Stuvia: Buy & Sell College Class Notes

What is Stuvia?

Stuvia is an international marketplace where students can go to upload and sell their class notes. The site allows sellers to set their own rates, but imposes a minimum rate of $2.50 (unless you’re giving the notes away for free).

How it works

There’s no cost to register and upload notes for sale. However, the site will take a 30% commission on any money you make.

Stuvia review

Unlike other sites that pay you to create notes, but keep any profit earned from selling them, Stuvia lets you profit from each sale.  The site also doesn’t demand that you take notes for an entire semester. You can simply create a study guide, notes for a class or textbook or create a workbook or flashcards.

You also set the price for your notes. The site says the average earnings per sale is $4 and that its average seller earns $76 per month.

Describing and marketing

The site provides some guidance on how to accurately describe what you’re selling, down to including the IBN number of any text book that you’re summarizing. Stuvia says it optimizes uploaded notes for search results too and can help your notes be found on Google — a big plus for those frantically searching for help before a test.

Rights

By and large, the student/seller maintains the rights to their notes and can list them for sale on other sites, as well. However, if you create a set of flashcards as part of your study guide, Stuvia grabs “royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual” rights to that particular intellectual property.

(The site is so covetous of your flashcards, in fact, that it demands in the site’s terms that if you agree to “perform any legal act necessary” to transfer your intellectual property rights to those flashcards to the site.)

Outside of that weirdness, the site’s terms are pretty reasonable. You get paid once a week through Stripe when your account has more than $10 accumulated in it. And you can sell your notes indefinitely.

Recommendations

If you sell notes here, you may also want to also sell them elsewhere. (You created them. You have the right to sell the where ever you wish, unless a site’s terms requires exclusivity.)

However, make sure you are never plagiarizing your professor’s work. His or her study guides, power-point slides and notes belong to him/her. Your notes on that material belong to you (as long they’re original). Anything you’ve quoted from your professor’s notes should be attributed.

Also be sure to check your school’s policy on selling class notes before you upload. Some schools prohibit selling your own class notes and can kick you out of class if you violate the ban. Other schools will hire you directly through the school’s disability services department to take notes for students who can’t take notes themselves. In some cases, those deals can be more lucrative than selling notes through Stuvia or other websites.

If you want to sell notes on Stuvia, you can sign up here.

Other sites where you can sell your notes, include Study Soup and Nexus Notes. However, be aware that while Study Soup pays more per upload, it also claims the notes for its own.