Course Creator Tools · Updated August 2026
Online Course Pricing Calculator
Quick answer: your course price depends on its depth, the transformation it delivers, and how warm your audience already is — not a flat “everyone charges $97” rule. This calculator gives you a real suggested range, then shows what you’d actually keep after fees on Udemy, Teachable, Kajabi, and Thinkific at your expected sales volume, using each platform’s real 2026 numbers.
| Platform | Net per sale | Monthly net (at your volume) |
|---|---|---|
| Udemy (organic sale) | $0 | $0 |
| Udemy (your own referral link) | $0 | $0 |
| Teachable Starter ($39/mo + 7.5% fee) | $0 | $0 |
| Kajabi Basic ($179/mo, 0% fee) | $0 | $0 |
| Thinkific Basic ($49/mo, 0% fee) | $0 | $0 |
| Your own site (Stripe, ~2.9% + $0.30) | $0 | $0 |
Break-even insight
This only compares per-sale economics — it doesn’t account for Udemy actually bringing you the buyer. A self-hosted platform “winning” this math still requires you to drive your own traffic.
What Actually Determines an Online Course’s Price?
Four things move the number: how much transformation the course delivers, how much support comes with it, how deep the content is, and how much your audience already trusts you — price follows value, not hours of video.
A 90-minute course that gets someone a promotion is worth more than an 8-hour course that’s purely for fun, even though it took less time to make. That’s the single biggest mindset shift most first-time course creators need: you’re not selling video minutes, you’re selling an outcome.
Industry pricing guides from course platforms themselves tend to converge on similar bands: mini-courses around $19–$49, standard courses $49–$199, premium or flagship courses $199–$499, and certification-level programs $299–$799. Cohort-based or coached programs, where you’re delivering live feedback, routinely run $1,000–$5,000+ because the personal time investment changes the entire economics.
What Does Udemy Actually Pay Course Creators in 2026?
Udemy pays instructors 37% on an organic marketplace sale, 97% when you bring the buyer yourself through your own coupon or link, and just 15% of pooled subscription revenue for Udemy Business views — down from 25% in 2023.
This isn’t a rumor — it’s published on Udemy’s own Instructor Revenue Share policy page, and the subscription cuts were disclosed via an SEC filing in November 2023 since Udemy was a public company at the time (it’s since been acquired by Coursera in a May 2026 merger, though the two platforms still operate separately).
The subscription share has been cut three times: 25% before 2024, down to 20% in January 2024, 17.5% in January 2025, and 15% as of January 2026. The organic 37% marketplace rate, by contrast, has held steady since May 2021.
There’s also a hard price ceiling worth knowing before you plan around Udemy: courses are capped at $199.99 across 29 fixed price points starting at $19.99, and Udemy runs frequent sitewide sales that push most courses down to $9.99 — meaning your effective per-sale earnings are often far lower than your listed price implies.
What Do Teachable, Kajabi & Thinkific Actually Cost You?
Self-hosted platforms flip Udemy’s model — instead of the platform taking a cut of your sale, you pay a monthly fee (and sometimes a smaller transaction fee) and keep the rest, with no price ceiling at all.
| Platform | Entry pricing (2026) | Transaction fee | Notable limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Teachable | $39/mo ($29/mo billed annually) | 7.5% on Starter; drops to 0% on higher tiers (~$119+/mo) | 5 products, 100 students on Starter |
| Kajabi | $179/mo (raised from $149 in Jan 2026) | 0% (via Kajabi Payments) | 5 products on Basic |
| Thinkific | $49/mo (Basic; no free plan since 2025) | 0% on all paid plans | Unlimited courses |
| Podia | Roughly $39–$199/mo depending on tier | Around 5% on entry tier, 0% on higher tiers | Check current plan details — Podia updates tiers frequently |
The break-even math matters more than the sticker price. At low monthly sales volume, a 0%-fee platform’s higher monthly cost can actually cost you more than a cheaper platform with a transaction fee — the calculator above does this math for your specific numbers instead of leaving you to guess.
Which Platform Should You Sell Your Course On?
If your suggested price is under $50 and you have little to no audience yet, Udemy’s built-in discovery can be genuinely useful despite the low per-sale cut. If your price is anywhere near or above $200, Udemy is structurally not an option — its $199.99 ceiling rules it out entirely.
For premium, certification, or cohort-priced offers, a self-hosted platform is close to mandatory — not because Udemy is “bad,” but because its own pricing rules make anything above $199.99 impossible to list at all. Established creators with an existing audience also tend to do better self-hosted, since Udemy doesn’t share student emails, meaning you can’t remarket, upsell, or build a list of the people who bought your course.
If you’re still deciding whether Udemy is worth using for anything, our Is Udemy Worth It review and Udemy vs Coursera comparison go deeper into the platform from the learner side, which is still useful context for understanding how buyers behave on it.
Related reading
- Is Udemy Legit? — trust and quality signals worth knowing
- Is Udemy Worth It? — the buyer-side view of the same marketplace
Common Online Course Pricing Mistakes
- Pricing by the hour of video, not the outcome. A short course that solves an urgent, high-value problem beats a long course that doesn’t.
- Copying a competitor’s price blindly. Their audience warmth, support level, and production quality aren’t yours.
- Ignoring the platform’s price ceiling before building. Building a $499 flagship course and then discovering Udemy caps at $199.99 wastes real production time.
- Forgetting the monthly platform cost when comparing options. A 0%-fee platform can still be the more expensive choice at low sales volume.
- Never testing a higher price. Most creators discover their course was underpriced only after raising it and watching conversion barely move.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I price my online course?
Start from the outcome it delivers, not its length: hobby content sits lowest, career-changing or income-generating results support the highest prices. Layer in your support level (self-paced vs. live coaching) and audience warmth, then benchmark against 2–3 similar courses before finalizing a number.
What’s a good price for a beginner online course?
Standard structured courses (2–8 hours of content) commonly land between $49 and $199. Shorter mini-courses under 2 hours typically run $19–$49. These are industry-common bands, not fixed rules — your specific outcome and audience still matter more than the length alone.
Is Udemy or a self-hosted platform better for pricing flexibility?
Self-hosted platforms like Teachable, Kajabi, and Thinkific have no price ceiling and let you keep 92.5–100% of each sale (after any transaction fee). Udemy caps every course at $199.99 and pays just 37% on an organic sale, though its built-in traffic can suit low-priced, high-volume courses.
How much do Udemy instructors really make?
An independent analysis of hundreds of thousands of Udemy courses found the average instructor earns about $3,306 a year, with 75% earning under $1,000 and roughly 1% reaching a full-time income — success concentrates heavily in high-search-volume categories.
Should I use a free online course platform to start?
Most major platforms (Teachable, Thinkific, Podia) removed their free tiers in 2025, so “free” now mostly means Udemy’s zero-cost-to-publish model, where the platform’s cut replaces any subscription fee. If you want to keep more per sale and have some starting budget, a paid plan on a self-hosted platform usually nets more once you clear a modest monthly sales volume.