Selling a film online in India, short or feature-length, costs you four things out of every ticket: GST at 18%, the payment gateway's charge of about 3%, the cost of actually streaming the film, and the platform's fee. On a ₹20 ticket for a 10-minute film on watchmycreation, that works out to ₹3.05 of tax, ₹0.71 to the gateway, ₹1.50 of streaming and a ₹2.00 platform fee — leaving ₹12.74, or about 64% of the ticket, for the filmmaker.
There is also a one-off listing fee to put the film on sale, starting at ₹99 for the shortest runtimes and rising with length. That is the whole cost. There is no monthly subscription, and no flat minimum price to clear — the cheapest a film can be sold for is set by its own runtime.
Most platforms quote you a single revenue share — "you keep most of it" — and that number is doing a lot of hiding. Two of the four costs of selling a film are percentages of the price, and two of them are flat amounts that do not shrink when the ticket gets cheaper. If you only ever see one blended figure, you cannot tell which is which, and you cannot work out what happens if you halve your price.
So here they are separately.
GST applies at 18% on a ticket sold to a viewer in India. On watchmycreation the displayed price is tax-inclusive: a ₹20 ticket means the viewer pays ₹20 and ₹3.05 of that is tax, which is remitted to the government. It is not revenue for the filmmaker and it is not revenue for the platform. Watch for this when comparing platforms — a platform quoting tax-exclusive prices is quoting you a number the viewer will not see at checkout.
Card and UPI processing costs roughly 3% of whatever is collected, and GST applies to that fee in turn. It is charged on the whole amount the viewer pays, not on what is left after tax. This one is genuinely outside anyone's control: it is what the payment networks charge.
This is the cost nobody mentions and the one that changes the shape of everything. Video delivery is billed by the minute. On watchmycreation it works out to about ₹0.15 per minute of runtime per ticket sold. A short piece costs very little to show. A feature costs proportionally more, every single time someone watches it.
Two consequences follow, and they are the reason the rest of this page is not simply "take a percentage off the top":
A flat ₹1 per ticket up to 5 minutes of runtime, ₹2 up to 15, and ₹3 above that. The cheapest band is there so a song or a short piece can be sold for very little without the fee taking most of it. Flat rather than a percentage, which is unusual and deliberate: a percentage fee means the platform earns more when you price higher, whether or not it did anything more. Reviewing, hosting and paying out a ₹1000 ticket is the same work as a ₹4.32 one — the cheapest a 10-minute film can be sold for.
The same 10-minute film, priced three ways. Every figure here is computed by the same function that settles the actual payment, so this is not an estimate — it is the ledger entry.
| Ticket | GST | Gateway | Streaming | Platform | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ₹4.32 | ₹0.66 | ₹0.15 | ₹1.50 | ₹2.00 | ₹0.01 (0%) |
| ₹4.32 | ₹0.66 | ₹0.15 | ₹1.50 | ₹2.00 | ₹0.01 (0%) |
| ₹4.32 | ₹0.66 | ₹0.15 | ₹1.50 | ₹2.00 | ₹0.01 (0%) |
Notice what the flat costs do. They are the same rupee amount on every row, so the share you keep rises sharply with the price — from about 64% to about 78% across this table. This is the single most useful thing to understand about pricing a film: cheap tickets are disproportionately expensive to sell.
Try your own numbers in the earnings calculator.
Because two of the four costs are flat, there is a price below which a ticket cannot cover its own costs. Every sale below it loses money — not a little margin, actual money out. So every film carries its own minimum: the price at which a ticket just covers the streaming and the platform fee, once tax and the gateway have taken their share. Nothing flat sits on top of that — there is no platform-wide minimum a film has to clear first — so the number falls out of the runtime, and a longer film starts higher:
We refuse a price below the floor rather than accepting it and quietly showing you zero earnings, which is what a naive calculation does. A platform that lets you list at an impossible price is one that has not thought about what happens when the film sells.
Putting a film on sale carries a one-off fee that keeps it listed for 90 days. It also scales with runtime, for the same reason streaming does — a long film occupies storage and bandwidth whether or not it sells:
Every fee above includes GST. There is a grace period of 7 days after a listing lapses before the film comes off sale, and tickets already sold stay valid either way.
We are not going to print anyone else's prices here, because they change and a stale comparison is worse than none. What is worth comparing is the shape of the deal, and there are only a few shapes on the market:
| Shape | You pay | Works when |
|---|---|---|
| Ad-supported (free to upload) | Nothing up front; you are paid a share of ad revenue | You have volume. Thousands of views, not hundreds. |
| Subscription platform | A recurring fee in foreign currency, whether or not you sell | You have a library and a steady audience. |
| Rights deal with a distributor | Usually nothing — you give up rights instead | They want your film and you want the reach. |
| Per-ticket (this) | A listing fee plus per-ticket costs; you keep the rest | You have an audience that would pay for one film. |
The honest summary: if your film will be watched by tens of thousands of people who would never pay for it, advertising earns more. If it will be watched by a few hundred people who care, a ticket earns more — usually by a wide margin. Most independent films, short or long, are the second kind, and are published as though they were the first.
A listing fee to go on sale, then GST, the gateway, streaming and a flat platform fee out of each ticket. Nothing recurring, no minimum but the film’s own cost floor, and the exact split is shown to you before you set a price — the same figures the payment settles against.
Published by Sajai Digital, which operates watchmycreation. We describe how our own platform works and what Indian law requires of it; this is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rates and rules change. Check anything that matters with a professional. Something wrong on this page? Write to support@watchmycreation.com and we will fix it.