What do you actually keep after platform fees?
See what you actually keep on YouTube, Substack, Spotify, Apple TV, and 35+ other platforms, after every fee. Free, with sources cited.
Every media-maker can tell you their budget down to the dollar. Almost none of them can tell you what they’d actually keep on a $4.99 rental.
Not because they’re bad at math, but because the math is buried. Platform take rates live in help-center footnotes. Store commissions stack on top of distributor fees, which stack on top of payment processing, which stack on top of currency conversion. By the time a dollar travels from an audience member to the person who actually made the thing, it’s been clipped four or five times, and almost nobody publishes the final number.
This isn’t just a film problem. YouTube keeps 45% of ad revenue on longform video. Apple takes 30% at the door. Substack takes 10% plus processing. (If you publish here, you've felt that one.) Every platform frames its cut as standard, and every creator we’ve talked to (filmmakers, musicians, podcasters, newsletter writers) has had the same moment: the deposit hits, and it’s smaller than they thought, and it’s nearly impossible to fully understand why.
So the dpop Studios team built the thing we wished existed.
Creator Calculator
Today we’re launching Creator Calculator, a free tool that shows what creators actually keep, across 35+ platforms, after every fee, cut, and processing charge.
Type in a price or a revenue number, pick the platforms, and the calculator runs the full fee stack for each one and ranks them by a single, brutal metric: what lands in your account.
No editorializing in the ranking. It’s a straight descending sort of one number, and the platforms order themselves.
We also show our work. Every fee in every calculation is sourced, pulled from the platforms’ own published rates and cited so you can verify it yourself. If a platform updates its take rate, we update the math.
Built deep for creators of all types
The calculator covers YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Spotify, Substack, Amazon, and the rest of the creator economy, in multiple currencies with real-time exchange rates. We went deepest where the math is murkiest: film distribution.
Growth Simulator. Model how revenue compounds over time, including a head-to-head mode that answers a question every indie filmmaker eventually asks: at what point does a YouTube ad-revenue strategy beat (or lose to) a $4.99 TVOD release?
Waterfall payouts. If your film has investors, deferments, or backend splits, you can model who gets paid, in what order, and when the first dollar should hit your account.
Plan Builder: from numbers to a plan
The calculators answer “what would I keep?” but our Plan Builder answers the next question: “so what’s my plan?”
Plan Builder is a full planning suite for release strategy, revenue modeling, comparables, and business planning, built around one idea: your numbers should turn into a document you can put in front of other people.
Distribution Match. We designed it like a college-match questionnaire, but for your release. Answer 24 quick questions across six dimensions: your goals, risk tolerance, how hands-on you want to be, audience, timing, and resources. Minutes later, you're matched to the distribution strategy that fits your media, instead of the one everyone defaults to.
Film Distribution Plan. Take your match and model it: release strategy, platform mix, and revenue projections, checked against a comparables library of real film performance data that's constantly updated.
Creator Business Plan. Investor and sponsor conversations aren’t unique to film, so the planning tools aren’t either. Whatever you make, whether it’s YouTube shorts, podcasts, newsletters, or music, answer five questions and get personalized revenue projections, a sponsorship rate card, and a business plan built to hold up in those rooms. It takes about two minutes, and you can edit your plan anytime.
Everything exports as a designed PDF, with three looks depending on the room you're walking into: a dark premiere-night theme, a clean script-treatment style, and a numbers-forward data-room layout.
What it costs (and what it doesn’t)
We want to be straight about the irony of charging anything for a tool about fees. Here’s how we’ve squared it:
Every calculator is free to use. Real results, every platform, no card required. Free use is capped at a set number of calculations, enough to honestly answer “what would I keep?” If you keep hitting that cap, it’s a sign you’re exactly who the paid tiers are for.
There are two ways to go further: a one-time lifetime purchase ($19.99) that unlocks unlimited calculations across the full suite, and the Plan Builder subscription ($9.99/month or $79.99/year, with a 10-day free trial) for the planning tools and PDF export.
Why dpop built this
We built Creator Calculator because distribution decisions deserve real numbers. We’re a media-tech studio; we make release decisions ourselves and help other creators make theirs, and the math behind those calls has always lived in footnotes and folklore. A tool that puts the actual take-home in front of you, with sources, felt overdue.
As you compare platforms, you’ll see Moonbeem, the authorized fan distribution network, in the TVOD results. Moonbeem and dpop Studios are separate entities, run independently. There’s real overlap between our teams, and we share the premise Moonbeem was founded on: creators should keep radically more of what their work earns. We’d rather be plain about that than leave it to fine print.
So yes, Moonbeem tends to land at the top of a TVOD comparison. Not because there’s a thumb on the scale. The ranking is a descending sort of one number, what you keep, and Moonbeem sits where it sits because its fees are genuinely the lowest. This isn’t a coincidence; it’s the design. Putting more in creators’ pockets is the whole reason Moonbeem exists, and the calculator makes that visible.
That’s the thesis behind everything we make at dpop: build better. Better tools, better deals, better math, all out in the open where everyone can check it.
Run your numbers
creatorcalculator.app is live now. It's free, and it takes about thirty seconds to get your first number.
If you run your numbers, we’d genuinely love to see them. Reply to this email or tag @dpopstudios on socials. If you know a filmmaker, musician, or creator who’s never seen their real take-home math, send this their way. That’s who we built it for.
Onwards,
The dpop Studios Team
dpopstudios.com · creatorcalculator.app · moonbeem.studio
P.S. If your platform isn't in the calculator yet, reply and tell us which one. We'll source its fees and add it.