Where every
dollar goes.
The manifesto says authors keep 87.5% of every sale. This page is the math behind that number — published so you can verify it, argue with it, or copy it.
Every Aletay transaction passes through a payment processor (Stripe) before any of it touches Aletay. Stripe takes a transparent cut: roughly 2.9% of the sale plus 30 cents. That fee is the same whether the platform is Aletay, Amazon, or your local bookstore’s website — it’s the cost of card processing. The remaining amount is what Aletay and the author split.
Below is the actual breakdown for a $9.99 book sale, traced from card swipe to author payout.
| Reader pays | $9.99 |
| Stripe processing fee (2.9% + $0.30) | − $0.59 |
| Subtotal after processing | $9.40 |
| Author royalty (87.5% of gross sale) | − $8.74 |
| Aletay’s remainder | $0.66 |
| Stripe Climate contribution (1% of Aletay’s remainder) | − $0.01 |
| Aletay’s net | $0.65 |
Numbers rounded to the nearest cent. The author payout flows directly to their connected Stripe account at the moment of sale, not on a monthly net-30 schedule. The climate contribution flows automatically through Stripe Climate to verified carbon removal companies.
A few honest observations from those numbers:
The author’s share is calculated on the gross sale, before Stripe’s fee. This is deliberate. If we calculated 87.5% of the net (after Stripe), the author would receive $8.23 instead of $8.74. Calculating on gross means the processor’s fee comes out of Aletay’s margin, not the author’s. The author’s 87.5% is what the manifesto says it is: 87.5% of what the reader paid.
Aletay’s net on a $9.99 sale is 65 cents. On a $4.99 sale it’s 13 cents. On a $14.99 sale it’s $1.18. The platform makes more money when books cost more, but the author makes proportionally more too — the royalty rate doesn’t change with price.
The $4.99 floor exists because below it, Stripe’s flat $0.30 fee eats most of the sale. A $1.99 book would leave Aletay with 5 cents after the author’s share and Stripe’s fee — not enough to fund hosting, search, infrastructure, or anything else the platform needs to run. Authors can still offer books for free if they choose; they just can’t price between $0.01 and $4.99.
Premium subscription math
Premium membership is $4.99/month. It works differently from book sales because no author payout is involved — the money flows from reader to Aletay directly. Here’s where it goes.
| Reader pays monthly | $4.99 |
| Stripe processing fee (2.9% + $0.30) | − $0.44 |
| Aletay’s remainder | $4.55 |
| Stripe Climate contribution (1% of Aletay’s remainder) | − $0.05 |
| Aletay’s net | $4.50 |
Premium funds infrastructure (hosting, bandwidth, search, the team building Aletay). It is not a creator pool that pays authors based on engagement — Aletay deliberately does not run that kind of program. Authors are paid when their books are bought, not when platform members read them. Premium members get an ad-free experience across platform surfaces; reading itself was never ad-supported and is the same for everyone.
1% to climate, in practice
One percent of every platform fee Aletay collects flows automatically to Stripe Climate, which funds verified carbon removal companies. The contribution happens at the moment of transaction, not on a quarterly batch. Stripe publishes the contributions and the projects they fund in public quarterly reports.
This is not carbon offsets. Offsets often pay for emissions reductions that would have happened anyway. Carbon removal is the harder, more expensive thing: actually pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere through methods like direct air capture, mineralization, or ocean alkalinization. The dollar amounts per Aletay transaction are tiny. Aggregated across the platform, they fund frontier removal technology that needs early-stage commitments to scale.
We are honest that this is not enough. A reading platform that takes attention from extractive ones is a small good. The climate contribution is the small operational commitment we can verifiably keep. If the platform grows, the contribution grows automatically with it.
What could change these numbers
Stripe’s processing fees could change. Stripe announces fee changes publicly and would apply to any platform using Stripe. If Stripe ever significantly increased fees, Aletay’s margin would shrink before the author’s royalty would. The 87.5% is calculated on gross precisely so changes to processor fees don’t flow through to author payouts.
Sales tax may apply in some jurisdictions as the platform grows. We are not currently collecting sales tax; tax collection in the United States typically begins when a platform reaches statutory thresholds in a given state. When tax collection begins, the tax is added on top of the listed price and flows directly to the relevant tax authority. The 87.5% royalty is calculated on the pre-tax sale price, not affected by tax collection.
Aletay’s share of 12.5% has no scheduled increase. If we ever needed to change the royalty rate, it would be announced publicly and existing authors’ books would be grandfathered in at the old rate. The manifesto would be updated to reflect any change, and the change history would be visible to anyone reading the page.
None of this is novel accounting. It is just published accounting. Most book-selling platforms have similar economic structures internally; what’s unusual is making the structure legible from the outside, so the manifesto can be checked against the math.
If you find an error in any of these numbers, or want to understand a calculation more deeply, the platform’s open accounting is here. Questions go to support@spinepub.io.