Problem
Brazilian digital producers do not control the money they earn. They sell courses, mentorships and communities through platforms that take the payment, hold the balance and decide when it comes back. Five things are taken. Purchasing power: revenue is denominated in a currency that lost 21. 5% against the dollar in 2024, with no instrument in the product to hold value in anything else. Capital: the balance sits in the platform's custody, around 30 days on card, and whatever it earns while parked is the platform's. Releasing it early costs 3. 59% at Hotmart. Due process: accounts are frozen with no specific justification and no right of reply. Hotmart's terms allow 180 days of retention, Ticto's 200. Decisions: the platform ships a dashboard and no diagnosis, so a tracker, a WhatsApp automation, a CRM and an analytics tool get bought separately. The customer: the buyer list is the platform's asset, and Ticto forbids exporting it.
Solution
Akrus is an intelligent intermediation platform for digital producers, built on our own checkout. The producer sells exactly as he does today — the buyer pays by Pix, the product is delivered — and what changes is everything that happens to the money afterwards. Four commitments. Due process. A freeze requires specific justification, a right of reply and a deadline. Contractual, not a support policy. Temporary treasury. He chooses whether the balance stays in his own currency or tracks the dollar. In Brazil: Pix in through our Hodle rail, settled in USDC on Solana into escrow, out to a Pix key or an external wallet through Caliza. We hold seven days against chargeback risk rather than thirty. He never sees a wallet, a seed phrase or the word crypto. Portability. The buyer base and the members area are his, exportable, with no clause keeping him. Kognus. Our behavioural engine reads the funnel and returns decisions instead of charts: where it leaks and what to change.
Business model
We charge the producer a monthly plan plus a percentage on each movement of his money, with no fixed fee per transaction. Free (US$0/month): 5% on the sale, 2. 5% to convert the balance to fiat, 1. 25% to withdraw. Pro (US$97): 3 / 1. 5 / 0. 75. Scale (US$297): 2 / 1 / 0. 5. Annual billing takes 20% and 30% off. All-in that is 8. 75%, 5. 25% and 3. 5%. Pro pays for itself above US$2,800 of monthly volume and Scale above US$11,400, which puts both upgrades inside our target segment rather than above it. A producer who keeps the balance in dollars pays only the entry; only converting costs more, the inverse of platforms that charge for faster access to money they are already holding. Expected ticket: a Scale producer at US$50k/month leaves roughly US$2,000 a month, US$24k a year, blended near 4%. Free sits close to market by design. It is the door, not the offer.
Market
Our market is Latin America: producers who earn in a currency that loses to the dollar. We operate in Brazil today because Pix is where our rail runs, and because Brazil is the largest single piece of it. Brazil: R$8. 8bn in 2024, projected R$10. 6bn in 2025 (CNDL/SPC with Offerwise), 389,448 people employed directly and indirectly (FGV, 2024). We start narrow inside it — the 5,000 to 15,000 producers billing R$50k to R$500k a month, who hold enough balance for treasury to matter. The regional creator economy is US$38. 5bn in 2025, projected to US$112. 7bn by 2031, and the currency argument is sharper outside Brazil: in Argentina and Colombia a dollar balance is not a preference. Balance, pricing and intelligence are already currency-agnostic, so each country needs a local on-ramp, not a second product. Goldman Sachs sizes the global creator economy near US$480bn by 2027.
Competitors
We compete with the platforms that run checkout and payouts for digital producers. Hotmart is the Brazilian leader and the incumbent across Spanish-speaking LatAm too; Kiwify and Cakto are the fast challengers; Eduzz, Monetizze, Ticto, Kirvano, Braip, HeroSpark, Greenn and Zouti fill the field. We mapped all 11, plus 144 globally. All 11 fight on one axis, the fee, in the Pix 0% war — attrition over a headline rate nobody pays, when effective cost lands between 4. 6% and 9. 9%. None denominates the balance in anything but local currency, offers due process on a freeze, or puts intelligence in the product. Our closest global competitor is Whop, which took US$200M from Tether in February for stablecoin rails and LatAm expansion. Whop is an English-language marketplace for a crypto-comfortable buyer. We sell to the Brazilian producer who was burned by crypto and will never see the word on screen.
Competitive differentiation
Three things no platform in this market offers: a balance that holds its value in dollars; assisted usability and advanced tracking, built to make the producer sell more; and decision intelligence inside the product instead of another dashboard. We can also price against them rather than with them. A producer on our top plan pays 3. 5% all-in, against an effective 4. 6% to 9. 9% in the market, and that works because our revenue is not the sale alone — it is the FX spread on both legs and the subscription. The incumbents earn on the balance they hold. We never hold it that way, so undercutting them costs us nothing they can match. Kajabi, Mighty and Circle proved the demand for the intelligence layer abroad. Nobody in the region has shipped one, and the eleven fighting on fee are not building one.
Entry barrier
The barrier is economic, and it is the one an incumbent cannot cross. Their margin is the float: they hold card revenue for around 30 days, charge to release it early, and earn on the balance in between. Dollarising that balance, or returning it on demand, defunds the line that pays for the company. Any of the eleven could copy our checkout in a quarter. None can copy the treasury without cutting its own revenue. Underneath sits work measured in months rather than sprints: custody of a dollar reserve, settlement that reconciles on-chain and in reais, and operating inside Brazil's virtual-asset regime, in force since February 2026. We assembled that stack before the first user existed, and it is what lets us open a second country without rebuilding it. Then it compounds. Kognus improves on data only we hold, so the gap widens with every producer who joins.