You recorded the course. You answer the questions. You are the reason someone bought it. And every time a student pays, a slice goes somewhere else.
Most instructors make peace with that early on, because the alternative sounds like becoming a developer. This is a look at what the slice actually costs once your school is working, what you genuinely get in return, and what the other path involves. Including the parts of it that are harder.
Start with the arithmetic
Course platforms charge in two ways, and the second one is the part that grows with you.
- A monthly fee for the software.
- A percentage of every sale, on the cheaper plans.
On Teachable, the entry plan runs about $29 a month and takes 7.5 per cent of each transaction. To remove that percentage you move up to the next plan at roughly $69 a month, which is $828 a year. Circle’s professional plan is around $89 a month, about $1,068 a year, and still takes 2 per cent. Kajabi starts near $143 a month on annual billing, which is about $1,716 a year.
Those monthly numbers are easy to absorb. The percentage is the one worth sitting with, because it is invisible until you succeed.
Sell $50,000 of courses in a year on a plan that takes 7.5 per cent, and $3,750 of it was never yours. That is not a fee on the software. It is a fee on how well you taught.
A flat monthly cost is a business expense you can plan around. A percentage is a partner you did not choose, taking a bigger cut each year you get better at this.
What you get for it, honestly
It would be easy to make the platforms sound like villains. They are not. Here is what that money actually buys, and it is worth naming properly before you consider leaving.
Somebody else keeps the site online when 400 people arrive at once for a launch. Somebody else patches security holes on a Tuesday night. Somebody else handles the video encoding so your lesson plays on a five year old phone in a country you have never visited. Somebody else deals with sales tax rules in places you have never sold to before, which is genuinely tedious work.
If you are teaching part time around a job, that convenience is worth paying for. Nobody should feel foolish for choosing it.
The question is not whether the service has value. It is whether the price still matches the value once you are earning real money, and whether you are comfortable with what you do not control.
The part that is not about money
Ask an instructor who has been doing this for five years what worries them, and it is rarely the monthly bill.
It is that the student list lives somewhere else. That the pricing rules can change with an email. That the course page looks like every other course page on that platform, because the template is the template. That if the company is acquired or shuts a feature you depend on, your school changes shape and you find out at the same time as everyone else.
None of that is a crisis on any given day. It is a slow discomfort that grows as the thing you built becomes the thing you rely on.
What running your own school actually looks like
Forget the software for a moment. Here is the day to day, because that is what you are really choosing between.
Your students are yours
They have accounts on your site. Their email addresses are in your database. When you want to tell 800 past students about a new cohort, you do not ask permission or export a limited list. You write the email.
Your checkout is your checkout
Payments go from the student to your payment processor to your bank. You set the price, the currency, the coupons, the payment plans. Nobody takes a percentage for the privilege of the transaction happening.
The course does not have to end at the last lesson
This is the part most instructors underestimate. On your own site, the course, the discussion, the member profiles, and the live sessions all share one login. A student finishes lesson six and asks a question in the same place, to the same people, under the same account. You are not stitching a course tool to a separate community tool and asking students to hold two passwords.
We wrote about why that matters for completion rates in building engagement that outlasts the course. The short version is that people finish things when other people notice whether they finished.
It looks like your school
Your colours, your typography, your layout, in light and dark. Not a platform’s template with your logo in the corner. Students who arrive from your newsletter land somewhere that feels like the same person made both.
What it costs
Running it yourself has a bill too. It is smaller and it is shaped differently.
- Hosting: anywhere from a few dollars a month to around $30 for something that handles a launch day without complaining.
- A domain: roughly $15 a year.
- The software: a full course system with quizzes, certificates, checkout, memberships and revenue sharing is available free, with no licence key and no per site limit. The paid tier, which adds learning paths, content drip, instructor payouts, advanced quizzes and analytics, lists at $149 a year or $399 once for a single site.
- Payment processing: the usual card fees, which you pay on any platform anyway.
Set that against $828 a year for the cheapest fee free plan on a hosted platform, and the gap is the point. It is wider still if you are currently on a percentage.
What you take on
This is the section most articles like this leave out, so here it is plainly.
Updates become yours. Backups become yours. If the site goes down at 2am on launch day, there is no support queue at a company whose job it is to care. Sales tax and VAT reporting become your responsibility rather than being handled invisibly. And the first setup takes a weekend rather than an afternoon.
Two honest answers to that. Managed WordPress hosting handles most of the maintenance for the price of a couple of coffees a month. And if you would rather never think about it, this is exactly the kind of thing an agency looks after on a retainer. Either way, it is a known cost rather than an open ended percentage.
Who should stay where they are
If you are testing whether anyone wants your course at all, stay. Validate the idea on the fastest thing available and worry about ownership when there is something to own.
If you sell occasionally and the percentage adds up to less than a dinner, stay. The maths does not justify a move yet.
Move when the percentage starts to look like a salary, when you want the community and the course in one place, or when you have started planning around a rule somebody else can change.
If you have an audience rather than a course
The same arithmetic applies to anyone who has built a following and monetises it, even without a formal course.
If your income comes from a membership, a paid newsletter, a private group, or coaching, you are almost certainly paying a percentage or a per member fee somewhere, and your audience list probably lives on a service you do not control. The uncomfortable version of that: the people who follow you are borrowed, and the terms of the loan can change.
Running it yourself looks much the same as it does for an instructor. Members sign up on your site, pay you directly, and get access to whatever you sell them: a private space, a library of recordings, live sessions, a chat with the rest of the members. The difference is that when the numbers get good, they stay good, because nobody is taking a cut that scales with your success.
Where to start
Do not migrate everything on a Saturday. The instructors who move well do it in this order.
- Put one course up on your own site while everything else stays where it is. A small one, or an older one you no longer promote.
- Sell it to ten people and watch what breaks. Checkout, the receipt email, the login, the video on a phone.
- Move the community next, so students have a reason to visit between lessons.
- Then move the flagship, once nothing about the process surprises you.
If you want the fuller walkthrough of standing up the paid side, we covered it in creating a paid online course community, and the wider question of what to charge for in monetising an online community.
The question underneath
Every instructor eventually asks a version of the same thing. Am I building a business, or am I building someone else’s inventory?
There is no wrong answer while you are starting. There is a point, though, where the percentage stops being the cost of convenience and starts being the cost of not having decided. That point is different for everyone, and it is worth recognising when you reach it rather than noticing a year later.