The 7 best platforms to sell online courses — priced over five years

How I compared these platforms

Feature lists are easy to write and almost never the thing that goes wrong. What goes wrong is the bill, and the bill is the one number every roundup in this search result reports badly — as a monthly figure, next to a competitor's annual one, with the transaction fee in a footnote.

So, four rules for the whole page:

• One worked example, applied to everybody. $50,000 of sales a year at a $50 average order — 1,000 transactions. Percentage fees mean nothing until you put a number behind them.
• Five years, not one month. $199 a month is a small number. $11,940 is not. They are the same decision.
• Card processing is called out separately. Roughly 2.9% + 30¢ goes to Stripe or PayPal no matter whose logo is on the checkout. Gumroad's and Udemy's cuts already include it; everyone else's doesn't. Pretending otherwise is how these comparisons get dishonest.
• Every figure was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 6 August 2026, with one exception I flag below. Prices in this category move — Thinkific put its up about 10% this year.

One caveat on sourcing, because it matters more than it sounds. Thinkific's pricing page returns a 403 to automated requests, including to a real browser user-agent. Its figure here comes from Google's index of that page plus corroborating 2026 reviews, not a direct read. Check it by eye before you act on it. Everything else came off the source.

What each platform costs over five years

Subscription cost only in the money columns. The last column is what the platform takes out of each sale on top.

Read off each vendor's own pricing page on 6 August 2026, except Thinkific, whose page blocks automated requests — that figure came from Google's index and should be checked by eye. Percentage rows are worked at $50,000 of sales a year across 1,000 orders of $50. Card processing of about 2.9% + 30¢ is extra on every row except Gumroad and Udemy, whose cuts include it. SoloStore's totals already include about $7 a month of hosting, so if anything the table flatters the subscriptions.

The spread is the story. The cheapest and most expensive ways to sell the same $50,000 differ by more than $25,000 over five years, and none of that difference is about how good your course is.

1. Kajabi — the most complete, and the most expensive

Kajabi genuinely is the all-in-one: courses, funnels, email, landing pages, a community and a checkout, all speaking to each other without a Zapier in the middle. If you want one login and one support address for your whole business, this is the product that delivers it.

Growth is $199 a month billed annually, or $249 month to month. Basic is $143 and Pro is $399. Call it $2,388 a year and $11,940 over five on the plan most people land on.

Here's the part that isn't in the other roundups. Kajabi's "no transaction fees" is conditional on using Kajabi's own payment processor. Run your sales through your own Stripe or PayPal instead and Kajabi takes a platform fee on top of processing: 1% on Growth, 2% on Basic, 5% on Starter, 0.5% on Pro. On $50,000 of sales that 1% is $500 a year for the privilege of using your own gateway. Kajabi Payments itself runs 2.8% + 30¢ on Growth.

• Best for: a business past roughly $100,000 a year where the time saved on integrations is worth more than $2,388.
• The catch: $11,940 over five years, and the cheapest way to avoid its transaction fee is to hand it your payment processing too.

Longer version with the arithmetic: the Kajabi alternative comparison.

2. Thinkific — course-first, and it just went up

Thinkific is the most course-shaped platform here. The builder is good, the student experience is clean, and it doesn't pretend to be a CRM. Start is $74 a month billed annually — $888 a year — with Grow at $149 and Expand at $374. There's a free plan, capped hard enough that it's a trial with no expiry date rather than a business.

The thing worth remembering isn't the price. It's that the price moved — Thinkific's plans went up roughly 10% this year. Every subscription on this page can do that, and you will find out by email on a Tuesday.

• Best for: someone selling courses and only courses, who wants the teaching side to be the good part.
• The catch: funnels and upsells are thinner than Kajabi's, and $4,440 over five years buys you no equity in anything.

