Graphy and Clienteles start from the same premise, an Indian creator selling a course to mostly Indian students shouldn't have to deal with dollar pricing, international payment gateways, or a platform that was clearly built for a different market and retrofitted for India later. Both handle rupee payments natively, both are built with Indian creators in mind rather than as an afterthought, so the useful comparison here isn't currency support or whether Razorpay works, that's already assumed both platforms get right. This is meant to be read as two solid options for the same market rather than a hit piece on one of them, because plenty of good schools run on Graphy today and will keep doing fine there. What actually separates the two is the commission model and the pricing structure sitting underneath, and that's where the real difference in what you keep from every sale shows up.
The commission question
Graphy, like most course platforms that aren't Clienteles, generally works on a model where you pay a subscription plus, on at least some of its plans, a percentage of what you sell, meaning your platform cost isn't fixed, it scales up as your revenue does, which is a common and defensible structure but one that quietly takes more from your biggest launches. Clienteles takes 0% commission on every sale, permanently, regardless of whether you're selling a ₹499 workshop recording or running a ₹1,00,000 cohort-based program, which means the platform costs you the same flat ₹2,200 a year whether last month was your slowest or your best ever. The practical effect shows up most clearly at scale, a creator doing ₹5 lakh a year in course sales pays Clienteles the same ₹2,200 they'd pay doing ₹50,000 a year, while a percentage-based model on the same platform takes a meaningfully larger absolute cut as revenue climbs.
What that actually looks like across a few revenue levels
The easiest way to see why a flat fee behaves differently from a percentage-based one is to look at what it costs as a share of what you're actually making.
At ₹1 lakh a year in course revenue, Clienteles' fee is a small, easily ignored line item, and by the time you're doing ₹10 lakh a year, that same flat ₹2,200 is close to a rounding error, because the platform cost never moves regardless of how well a launch performs. A percentage-based structure works in the opposite direction almost by definition, the better your year goes, the more the platform takes in absolute rupees, which isn't necessarily unfair, plenty of businesses are comfortable paying more when they're making more, but it does mean your platform cost and your success stay permanently linked in a way a flat fee simply isn't.
Where the two platforms are genuinely similar
It's worth being fair here rather than pretending Graphy is a weak platform propped up by a worse pricing model, because it isn't, Graphy has built a real reputation among Indian creators and has feature depth in areas like live classes and cohort management that plenty of schools rely on daily. Both platforms support unlimited courses in their core plans, both give you a real course hosting setup rather than a stripped-down free tier bolted onto a paid upsell, and both understand that an Indian creator's students are paying in rupees through UPI far more often than through an international card. Both also let you plug into your existing marketing stack rather than boxing you into a single email tool, which matters if automation between your funnel and your course platform is already part of how you sell. Neither platform is holding Indian creators back the way a dollar-first tool sometimes does, so this comparison is genuinely about the finer print rather than the basics, and if you're choosing based purely on which platform has more built-in features today, that comparison depends on which specific tools, live cohorts, community depth, and so on, matter most for how you teach.
The decision in practice
If most of your revenue comes from a small number of high-ticket sales, a ₹40,000 flagship program sold to thirty people a year for instance, the commission difference is real money left on the table with a percentage-based model, and it compounds every year you keep growing. If you're earlier in building your audience and selling smaller amounts more frequently, the gap matters less in absolute rupees today but starts mattering more the moment a launch goes well, which is exactly the situation you don't want your platform cost quietly eating into. It's also worth actually running the numbers on your own last twelve months of sales rather than guessing, since the difference between a flat fee and a percentage cut is easy to estimate once you know roughly what you sold and at what price. The full feature-by-feature comparison is on the Clienteles vs Graphy page, and if you're earlier in the process and just weighing options broadly, Graphy alternatives is a reasonable place to start.
Neither platform is the wrong choice, and if Graphy's specific feature set is already working for you, a small commission on sales might be a fair price for that. But if you're optimising for what you actually keep, particularly once your revenue starts climbing past a lakh or two a year, a flat fee with 0% commission stops being a nice-to-have and starts being the difference between a good year and a genuinely great one landing fully in your account.