pricing and the creator split are not finalized, so what follows is the report format running on illustrative numbers rather than banked revenue. The commitment is the point: this post appears every month once money moves, with the same structure, whether the numbers are flattering or embarrassing.

We are publishing the empty version first so that the format is fixed before there is any incentive to shape it.

What goes in the pool

Membership revenue splits three ways: payment processing, platform costs, and the creator pool. The pool is divided among the tools that members actually used, weighted by verified plays. Direct-sale tools sit outside this entirely — those creators set their own price and the platform takes a percentage of the sale instead.

A verified play is a session where a member loaded a tool and audio was actually rendered through it for a meaningful duration. Opening a tool page does not count. Nor does leaving a tab open overnight; sessions are capped so a single insomniac cannot fund anyone's rent. The definition lives in the creator agreement in plain language, because a weighting formula nobody can read is not transparency.

This month, in the format

Gross membership fees: [placeholder] Processor fees: [placeholder] Platform share: [placeholder] Creator pool: [placeholder]

Verified plays across pool tools: [placeholder] Effective per-play rate: [placeholder]

Per-tool, the table lists each membership-pool tool, its verified play count, its share of the pool, and the amount paid. Right now the pool tools are the small roster this site actually ships — the shipped examples and the derived tools built on top of their kernels. Four honest rows beat forty imaginary ones.

Why the per-play number is published

Because it is the number a creator uses to decide whether publishing here is worth their time, and because it is the number a platform is most tempted to hide.

It will be small at first. That is arithmetic, not modesty: a pool divided among a handful of tools, funded by a membership base that is currently a rounding error, produces a per-play rate that will not impress anyone. Publishing it small is more useful than not publishing it, because a creator can multiply it by their own expected usage and get a real answer instead of a pitch.

What we will not do with these reports

We will not quietly change the weighting formula and republish under the same headings. Formula changes get announced ahead of time, are never applied retroactively, and appear in the changelog as their own entry.

We will not stop publishing when the numbers get worse. A transparency report that only appears in good months is marketing wearing a lab coat.

We will not report a metric here that we do not also expose in the creator dashboard. If a creator cannot see their own numbers as they accrue, a monthly blog post is theater.

What we would like to be wrong about

The open question is whether pool economics work at all at this scale, or whether direct sales are simply the honest answer for a catalog this small. We do not know yet. The reports are how we find out in public, and if the answer turns out to be "the pool is not worth it", that will be a post too.