Key takeaways
- There are three real routes: a hosted course platform ($0–$499/month), your own WordPress site with an LMS plugin (~$300–$600 to build on, $0 platform fees forever), or a custom build ($25,000+).
- The number that matters isn't the monthly price — it's the transaction fee. On a plan taking 7.5%, selling $10,000/month costs you $750/month before the subscription. That's a $9,000/year success tax.
- Seven costs never appear on pricing pages: video hosting, email marketing, payment processing (2.9% + $0.30 on every sale, everywhere), domain, maintenance, content production, and migration lock-in.
- The honest sequence: start on a cheap hosted plan while your course is unproven, move to WordPress the moment you pass ~$2,000–$3,000/month, and only consider custom when corporate clients demand it.
- Video is the line item people underestimate most. Never host course videos on your own web hosting — and never sell a course you host as unlisted YouTube links.
Here's the question people actually mean when they ask how much an online course website costs: "I have knowledge people will pay for. What will it cost me to put it on a website and keep the money?"
Google's top results don't answer that question. They answer a different one — how much it costs to build a software platform like Udemy, written by agencies selling $25,000–$80,000 builds and software vendors selling their own scripts. That's useful if you're a training company. It's useless if you're a coach with one great course and 200 people who'd buy it.
This is the honest version, from a team that builds course sites both ways — hosted platforms for people launching fast, and WordPress sites for people who've outgrown them.
The three routes, honestly priced
You have three ways to sell a course online. They differ in upfront cost, ongoing cost, who owns the student relationship, and what happens when you grow. Picking wrong doesn't mean you're doomed — it means you'll pay to move later, and migration is the most expensive line item in this entire article.
Route 1: A hosted course platform
Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi, Podia, Skool. You pay a subscription, upload your videos, and you're selling by Friday. Zero technical work. This is where most successful courses start, and there's no shame in it — there's a reason it's the default.
But "starts cheap" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Here are the 2026 prices, with the number the marketing pages whisper: the per-sale cut.
| Platform | Entry price (annual billing) | Transaction fee | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Teachable | $39/month (Starter) | 7.5% on Starter; 0% from Builder ($89/month) | Restructured plans in 2026 — old price guides are outdated |
| Thinkific | ~$39–49/month (Basic) | 0% on all plans | Email marketing and funnels are basic; you'll bolt on other tools |
| Kajabi | $143/month (Basic, annual); $179 month-to-month | 0% with Kajabi Payments | Raised prices January 2026; course + email + funnels in one bill |
| Podia | ~$39–49/month | 5% on entry plans; 0% from ~$99/month | Simpler, friendlier — fewer advanced features |
| Skool | ~$99/month | ~2.9% processing | Community-first; great if the cohort is the product |
| Udemy (marketplace) | Free to list | Up to ~63% on marketplace sales | You're renting someone else's audience, not building yours |
Teachable's $39/month plan sounds $100/month cheaper than Thinkific's — until you sell $2,000 in courses and discover the 7.5% cut turned your $39 plan into a $189 plan. The cheapest sticker price is rarely the cheapest plan.
Route 2: Your own site — WordPress + an LMS plugin
This is the route every honest developer recommends and every platform's marketing hopes you never find. You pay for hosting and a learning-management plugin, and you pay zero percent to any platform, forever. LearnDash starts around $199/year, LifterLMS has a free core plugin with paid bundles from about $398/year, and Tutor LMS sits in the same range. Add managed WordPress hosting and you're in business.
A realistic year-one budget:
| Line item | Typical cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Managed WordPress hosting | $15–$40/month | Don't cheap out — video students are unforgiving of slow loads |
| LMS plugin (LearnDash/LifterLMS/Tutor) | $0–$400/year | LifterLMS core is free; the paid bundles add payment and engagement add-ons |
| Premium theme | $59–$129 one-time | Astra, Kadence, or similar |
| Payment gateway | Free to set up (Stripe) | You still pay 2.9% + $0.30 per sale — same as everywhere |
| Video hosting (Vimeo Starter or Bunny.net) | $12–$25/month | More on this below — it's the cost people forget |
| Domain + SSL | ~$15/year | Often bundled with hosting |
Total: roughly $500–$1,200 for year one if you set it up yourself, versus $1,716–$2,988 for a year of Kajabi Basic. And here's the part that compounds: on WordPress, your costs barely move as your revenue grows from $1,000 to $20,000/month. On hosted platforms, they scale with every sale.
The trade-off is real, though. You're now the person responsible for updates, backups, and security. That's either a $50–$150/month maintenance plan (see our website maintenance cost breakdown) or an hour of your month. If the thought of a plugin update breaking your checkout terrifies you, the hosted route is worth the premium.
Route 3: A custom-built platform
$25,000–$80,000+ for an MVP, 3–6 months of work, and then real maintenance bills. Who actually needs this? Professional training companies selling into corporate clients that require SSO, SCORM compliance, custom enrollment workflows, or certificates with genuine credential weight. A franchise network onboarding 200 locations. An association running certification programs.
If you're a coach with a $297 course, a custom platform isn't an investment — it's a bonfire. Every quote you get in this category will be from someone delighted to build it. Smile politely and keep walking.
The transaction-fee math that changes everything
This is the section the pricing pages never show you, because it makes their cheapest plans look like their most expensive ones. Transaction fees are a success tax: the better your course does, the more you pay.
