Creator handbook

Your plan

There are 5 plans. Launch is free and you can sell on it from the first day; every plan above it costs a fixed amount each month and takes a smaller cut of each sale.

Both numbers are what you actually pay. The plan price and the fee per sale are VAT-inclusive — the 20% VAT sits inside them and SkillsPad remits it. Nothing is added on top at checkout.

Paying for a year up front costs about 20% less than twelve monthly payments — Grow GHS 2,208/year, Pro GHS 4,320/year, Business GHS 8,544/year.

What each plan includes

Launch — Free, 10% per sale

• Sell ebooks, templates & services
• Up to 25 products
• 1 landing page
• 500MB storage
• AI: Idea + What-to-Sell only, 20 AI credits/month
• Sell with affiliates (limited)
• Team members with roles & permissions (0 seats)
• Email support (48h)

Not on Launch: no course uploads, no video hosting — link to video hosted elsewhere, skillspad branding, 1 brand · 0 admins and no email marketing.

Grow — GHS 230/mo, 6% per sale

• Everything in Launch, plus:
• Sell coaching
• Courses — upload up to 10
• 1 community
• 3 landing pages with basic analytics
• 20GB storage
• 2,000 video playback minutes/mo
• Email marketing — 500 subscribers, 5,000 emails/month
• Full AI Studio (Idea, What-to-Sell, Validate, Price, Build) + AI Marketing + AI Landing Pages — 200 AI credits/month
• Affiliate dashboard (full)
• 3 bundles
• Funnels, upsells & order bumps
• 15 post-purchase redirects
• Custom domain
• Remove Skillspad branding
• Automated buyer onboarding emails

Pro — GHS 450/mo, 5% per sale

• Everything in Grow, plus:
• Sell playbooks
• Courses — upload up to 25
• 3 communities
• 5 landing pages with full analytics
• 50GB storage
• 10,000 video playback minutes/mo
• Email marketing — 2,500 subscribers, 25,000 emails/month
• Full AI Studio (Idea, What-to-Sell, Validate, Price, Build) + AI Marketing + AI Landing Pages, priority — 500 AI credits/month
• Team members with roles & permissions (2 seats)
• CRM, email automation & customer segmentation
• 5 bundles
• A second brand & storefront
• Email support (24h)

Business — GHS 890/mo, 4% per sale

• Everything in Pro, plus:
• Sell systems & webinars
• Courses — upload up to 60
• 5 communities
• Unlimited landing pages with full analytics + A/B testing
• 250GB storage
• 50,000 video playback minutes/mo
• Email marketing — 10,000 subscribers, 100,000 emails/month
• Full AI Studio (Idea, What-to-Sell, Validate, Price, Build) + AI Marketing + AI Landing Pages, priority — 1,500 AI credits/month
• Team members with roles & permissions (5 seats)
• Free withdrawals — SkillsPad pays every payout charge
• API, webhooks & workflow automation
• Webinars & white-label certificates
• Unlimited bundles
• Unlimited post-purchase redirects
• Free products for lead generation
• Advanced analytics & exports
• Up to 10 brands & storefronts
• Priority support (12h)

Enterprise — Custom, from 3% per sale

• Everything in Business, plus:
• Unlimited courses
• Unlimited communities
• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited video playback
• Email marketing — unlimited subscribers, unlimited emails
• Full AI Studio (Idea, What-to-Sell, Validate, Price, Build) + AI Marketing + AI Landing Pages, priority — unlimited AI credits
• Unlimited users & teams
• SSO / single sign-on
• Custom contract & SLA
• Dedicated infrastructure & custom integrations
• Onboarding & migration support
• Invoice billing
• Dedicated success manager
• Dedicated support

Changing plan

• Dashboard → Subscription is where you upgrade, downgrade or cancel. A plan change takes effect on the subscription, not on your products.
• Paying for a plan needs a card. Mobile money can pay for a product at checkout, but a subscription has to renew itself and only a card can do that — if you do not have one, /help/get-a-card-for-subscriptions walks through getting a virtual card.
• If a paid plan lapses, products of a type your new plan does not include are paused rather than deleted, and anything already sold stays with the buyer.

Add-ons

When you need more of one thing than your plan includes, you can buy it on its own instead of moving up a plan. Add-on allowances are only drawn on once the plan’s own monthly allowance is used up.

What you can sell

SkillsPad has 9 product types. Each one has its own builder and its own idea of what "finished" means, and your plan decides which of them you can create.

A type your plan does not include still appears in the product builder, locked, with the plan that opens it — so you can see what you are missing rather than hunt for it.

