Selling an Online Course: The Platform Fees Nobody Shows You

Disclosure first, because one link in this post is an affiliate link: if you sign up through it, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend tools I use or would use, and I’m not a financial advisor — nothing here is financial advice.

Course creators argue endlessly about platform fees, and the argument is mostly misdirected. Yes, the marketplace platforms take a bigger slice of every sale, and yes, the fee comparison matters at the margin. But the number that actually decides whether a course business exists is not the platform’s cut — it’s how many people hear about the course. A $5,000 launch at 50 sales nets you roughly $2,500 on a marketplace, about $4,400 on a hosted platform, and roughly $4,400-4,500 self-hosted. All three numbers round to the same conclusion, and none of them matter if the sales count is four. This post runs the fee math honestly and then points at the real bottleneck.

The Three Platform Models

Every way of selling a course falls into one of three buckets, and each bucket takes its cut in a different currency — percentage, subscription, or your own labor:

• Marketplaces (Udemy-style). You list on a platform with its own audience. Revenue share varies by marketplace and by who drives the sale — sales through the platform’s own traffic commonly split 50/50 or worse in the instructor’s favor of the platform; sales you bring yourself often earn a much higher share. The currency you pay: half or more of each sale, plus you don’t own the student relationship, price control is limited, and discount cycles can reprice your $100 course at $12 without asking.
• Hosted course platforms (Teachable-style). You get a storefront, checkout, hosting, and student management for a monthly subscription plus payment processing — plans and pricing change over time, so check current tiers, but a typical small-business plan has historically landed in the tens of dollars per month with roughly 3% processing on top. The currency you pay: the subscription whether or not you sell anything, plus processing. You own your students’ emails and your pricing.
• Self-hosted (WordPress + LMS plugin). Your own site, your own checkout, payment processing around 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, hosting costs, and the LMS plugin doing course delivery. The currency you pay: a couple hundred dollars a year in hosting and tooling, plus real setup labor and every future update yourself. Maximum ownership, maximum maintenance.

The Fee Math on a Realistic Course

Take a hypothetical $100 course that sells 50 copies in a year — $5,000 gross. Here’s the net under each model with hedged, check-current-pricing assumptions:

Model	Platform cost	Processing	Net (approx.)
Marketplace, 50% share on platform-driven sales	$2,500	usually included	~$2,500
Hosted platform, ~$39/mo plan	$468/yr	~3% = $150	~$4,380
Self-hosted, ~$15-25/mo hosting + ~$200/yr tooling	$380/yr	~$160 (2.9% + $0.30 × 50)	~$4,460

Read the table twice, because it says two opposite things at once. First: the hosted and self-hosted models land within about $80 of each other — at 50 sales, the fee debate between those two is noise. Second: the marketplace takes nearly half the money. That spread is real, and it’s the entire case for building on owned platforms if you have an audience to sell to. But notice what the table doesn’t say: it doesn’t say self-hosting beats a marketplace, because the marketplace’s fee is buying something — its traffic. The honest comparison is: 50 sales × $50 net (marketplace, where the audience finds you) versus 50 sales × $88 net (where nobody finds you). Same effort, half the money. The fee is only “too high” once you can replace the traffic yourself.

The Fee Nobody Line-Items: Distribution

Here’s the part nobody shows you in platform comparison posts — including the ones that rank platforms with pretty tables. The dominant “fee” in course economics is the cost of attention. Every model charges it differently: marketplaces take 50%+ but include discovery; hosted platforms charge $40 a month and nothing else — the traffic problem is entirely yours; self-hosting charges you hours. Most failed courses didn’t lose to a fee structure. They failed because the creator had no list, no content channel, and no reason for a stranger to trust them with $100.

Which is why my honest verdict on platform choice is sequence, not brand: if you have no audience yet, a marketplace can be a reasonable training-wheels phase — accept the rev share as tuition for distribution and market feedback. The moment you have even a small audience — a few thousand readers, viewers, or subscribers — the math flips hard toward owning the storefront, because every sale you generate yourself earns two to four times more. That audience-first logic is the core of how to make money online, and the strategic reason content compounds while ads rent is in why content is the best leverage you have.

If you’re at that second stage and comparing hosted platforms, Teachable is the one I’d point people at first — checkout, course delivery, and student management without maintaining anything yourself: here’s my Teachable referral link. Pricing has changed repeatedly over the years, so verify current plans and transaction fees before you decide — the fee structure matters more as your volume grows, which is the one case where this post’s “fees are noise” conclusion stops being true.

What a Course Business Actually Requires

Strip away platform debates and a course business needs exactly four things:

1. A specific transformation. Not “learn photography” — “take a manual-mode photo of your kid indoors without blur by Saturday.” The narrower promise converts; the broad one browses.
2. Proof you can do the thing. An audience that watched you do it, or results you can show. Credentials matter less than evidence.
3. A distribution channel you own or can rent: an email list, a YouTube channel, a blog with search traffic, a community. Something that lets you tell 500 people about launch week.
4. The unglamorous operational layer: refunds policy, support emails, updates when your material ages. Budget real hours for this — it’s the part course marketing never mentions and the reason course businesses feel like products plus customer service.

And the revenue honesty, since this post would be dishonest without it: most courses sell a handful of copies, not thousands. The median result of “make a course” is a few hundred dollars, not a lifestyle. That’s not a reason not to do it — it’s a reason to do it cheaply and early, while the stakes are small and the lessons are cheap. The failure mode worth avoiding is spending six months building forty hours of video before selling a single pre-sale; the fix is selling the transformation to five people first, at any price, and building the curriculum that those five validate.

Where This Fits

Courses sit at the monetization end of the content ladder: content earns attention, attention earns trust, and your own product converts trust at the best margin anywhere in the income catalog. The next rung over is ad-based content income, which I break down in YouTube monetization math — same distribution logic, different revenue layer. And the platform-and-tooling cost side of running a content site generally (hosting, domains, the real budget) is in what a blog actually costs to run — the same cost-stack thinking this post applied to course platforms.

I’m not promising course income and the worked numbers above are a labeled hypothetical, not a forecast. Run them with your own price and traffic assumptions before you pick a platform.

Forward step: before you choose any platform, answer the distribution question in writing — how exactly will the first 20 buyers hear about this course? If the answer is “my existing list/channel of at least a few hundred people,” pick a hosted or self-hosted setup and keep your margin. If the answer is “I don’t have one yet,” the platform decision is premature — spend this month building the channel instead, and revisit fees when there’s an audience for the fee math to matter.