Here's three years of platform cost (subscription only — before payment processing, which hits everyone equally) at three revenue levels:
| Monthly revenue | Teachable (Starter/Builder) | Thinkific (Basic) | Kajabi (Basic) | WordPress + LearnDash |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $500/month | $2,754 (7.5% fee bites hard) | $1,764 | $6,444 | ~$1,137 |
| $2,000/month | $3,204 (fee drops at Builder) | $1,764 | $6,444 | ~$1,137 |
| $10,000/month | $3,204 | $7,164 (Grow plan) | $8,964 (Growth plan) | ~$1,137 |
Read that bottom row again. At $10,000/month in course sales, Kajabi costs you roughly eight times what the WordPress route costs — not because Kajabi is a rip-off, but because you stopped needing what Kajabi sells: someone else handling the infrastructure. At $10k/month, you can afford someone to handle it for you and still keep the difference.
The crossover point is roughly $2,000–$3,000/month in course revenue. Below it, hosted platforms are worth every penny. Above it, the WordPress route saves you thousands a year, every year, compounding.
The 7 costs nobody puts on the pricing page
Whatever route you pick, these are the line items that ambush first-time course sellers. Budget them now or meet them later.
- Video hosting ($0–$25+/month, and this one is non-negotiable). Never host course videos on your web hosting — one cohort of students streaming 40 hours of video will melt a shared server. Vimeo Starter runs roughly $12–$20/month with a 2TB monthly bandwidth cap (plenty for most courses). Pay-as-you-go options like Bunny.net or Mux charge pennies per minute stored and delivered. And the free option — unlisted YouTube links — is the worst of all worlds: unprofessional branding, no piracy protection, and links that leak the moment one student shares them.
- Payment processing (2.9% + $0.30 per sale, on every platform). This is Stripe/PayPal's cut, and it's separate from the platform's transaction fee. A $297 course sale nets you about $288 after processing. Everyone pays this. Nobody advertises it.
- Email marketing ($0–$50/month to start). Your student list is the most valuable asset the course creates — the thing that lets you launch course #2 without paying for ads. Budget $15–$30/month for a starter plan once you pass the free tiers. (We broke down the full picture in our email marketing cost guide.)
- Content production (wildly variable — and it's the real cost of "building a course"). The website is cheap; the course is expensive. A lean DIY course (decent USB mic ~$100, screen recording, Canva slides) can cost under $300. Professional filming, editing, and branding push a serious course into the thousands. Spend on audio first — students forgive mediocre video, they never forgive bad audio.
- Maintenance ($0 or $50–$150/month). Hosted platforms: zero, included. WordPress: you're on update duty, or you pay someone. A neglected LMS with an expired license key is how checkouts break silently over a weekend.
- Migration lock-in (the most expensive item here). Moving a course with 500 students, progress records, and quiz data off Teachable or Kajabi is a project, not a weekend. Export formats are hostile, progress data often doesn't transfer, and your students will need to reset passwords. Starting on the wrong platform and moving later routinely costs more than just starting on the right one.
- The domain and the brand (peanuts, but yours). ~$15/year. Buy it in your own name from day one — on hosted platforms your checkout lives at yourplatform.yourdomain.com only if you set it up. Ownership of the domain is ownership of the escape route.
The 60-second decision framework
Stop comparing feature tables. Answer these in order:
- Is your course validated? No audience, no pre-sales, first launch? Go hosted — Teachable or Thinkific's cheapest plan. Speed beats ownership when you don't know if anyone will buy. Your only job is to get to sale #50.
- Are you past ~$2,000/month? That's the migration window. Build the WordPress site now, while migration is still cheap — a weekend project, not a data rescue. Every month you delay, the move gets harder.
- Is your funnel email-heavy? If your whole business is launches, webinars, and upsells, Kajabi's all-in-one (courses + email + funnels) earns its premium. If you already use a separate email tool, you're paying for Kajabi's best feature twice.
- Are corporate clients buying? If buyers ask about SSO, SCORM, or data processing agreements, you're in custom-build territory ($25k+) — and your course prices should reflect it.
- Do you hate technology? Be honest. WordPress ownership costs you either money (maintenance plan) or time (your Sunday afternoon). If you'll neglect it, a hosted platform's premium is an insurance policy you'll actually use.
The single most expensive mistake in this entire space is building custom software to validate a course idea. Validate with a $39/month plan. Build the real thing with the profits.
What we'd actually build at each stage
Since people ask us to build these: for a first course, we usually tell people to launch on a hosted platform and spend the build budget on content instead — a $100 microphone and three weeks of recording beat a $3,000 website attached to a mediocre course. We wrote about the AI website builders we end up fixing, and the pattern is identical: people buy infrastructure before they have a product.
For an established creator doing five figures a month on Teachable or Kajabi, the move we build is WordPress + LearnDash or LifterLMS on managed hosting, Vimeo or Bunny.net for video, Stripe for checkout, and their existing email tool untouched. Typical build cost lands where our small business website cost guide says it does, and the payback against platform fees is usually under six months. The membership mechanics overlap enough with our membership site breakdown that we reuse the same access-control patterns.
The bottom line
An online course website costs $0–$200/month on a hosted platform, ~$500–$1,200 for year one on WordPress with zero platform fees, or $25,000+ custom. But the sticker price is the least important number. The important numbers are the transaction fee, the video hosting line, and the revenue level where staying put starts costing you thousands a year.
Most course businesses fail at the content, not the platform. Pick the boring option that matches your revenue, spend your real money on making the course worth $297, and revisit the decision when the transaction fees start stinging. You'll know exactly when that is — you'll feel it in the payout report.
Not sure which route fits where you are right now? Get a free audit of your site or course setup — we'll tell you straight whether your platform is costing you money, and what the move would actually cost. Or book a call and we'll scope it properly.