How many you can have

Pricing a product

• Set a price in GHS, and optionally a lower promotional price. Both show on the product page, with the original struck through.
• Free products — price zero — are a Business feature, so that a free listing is a lead magnet you chose rather than a price you forgot. Below that plan every product, community tier and service package needs a price.
• Community products price their tiers rather than the product, and Services price their packages. The product page shows the cheapest of them as "from".

Selling before it is finished

Pre-orders let you take payment now and deliver on a release date. They are a Pro feature, and only for types that end in a deliverable: Ebook, Course, Playbook, Templates, System and Webinar. The money is held — it does not reach your available balance — until you release the product or the release cron does it for you; if you cancel, every buyer is refunded in full.

Deleting

Deleting a product hides it everywhere but does not destroy it, and it does not take away access from anyone who already bought. If you delete something by mistake, support can put it back.

Money: fees, and getting paid

Buyers pay the processor; the processor pays SkillsPad; SkillsPad credits you and you withdraw. Three charges exist on that path and none of them is hidden.

The three charges

• The checkout fee — 2% — is added to the buyer's total at checkout and covers payment processing. It does not come out of your price.
• The platform fee is SkillsPad's cut and depends on your plan: Launch 10%, Grow 6%, Pro 5%, Business 4%, Enterprise from 3%. It is all-in — the 20% VAT is inside that percentage, not added to it.
• The payout charge is a flat GHS 1 for mobile money or GHS 8 for a bank transfer, taken once per withdrawal — not per sale. On Business SkillsPad pays it for you.

A GHS 200 sale, end to end

Of that platform fee, GHS 3.33 on Launch is VAT that SkillsPad remits to the GRA. You are never billed for it separately.

If an affiliate referred the sale, their commission comes out of your share, after the platform fee — so the affiliate rate you set is a share of your price, not of what is left.

From balance to your phone

1. Verify your email. Payout settings will not save until you do — it is one of only two places SkillsPad insists on it, so it is easy to sell for weeks and only meet it when you first try to withdraw.
2. Add a destination in Dashboard → Payouts → Settings: a mobile money number or a Ghanaian bank account. The account name is resolved before it is saved, so a wrong digit is caught there rather than after the transfer.
3. Wait for the sale to clear. An order becomes withdrawable 24 hours after the buyer paid.
4. Request the payout once your cleared balance is at least GHS 50. You pick which cleared orders to include.
5. SkillsPad reviews the request and releases the transfer. The timeline on the payouts page shows which step you are at and when each one happened.

Pre-order money and money from an order that has not cleared do not count towards the GHS 50 minimum — the payouts page shows cleared and held separately.

Refunds

There is no self-service refund button for buyers. A buyer who wants their money back contacts support, and an admin issues the refund — which reverses your credit for that order. Cancelling a pre-order is the one case that refunds every buyer at once, from the product’s own panel.

Files, video and storage

Files and video share one storage pool per account. Files are served from Cloudflare R2, video from Cloudflare Stream; you never handle a storage key yourself — the browser uploads straight to a signed URL.

What happens when you reach the limit

• On Launch the pool is a hard stop: an upload that would take you over it is refused. Nothing already uploaded is deleted.
• On a paid plan you get a warning as you approach the limit and a little headroom past it, and uploads are refused beyond that. Again, nothing is deleted.
• Video hosting starts on Grow. Below that you can still use video — you paste a link to a video hosted somewhere else (YouTube, Vimeo) and it plays in the lesson.
• Playback minutes above your monthly allowance are billed at the start of the next month at GHS 0.03 a minute (GHS 30 per 1,000 minutes). Buyers never lose access to what they bought because of an unpaid overage.

Preview-only files

A file can be marked preview-only, which means a buyer can read it in the browser but not download it. Because a preview is re-streamed on every view rather than delivered once, the size a preview-only file may be is capped per plan, and only files you uploaded to SkillsPad can be marked that way — not ones you linked from elsewhere.

Landing pages, lead pages and your shop

Three different ways for a buyer to arrive: your shop, which lists everything; a landing page, which sells one thing; and a lead page, which collects a contact before anything is sold.

Your shop

Every creator gets a shop page listing their published products, on skillspad.org. A custom domain of your own — shop.yourdomain.com pointed at SkillsPad with a CNAME — starts on Grow, and Grow is also where SkillsPad branding comes off. Separate named storefronts, each with its own URL and its own curated selection of your products, are a Pro feature, up to 10 of them.

Landing pages

• A landing page is built from typed sections — hero, stats, comparison table, sticky CTA, about-you and more — each with a few layouts to choose between. It saves as you type as well as on the Save button, and warns you if you try to leave with something unsaved.
• Publishing gives the page its own address; you can also put it on a subdomain, and the builder checks the subdomain is free before you commit to it.
• A lead page is the lighter one: a form that captures a name and email and then sends the person on. The lead it creates is carried into checkout, so when that person eventually buys you can see which lead converted.