3. Teachable — the cheapest 0% plan, and a trap one tier below it

Teachable Builder is $69 a month billed annually ($89 monthly) with no transaction fee — $828 a year, $4,140 over five. That is the least you can pay a hosted platform on this page without handing over a percentage, and it's why Teachable stays on these lists.

The Starter plan is where people get hurt. It's $29 a month billed annually, which looks like the sensible way in, and it charges 7.5% of every sale. Do the arithmetic once: at $50,000 of sales that 7.5% is $3,750, so Starter costs you $4,098 a year against Builder's $828. The two plans cost the same at about $6,400 of annual sales. Above that, the cheap plan is the expensive one, and it stays that way forever.

Personal disclosure, since it colours how I read this one: Teachable is the platform I used, and the platform I spent three years wanting to leave — bugs, support that didn't fix them, and then a price increase that finally made the decision for me. Builder is a fair deal on paper. I would still ask what year three looks like.

• Best for: selling a course without paying a percentage, at the lowest hosted price available.
• The catch: the entry tier's 7.5% is one of the most expensive fees on this page in disguise.

4. Podia — the simple one, with the same trap

Podia is the friendliest platform here and the least likely to make you read documentation. Courses, digital downloads, memberships, coaching and email in one place. Shaker is $84 a month — $1,008 a year, $5,040 over five — with no transaction fee. Earthquaker is $150.

Mover, at $42 a month, takes 5% of each sale. Same shape as Teachable's Starter, different crossover: the two plans cost the same at about $10,080 of annual sales. Below that Mover genuinely is cheaper. Above it you are paying Podia a bonus for growing.

• Best for: a creator who wants to be selling this afternoon and doesn't want a funnel builder.
• The catch: it's still $5,040 over five years, and the cheap plan taxes success.

5. Gumroad — free until it isn't

Gumroad charges nothing to start and 10% + 50¢ of every sale, or 30% if the buyer found you through its Discover marketplace. There is no monthly fee, ever.

Under about $5,000 a year of sales, this is the best answer on the page and I'd tell you to stop reading and go use it. 10% of a small number is a small number, the setup takes an afternoon, and you pay nothing in the months you sell nothing.

The problem is that 10% doesn't taper. At $50,000 of sales Gumroad's cut is $5,500 a year — more than Kajabi's subscription — and over five years it's $27,500. Going direct instead, Stripe's cut on the same sales is $1,750 and the platform's is zero. What Gumroad's 10% does buy you, and this is real, is that it becomes the merchant of record. More on what that's worth in a moment.

• Best for: your first product, an unproven idea, or anyone whose sales are lumpy enough that a fixed monthly fee would hurt.
• The catch: the fee that made it painless at $2,000 is a salary at $50,000.

6. Udemy — they bring the buyer, and they charge for it

Udemy is the only platform here that markets your course for you, and the numbers reflect exactly that. There's no fee to create or host a course. What there is instead is a revenue split, and it hinges on who found the student.

Udemy's own terms put it plainly: instructors receive 97% of revenue when the buyer used the instructor's coupon or referral link, and 37% for any sale where they didn't — the browse-the-marketplace, clicked-a-Udemy-ad sales. So the marketplace costs you 63%. On $50,000 of Udemy-sourced sales you keep $18,500.

Whether that's expensive depends on a question only you can answer: would those buyers have found you at all? If yes, 63% is the worst deal on this page by a distance. If no, 37% of something beats 100% of nothing. What you should not do is assume it's a substitute for the others — you don't own the customer relationship, and building an audience you can email is the entire asset in this business.

• Best for: broad, evergreen, skills-based topics, run alongside your own store rather than instead of it.
• The catch: 63% on the sales you didn't source, and a student list that isn't yours.

7. SoloStore — buy it once, run it yourself

Full disclosure, in case the domain didn't give it away: I built this one. It exists because I was the creator in the example above, paying a platform four figures a year to serve video files and take card payments, which are two of the cheapest things on the internet.

