Best Online Course Platforms by Take-Home per Sale

You have five to ten evening hours a week, a course planned at $49 or $297, and a browser full of roundups grading quiz builders. Most course platform pricing comparison articles answer the wrong question. At ten sales a month, the fee stack moves more money than every feature on the checklist combined, and almost nobody runs those numbers. So this is a ranking of the best online course platforms built the way a side hustler actually needs it: identical courses, real fee stacks, take-home per sale.

The method holds the course constant and moves it through each platform's actual fees. Teachable, Thinkific, Podia, and Kajabi selling from your own site, then Udemy and Skillshare where the platform supplies the buyers. Three scenarios: a $49 course at 10 sales a month, the same $49 course at 200 sales, and a $297 course at 50 sales.

Three findings fall out, and none of them appear in a feature chart. The cheapest option flips at least twice between 10 and 200 monthly sales. A free plan charging a percentage per sale becomes the most expensive option on the shelf once sales pass a threshold you can compute in one line. And marketplaces that bring their own buyers commonly pay for that traffic by keeping 63 to 85 percent of every sale.

How the Best Online Course Platforms Stack Their Fees

Online course platform fees arrive in four layers, no matter how the pricing page is dressed up. Learn them once and you can decode any vendor in about a minute.

1. The subscription. A flat monthly or annual fee, from zero at the free tier to roughly $150 a month for premium plans in this comparison.
2. Course platform transaction fees. A percentage of each sale, sometimes with a flat per-sale amount bolted on. This is how free tiers recover their cost, commonly around 10 percent. The ability to sell online courses without transaction fees is what a paid subscription actually buys.
3. Payment processing. Roughly 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction, charged by the card processor on top of the platform's cut, per Stripe's published pricing. It follows you almost everywhere, so treat it as a constant rather than a differentiator.
4. Marketplace revenue share. Udemy and Skillshare skip the first three layers for a different deal: they keep a large share of the sale and hand you the rest, in exchange for the buyers they deliver.

Model inputs, monthly billing, as of early 2026.Teachable's pricing page: free plan $1 plus 10 percent per sale, entry paid plan $59. Podia's pricing page: free plan 10 percent, first paid plan $39. Thinkific: free plan with no per-sale platform fee but tight course and student caps, entry paid plan around $49, per this Teachable vs Thinkific comparison. Kajabi: no free tier, entry plan commonly around $149. Processing modeled at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on every sale. Platforms reprice often, so verify before you commit.

Scenario One, a $49 Course at 10 Sales a Month

$490 of revenue. Here is what each option leaves in your pocket.

Plan, monthly billing	Fees per sale	Take-home per sale	Net on $490
Thinkific Free	$1.72	$47.28	$472.80
Podia Mover, $39	$1.72	$47.28	$433.80
Podia Free	$6.62	$42.38	$423.80
Thinkific Basic, $49	$1.72	$47.28	$423.80
Teachable Free	$7.62	$41.38	$413.80
Teachable Basic, $59	$1.72	$47.28	$413.80
Kajabi entry, ~$149	$1.72	$47.28	$323.80

Three things worth noticing. First, at this volume a free tier with no percentage fee wins outright, keeping 96.5 percent of revenue, though Thinkific's student caps will catch up with you within months at ten new enrollments per month. Second, Teachable's free plan and its $59 Basic plan land on the identical $413.80. That is not a coincidence: ten sales times the $5.90 per-sale fee equals the $59 subscription exactly. The crossover point sits precisely at this volume. If you have ever wondered how much Teachable takes per sale at $49 on the free plan, the answer is $7.62 all-in, about 15.6 percent of the sale.

Third, Kajabi's subscription alone eats 30 percent of a $490 month. The Teachable vs Thinkific vs Kajabi question settles differently at every price and volume, which is why any single ranking misleads. For a low price course at low volume, the best course platform is a zero-percentage free tier, or the cheapest paid tier if you need headroom.

Scenario Two, the Same Course at 200 Sales a Month

Twenty times the volume, $9,800 of revenue, and the first flip arrives.

Plan, monthly billing	Net on $9,800	Share kept
Podia Mover, $39	$9,417	96.1%
Thinkific Basic, $49	$9,407	96.0%
Teachable Basic, $59	$9,397	95.9%
Kajabi entry, ~$149	$9,307	95.0%
Podia Free	$8,476	86.5%
Teachable Free	$8,276	84.4%

Teachable's free plan now costs $1,141 more per month than a $39 paid plan, about $13,700 a year, for delivering the same 200 students. Percentage fees scale with revenue while flat subscriptions do not, which is why a free plan flips from cheap to most-expensive-on-the-shelf as volume grows. Meanwhile Kajabi, the worst option at ten sales, sits within $110 of the lead. Thinkific's free plan would keep $9,456 if its caps allowed it, and at 200 enrollments a month they will not. That is a second kind of free-plan cost, and it bites before the math does.