Turning a sale into two

• Order bumps and post-purchase upsells start on Grow. An order bump is a checkbox on the checkout page offering another of your products at up to 50% off; a post-purchase upsell is a countdown offer on the success page at up to 70% off, valid for between 1 and 72 hours.
• The offered product has to be one with a single price — a Community or a Services product cannot be offered this way, because the checkout card has nowhere to ask which tier or package.
• A post-purchase redirect sends buyers straight to a WhatsApp group, a Telegram channel or any URL after they pay: Launch no, Grow 15, Pro 15, Business unlimited, Enterprise unlimited.

Affiliates and referrals

Two different programmes that share a word. Affiliates promote your product for a commission. Referrals bring another creator to SkillsPad and earn you free months.

Letting affiliates sell for you

Affiliate selling is on every plan; the full affiliate dashboard comes with Grow. You turn it on per product, from the product's Affiliates tab.

• The commission is either a percentage of the sale or a fixed amount per sale — you pick one, and the amount is shown to affiliates before they sign up.
• Cookie duration decides how long after a click a purchase still counts as theirs.
• Auto-approve lets any affiliate start promoting immediately; turn it off if you would rather approve each one.
• A minimum payout threshold, a package description and terms are all yours to set.
• The commission comes out of your share of the sale, after the platform fee.

Referring other creators

Your referral link is in Dashboard → Referrals. When a creator who signed up through it makes their first sale, you both get a free month, and referral months stack on top of any promo you already have.

Email marketing

Email marketing — your own list, your own campaigns — starts on Grow. Buyers always get their receipts and access emails, on every plan; this is the marketing on top of that.

• A campaign is one email to a list or a segment, sent now or scheduled. A sequence is several emails with waits between them, which people are enrolled into.
• Nothing sends the moment you press send: the email is queued and a background job drains the queue. A campaign showing as sent has been handed over, and delivery follows within minutes.
• The send limit counts individual emails, not campaigns — one campaign to 2,000 subscribers is 2,000 sends.
• Unsubscribes are per subscriber and respected on every marketing send. Receipts and access emails are not marketing and are not affected.
• Automated buyer onboarding — a welcome email after every purchase, with your own message in it — is a Grow feature, switched on in Settings → Integrations.

The AI tools

The AI tools help you decide what to sell, price it, write it and market it. Every plan includes a monthly allowance of credits; one credit is one AI action, and a heavier action costs more than one.

What an action costs

Most actions cost one credit. The ones that make several model calls cost more, and the screen tells you the cost before you spend it. If an action fails, the credits are refunded.

Run out before the month ends and you can buy a credit pack — 40 credits for GHS 30 or 150 credits for GHS 100. Packs do not expire, and they are only drawn on once your monthly allowance is gone.

The AI will not invent proof. It does not write testimonials you did not receive, it only quotes sales numbers that really happened, and where a page wants a real photo it leaves you a note saying so rather than making one up.

Courses and communities

The two product types that are a relationship rather than a file, and the two with the most moving parts.

Courses

A course is modules, each with lessons. A lesson can be video, text, a file or a quiz. Courses start on Grow: Grow 10, Pro 25, Business 60, Enterprise unlimited.

White-label certificates — a completion certificate with your brand on it rather than SkillsPad's — are a Business feature.

Communities

A community is a product people join rather than buy once. You define membership tiers with their own prices and billing cadence, and a member’s tier is a recurring subscription: it renews on its own, and a failed payment puts them in a grace period rather than throwing them out immediately.

Every community has a General and an Announcements channel on every plan — the Business feature is channels beyond those two.

Running it as a business

The parts that matter once this stops being a side project: other people, other systems, and knowing what is working.

• Analytics is on every plan: views, sales, revenue, conversion and where buyers came from. Business adds the deeper cuts, exports and reports emailed to you on a schedule.
• Team members with their own roles and permissions start on Business; below that the account is one person.
• API keys and webhooks start on Business. A key is shown once when you create it and never again, so store it when you make it; you can hold 5 at a time and revoke any of them.
• The Facebook Pixel is on every plan — paste a Pixel ID on a product and view, add-to-cart and purchase events fire for it.
• Support is in Dashboard → Support. Your plan sets the response time you are entitled to, in the table above.

Still stuck

Open a ticket from Support — the response time your plan is entitled to is in the table above. The help centre has step-by-step guides for individual jobs, and this handbook is also public at skillspad.org/handbook if you want to send someone a link.