SoloStore is one application you deploy to your own hosting in about fifteen minutes. Courses, funnels with order bumps and upsells, checkout, member community and file delivery are all in it, and every payment runs through your own Stripe account. $497 once, no renewal, 0% of your sales, and about $7 a month of hosting paid to the hosting companies rather than to me.

And the honest other side, because a page that only flatters itself is an advert. There's no built-in email marketing or CRM — it feeds Kit or MailerLite instead. No student mobile app. Support is email only. It won't run on shared or WordPress hosting; it needs its own app hosting, which is a one-time fifteen minutes but is fifteen minutes more than signing up for Podia. And nobody is on call at 2am except you.

• Best for: someone already paying $1,000+ a year to a platform, who wants that to stop and doesn't need a vendor to hold the keys.
• The catch: you pay up front, you host it, and you're the support team.

Who is the merchant of record — and why it decides your tax bill

This is the question underneath every fee comparison on this page, and I've never seen a roundup answer it. The merchant of record is whoever legally sold the thing — whose name is on the buyer's card statement, and who owes the tax authorities.

• Gumroad and Udemy are the merchant of record. They sold it, not you. They collect and remit EU VAT and US sales tax, and that is a large part of what their percentage buys.
• Kajabi, Thinkific, Teachable, Podia and SoloStore are not. You stay the seller on every transaction. The software runs the checkout; the liability is yours.

Which sounds like a straight point against the second group until you know the switch exists. Stripe sells its own merchant-of-record service — Managed Payments — and it's a toggle on your account. Turn it on and Stripe becomes the merchant of record, handling EU VAT and US sales tax, for an extra 3.5% per transaction on top of normal processing. Leave it off and the filing is yours.

So the honest comparison against Gumroad's 10% + 50¢ isn't 2.9% + 30¢. It's 2.9% + 30¢ plus 3.5% if you want the same hands-off treatment — call it 6.4% + 30¢. Still cheaper, and the difference is that you can switch it off when you'd rather file yourself, which nobody using Gumroad can.

What happens to your course when you stop paying

The last thing nobody asks before signing up, and the only one that matters on the day it does.

On every subscription platform above, the answer is the same: your sales pages stop resolving, your checkout links 404, and your students lose access, in the month you stop paying. Not in a grace period measured in years — the month. Which means the five-year figures in that table aren't really the cost of the software. They're the cost of your students continuing to be able to log in.

So four questions to ask a platform before you upload anything, in the order they'll hurt you:

1. Can I export the student list with email addresses and purchase dates? Some platforms give you names and nothing you can email.
2. Can I download the original video files, or only stream them? If it's stream-only, re-hosting fifty lessons is your weekend, and you'll be doing it from local copies you'd better still have.
3. Do checkout links live on my domain or theirs? Every link you've put in an email, a video description or an affiliate's page dies with the account if they're theirs.
4. What happens to active payment plans and subscriptions? Half-paid instalments are the ugliest part of any migration and nobody's onboarding page mentions them.

Self-hosting doesn't make that problem disappear so much as change its shape. Nobody can switch you off, the files are on storage you rent directly, and the checkout is your own Stripe account — but the flip side is that nobody's monitoring it either. That's the actual trade. Not features. Who holds the keys, and who's on call.

So which one should you actually pick

Roughly, and I'd stand behind each of these:

• Selling your first thing, under ~$5,000 a year: Gumroad. Pay the 10%, keep your cash, find out whether anyone wants it.
• $5,000–$50,000 a year, want it simple: Teachable Builder at $828 or Podia Shaker at $1,008. Not the percentage tiers.
• Past $100,000, and integrations cost you more than money: Kajabi. It's expensive and it's good, and at that revenue $2,388 stops being the deciding number.
• A broad skills topic and no audience yet: put a course on Udemy alongside your own store, and treat the 63% as marketing spend.
• Already paying four figures a year and tired of it: $497 once, self-hosted. That's the one I built.