Build It or Rent It: What an Online Course Platform Really Costs

A client asked me last month how to put her classes online. She has years of PowerPoints, a stack of recorded webinars, and a new continuing education accreditation. She wanted a member login on her website where people could watch recorded classes alongside the handouts.

Reasonable ask. The part that surprised her was that picking the software was the easy half of the question.

What the off-the-shelf platforms actually cost

Course platforms advertise a low entry price and get expensive as you grow. Here is roughly where things sat when I checked in October 2026. Treat these as a shape, not a quote, because every one of these companies repackages its tiers at least once a year.

Teachable starts around $39 a month for a single course. That is fine. But a five course plan runs closer to $189 a month. I have been a Teachable customer, and that curve is the reason I am leaving. The community features were also an afterthought. They are buried, they are not built around group interaction, and if conversation between your students matters to you, you will feel it.

Circle starts around $89 a month and goes to about $199. It is the opposite trade. Circle was built community first, so discussion and cohort style classes feel native. The course delivery is the part that got added later.

Thinkific sits around $40 a month. I have not run a course on it personally, so I will not pretend to have an opinion on how it feels day to day.

Call it $500 to $2,400 a year once you are past one course. That is the number to hold onto.

What building your own actually costs

We built our own course portal to replace Teachable. It runs on shared hosting that also serves several of our other sites, so the marginal cost is about $20 a month. No per course fee. No per student fee. It currently hosts four classes with multiple modules each, a discussion board, direct messaging between members, live class scheduling with Zoom, and a resource library. We added an AI reader that reads each page aloud and generates an audio summary of the session, because a real share of adult learners would rather listen than read.

That sounds like a clear win on price. It is not, and this is the part people skip.

The $20 a month is hosting. It is not the build. Somebody has to design it, build it, fix it when a video stops playing the week your cohort starts, and keep it patched for years. If that somebody is you, the subscription you avoided was never the real cost. Your time was.

The honest framing: time versus money

Off the shelf costs more per month and gets you live faster. Custom takes longer and costs less to run once it exists. That is the whole trade, and which side you should take depends on one thing: how certain you are that people will pay for this.

If you have never sold a course, you do not know that yet. Neither does anyone else. So do not spend six weeks building infrastructure to find out.

Start on the cheapest thing that lets you learn the answer. For most people that is YouTube, which costs nothing. Post two of the talks you have already given. See whether anyone watches to the end, and whether anyone emails you afterward. If they do, you have earned the right to pay $40 a month. If a year later you are running five courses and the bill is $189 a month with no end in sight, then a custom build starts to pencil out.

Platforms are easy to move between early and painful to move between late. Build the thing you will outgrow, not the thing you hope to grow into.

The question that actually decides your revenue

Here is what I told that client, and it is the part she had not considered.

Who are you marketing this to?

If the answer is "my existing clients," your course has a ceiling, and you can calculate it on a napkin. Count your clients. Guess what fraction will buy. Multiply by the price. That is your revenue, and no platform decision changes it. If that number does not justify the work, the problem is not that you picked the wrong software.

If the answer is "the general public," the ceiling is much higher and so is the cost. Reaching strangers takes ad spend, or it takes a lot of your time producing content consistently for months. Passive income is a real thing. It is just not free, and it is rarely passive in year one.

Most people building a course are doing it because they have run out of hours. They cannot see more clients, teach more sessions, or be in two rooms at once, and a recorded class is the only version of themselves that scales. That is a good reason. It just means the course has to reach people you are not already reaching, which makes marketing the project, and the platform a line item inside it.

What to do before you build anything

Write a one page business plan for the course. Not a real business plan. One page.

Who buys it. What they pay. How many of them exist. How they find out it is there. What it costs you to make and to run. How many sales before you are even.

If the revenue model does not survive one page, it will not survive a platform migration. Most of the course projects I have watched stall did not stall on software. They stalled because nobody did the arithmetic first, and the honest answer was that the audience was too small to justify the build.

Do the page. Then pick the platform. It takes an afternoon and it will save you a year.

If you want help running those numbers, that is exactly the kind of thing we work through with clients hourly, and Seattle businesses can often get it covered through the ABC Program at no cost.