First question: who should be the seller?
Choose Merchant of Record when Lernaura should be the seller and operate the transaction. Choose Direct when your company should remain the seller and keep the legal and tax responsibility.
The two are not a good tier and a cheap tier. They are a trade: hand over the legal load and pay a transparent share of each sale, or carry the compliance yourself and have Lernaura run the commercial machinery around you.
Merchant of RecordOne service · two rates
Lernaura is the seller
The Merchant-of-Record scope is the same whether your customer pays by card or by invoice. Only the transaction rate changes with the payment method.
- Card payment
- 5%+ €0.40
- Invoice payment
- 3%+ €0.40
- Lernaura is the legal seller
- Cards, invoices and buyer documents
- Tax, settlement and revenue records
- Refunds, disputes and recovery
Direct
You remain the seller
Talk
to us
Keep your entity on every document while Lernaura provides the commercial infrastructure around your chosen operating model.
- Your entity, VAT number and liability
- Your receivables and customer relationship
- Contracts, invoicing and revenue data
- Configured for your footprint
Why two Merchant of Record rates?
Cards and bank transfers do not cost the same to accept. Both rates include the full Merchant-of-Record service — invoice-paying customers should not subsidise card economics.
Building an early-stage SaaS?
Lernaura Launch is a separate programme for qualifying companies. Its terms live in the Launch journey rather than changing the standard proposition shown here.
What the 5% + €0.40 includes
Almost every other course platform splits the bill three or four ways: a platform subscription you pay every month, a card-processing fee on every transaction (~2.9% + a fixed cost), a VAT-handling tool or accountant on the side, and a stack of AI / scheduling / email / search tools you assemble yourself. lernaura's 5% + €0.40 is the merchant-of-record rate — the payments-and-tax back-office — and the software that would be the subscription line everywhere else is simply free.
Included in the 5% + €0.40:
Payment processing — the Stripe-equivalent leg of the bill (card acquiring, network fees, multi-currency, Apple/Google/SEPA/iDEAL/Bancontact/Klarna/PayPal).
Merchant of record — we are the legal seller, so tax in the buyer's country, invoices, refunds, chargebacks and failed-payment recovery are our responsibility, not yours.
EU-sovereign hosting — Scaleway (French-owned hardware) for the database and infrastructure, Scalingo for application hosting, api.video EU, Whereby EU. No US-owned link in the chain.
The AI content pipeline — every upload is automatically transcribed (Gladia), translated, subtitled in your target languages, and priced into local currency.
AI semantic search — Mistral-hosted in France, indexing every lesson, transcript, PDF, slide and community post.
Native live video — 1:1, group, webinar via Whereby EU, no participant cap.
Email delivery — newsletters, transactional, marketing, all through Brevo (Paris).
All product surfaces — courses, communities, newsletters, coaching, podcasts, live, B2B per-seat licensing.
Done-for-you migration — current content + contact lists moved in 48 hours when you switch.
There is no Pro tier. No Business tier. No Enterprise unless you specifically need a contract for procurement. Every creator on lernaura runs on the same stack, at the same rate. The same rail is also available headlessly to SaaS vendors and developers through our public API — same 5% + €0.40, same infrastructure.
What is not added on top
There is no international surcharge, no subscription surcharge and no FX conversion charge. That matters most on the motion this platform is built for — a cross-border European B2B subscription — because that is precisely where per-transaction add-ons accumulate quietly. The headline rate is the effective rate.
Side-by-side rates against the merchant-of-record field belong on the comparison pages, where each figure carries a source and the date it was checked. We would rather send you there than quote a competitor’s number here without one.
A worked example, at the size this is built for
Take a €1,500/month B2B subscription — mid-band for the companies this platform is for — billed monthly for a year.
On cards, Merchant of Record takes 5% of each €1,500 charge plus €0.40 per transaction.
On the invoice rail, the same subscription is charged at 3% plus €0.40 per transaction — which is the difference between paying card economics on a bank transfer and not.
Nothing else is added in either case: no platform fee, no seat count, no minimum, no charge for the software.
Creators
Creators on lernaura Creator pay 5% + €0.40 per sale, flat, with the platform free. It is the same engine underneath.
Pricing FAQ
- What is a merchant of record, and which mode am I in?
- The merchant of record is the party that is legally the seller: the name on the invoice, the party that owes the buyer’s country its tax, the one who answers the disputes. On Merchant of Record that is Lernaura. On Direct it is you. You are in whichever mode you chose when you set the account up, and it is shown on your account page.
- Why is invoicing cheaper than cards?
- Because it costs less to accept. A card payment carries scheme and acquirer costs that a bank transfer does not, and pricing them identically would mean invoice-paying customers subsidising card-paying ones. The more interesting question is why the merchant-of-record field mostly does not offer an invoice rail at all.
- What does Direct cost, and why can’t you publish it?
- Direct is priced individually, and we would rather say so plainly than publish a "from" number that turns out not to apply to you. The shape of the work depends on your footprint — how you collect, where you are registered, what you are already running. The contact form asks the questions that determine it, which is usually enough to give you a number without a discovery call.
- Can I move between modes later?
- Yes, and it is a commercial decision rather than a migration. The contract model, the lifecycle and the revenue records are identical in both modes — what changes is whose entity is on the documents from the change date. Documents already issued keep resolving to the entity that issued them; nothing is retroactively rewritten.
- What happens to my VAT obligations in each mode?
- On Merchant of Record they are ours: we are registered where we need to be, we file, we remit. On Direct they stay yours — the registrations, the returns and the liability. We still calculate and render the VAT on your documents, because getting that wrong harms you regardless of who the authority pursues.
- What does the 5% + €0.40 actually exclude?
- Costs that aren't really platform costs: a domain registration if you bring your own (about €10/year, paid to your registrar), any paid ads you choose to run on Meta/Google/etc., and any third-party SaaS you choose to integrate optionally. The platform itself, the AI stack, the merchant-of-record obligations, and migration are included.
- Is the platform really free to use without paying?
- Yes. You can sign up, build your entire catalog, set up your community, configure your store and your B2B licensing, and never spend a cent until a first sale comes through. There is no trial timer and no countdown. The software is free indefinitely — the rails are the business, and the software is the proof. We only earn the 5% + €0.40 when money actually arrives for you.
- Is the 5% taken on gross, and is card processing really included?
- Yes. We take 5% + €0.40 of the gross transaction value, and the card processing comes out of that, not on top of yours. One line on your invoice; we deal with the card networks.
- Doesn't the flat €0.40 hurt very small sales?
- On a €5 item, 5% + €0.40 is €0.65 — an effective 13%. That's the same trade-off Paddle and Lemon Squeezy make, and it's why micro-priced items are best sold bundled or as part of a membership rather than one-by-one. On a €50 sale the effective rate is 6%; on €500 it's 5.1%.
- How do payouts work?
- Weekly. Six payout currencies (EUR, SEK, NOK, GBP, USD, CHF). Local bank rails where available — SEPA for EUR, BACS for GBP, ACH for USD, local rails for the Nordics and CHF.
- Do you ever charge anything else?
- No. There is no setup fee, no migration fee, no charge for extra users, no charge for extra storage, no overage on video bandwidth, no charge per student, no charge per course, no charge per active member, no charge to remove our branding (there isn't any), no charge to enable B2B licensing.
- I run a SaaS / I'm a developer — can I use the rail without the creator software?
- Yes. The same merchant-of-record rail is available headlessly through our public API at the same 5% + €0.40 — EU-compliant VAT, DAC7, DSA seller verification and settlement, on European-owned infrastructure with no US jurisdiction. See the developers page for design-partner access.