How it works
Two flows, one record.
Skillvel is a marketplace for finished student work. Buying and selling diverge after the first click, so both are written out below in full — and then the part they share: what a Creator Certificate is actually backed by.
Buying
You pay once and keep the file.
An account is required — there is no guest checkout, because a download you own forever has to belong to somebody. Everything else is five steps.
- 01
Find a project
Everything on Explore is work a student has already finished — code, design, research or problem sets. Search by title and description, or filter by category, price range and university. Sellers may attach a free preview file, so you can often look at a sample before paying for anything.
- 02
Pay through Stripe
Checkout happens on Stripe’s own hosted page — card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. Skillvel never sees your card details. Before you get there you have to tick one box: you agree to the Terms and waive your right of withdrawal for a digital product. That is not a formality we could drop. A file you can download in full cannot be handed back, so German consumer law requires the waiver to be given actively — and it is the reason a purchase here is final rather than returnable.
Waiver required - 03
Download it immediately
The file appears under /dashboard/purchasesas soon as Stripe confirms the payment, and stays there. Downloads are unlimited and permanent — a seller can pause a listing but never delete it, precisely so that access cannot be taken away from you afterwards. The purchase date and transaction ID sit next to it for your records, along with the seller’s contact address if they chose to share it.
- 04
Get the certificate behind it
Where the seller enabled it, the project carries a Creator Certificate in their name — project, institution, date, and a unique ID. It is issued at the project’s first sale and is the same certificate for everyone who buys it afterwards, because it attests the project and its author rather than your particular order. Anyone can check that ID, which is what makes it worth something to you as a buyer: the person you bought from has a public, revocable record attached to that project.
- 05
Report a problem within 14 days
If a project is not what the listing described, every listing page has a report button, and you have 14days from the purchase to ask for a refund through it. Reports are reviewed by a person, not by a rule — and confirmed fraud does more than refund you: the seller’s certificates stop verifying, their listings are paused and their account is banned.
14 days
Selling
Listing is free. Publishing is automatic.
There is no separate seller account — the account you buy with is the account you sell with. What stands between you and your first sale is Stripe’s verification and a malware scan, in that order.
- 01
Verify with Stripe
Before your first listing you connect a Stripe account and go through Stripe’s own verification — name, address, an ID document. It happens on Stripe’s hosted pages, and the payouts land in your account rather than passing through Skillvel. If you are under 18, a parent sets up the Stripe side; the marketplace account and every certificate still stay in your name.
- 02
Create the listing
Title, a short and a long description, category, tags, a cover image and the file itself. Optionally screenshots, a free preview file and an external link. Everything can be edited later except the price, which is fixed at creation so a certificate can never show an amount that changed afterwards.
from 2,00 € - 03
The scan decides when it goes live
There is no review queue and nobody approves you. Your main file is hashed with SHA-256 on upload and the hash is checked against VirusTotal; the listing publishes itself the moment that scan comes back clean and a cover image exists — usually seconds. While the scan runs the listing stays private, and a file that comes back flagged is never published at all.
File verified - 04
A sale is recorded
You are emailed and notified in the dashboard, the buyer gets the file, and the Creator Certificate is generated in your name if you enabled it — ready to add to LinkedIn. The exact amounts Stripe charged are written onto the order, so the ledger below is never our arithmetic guessing at Stripe’s.
Order completed - 05
Payout after 7 days, then weekly
Stripe holds the first payout for 7 days as fraud protection — that is Stripe’s rule and it cannot be shortened. After that, payouts run automatically on a weekly schedule to the bank account you gave Stripe.
7-day hold
The fees, in full
Two cuts, and only one of them is ours.
Skillvel takes a flat 12% of the sale price. That is the whole of our commission: no listing fee, no monthly fee, nothing deducted for the scan, the certificate or the hosting of your file.
The second cut is Stripe’s, and it is worth understanding why we cannot quote it exactly. Payments run as a direct charge on your own Stripe account, so Stripe bills its transaction fee to you rather than to us — and that fee depends on the card the buyer happens to use, from roughly 1.5% + 0,25 € on a European card up to about 3,15% + 0,25 € on an international one. So your share has no fixed percentage. In practice it lands between 85% and 87%.
Example — a 24,00 € sale on a European card
The last two rows are estimates until the payment exists — the exact figures Stripe charged are read back off the settled transaction and recorded on the order you can see in your dashboard.
Why the minimum price is 2,00 €
Because Stripe’s fee is partly fixed, a small enough sale would cost you more to process than it brings in. At the minimum price on the worst-case card the arithmetic still clears:
2,00 € − 0,31 € − 0,24 € = 1,45 €
Sale, minus Stripe, minus commission — never negative. That is the entire reason the floor exists.
What backs a certificate
A certificate is a record, not a badge.
Anyone can print a graphic that says “verified”. What makes a Creator Certificate worth reading is that four separate checks had to have happened before it could exist — and that it stops holding if any of them is later undone.
- The file hash
- Every uploaded file is hashed with SHA-256. For main project files that hash is unique across the whole marketplace, so the same file cannot be listed twice — nobody can take your work, re-upload it and collect a certificate for it.
- The malware scan
- That same hash goes to VirusTotal before anything is published. A listing whose main file has not come back clean is not visible to buyers, so a certificate can only ever point at a file that passed.
- The completed sale
- A certificate belongs to a listing, not to one order — it is issued once, at the project's first completed sale, and every sale after that is a real sale without minting a second certificate. It records the seller's name, the project title and the date it was first sold — never a price.
- The public check
- The ID and the QR code on the PDF both resolve to a page anyone can open. If every sale behind it is undone, or the seller is banned after a confirmed fraud report, that page answers no — the certificate is never quietly deleted, because someone holding the ID is owed an answer either way.
One account
You do not have to choose now.
Buyers and sellers use the same account. Sign up to buy, and the day you want to sell something you finished, connect Stripe from your dashboard — nothing to migrate, nothing to sign up for twice.