Scenario Three, a $297 Course at 50 Sales a Month

Raise the price, hold volume, and the second flip shows up: the fee decision compresses.

Plan, monthly billing	Take-home per sale	Net on $14,850
Podia Mover, $39	$287.31	$14,365.50
Thinkific Basic, $49	$287.11	$14,355.50
Teachable Basic, $59	$286.91	$14,345.50
Kajabi entry, ~$149	$285.11	$14,255.50
Podia Free	$258.39	$12,919.50
Teachable Free	$257.39	$12,869.50

Kajabi's subscription falls from 30 percent of revenue to about 1 percent, and every no-fee paid plan now lands within $2.20 per sale of each other. The free plans bleed $1,446 to $1,496 a month versus the $39 plan, and their free-to-paid crossover collapses to roughly two sales, because Podia's 10 percent on a $297 sale is $29.70, more than the entire monthly cost of the cheapest paid plan after the second sale. The higher your price, the faster a free plan becomes the expensive one, and the less the subscription matters. At $297, fees stop deciding anything among paid plans.

When the Platform Brings the Buyers

Everything above assumes you generate the traffic. Udemy and Skillshare invert the deal: they supply buyers and keep most of the money. Whether that trade pays depends on what your evenings are worth.

Udemy Instructor Revenue Share in Practice

Under Udemy's published instructor terms, you commonly keep 37 percent of an organic marketplace sale and 15 percent when Udemy's own ads or an affiliate drive the purchase. The platform keeps 63 to 85 percent, and that is the price of traffic you did not generate. Udemy also controls list prices through tiered bands with a set floor and ceiling, per Udemy's price tiers, and marketplace promotions routinely push effective prices into the $10 to $20 range regardless of what you list.

Run a $14.99 promo sale through the split: $5.55 to you if the purchase was organic, $2.25 if it came through Udemy's advertising. Your same course sold direct at $49 on a zero-fee stack nets $47.28. One direct sale is therefore worth roughly eight to nine organic marketplace sales, or more than twenty ad-driven ones. That single division is the whole Udemy versus your own site earnings comparison.

None of this makes Udemy a bad deal by default. If your site sells two courses a month and Udemy's audience would buy fifty, the revenue share is cheaper than acquiring customers by hand. The failure mode is publishing there and expecting list-price income.

Skillshare Royalties Per Minute Watched

Skillshare removes the price tag entirely. Students pay a subscription, and teachers are paid from a royalty pool allocated by minutes watched, per how Skillshare pays teachers. There is no per-sale number to compare, which is exactly the point: payouts per minute watched are typically small and vary with the pool each month. Skillshare rewards a long class that retains viewers, not a well-priced one. Treat it as a watch-time and volume business. A tight 90-minute sprint works against you there; a ten-hour masterclass people actually finish can pay steadily without you selling anything.

Hidden Costs Beyond the Headline Fee

Annual billing. Paying yearly typically trims 20 to 35 percent off the subscription, which lowers every crossover threshold in this piece. A $39 plan discounted 25 percent breaks even at six $49 sales instead of eight. The catch is timing: annual billing locks cash into a tool before your course has proven it sells, which is precisely the risk a pre-launch side hustler should avoid.

Payout minimums and schedules. Platforms hold funds until thresholds and payout cycles clear, and Teachable's payout rules are a fair example of the fine print to check. Keeping 96 percent of revenue feels different when the deposit lands three weeks late or sits below the minimum on a slow month.

Free plan caps. The transaction fee is only one cost of a free tier. Free plans commonly cap courses, students, or email contacts, so growth can break the plan before the percentage math does.

The regressive 30 cents. The fixed chunk of processing is about 3 percent of a $10 sale but about 0.6 percent of a $49 sale. Cheap products and installment plans eat it hardest; a $12 mini-course loses over 5 percent to processing alone before any platform fee.

Pricing drift. Platforms repriced repeatedly through 2025 and into 2026, and 2026 pricing changes are worth a scan before committing. Every threshold here is a snapshot, not a contract.

When a Paid Plan Beats a Free Plan

When does a paid course plan beat a free one? At the exact sales count where the free plan's per-sale fee catches the paid plan's monthly price. The online course platform break-even sales calculation is one division:

break-even monthly sales = plan price ÷ (platform % × course price + per-sale flat fee)

Worked example with substitutable numbers: your course is $49, the free plan takes 10 percent, the paid plan costs $39 a month. The free plan costs you $4.90 per sale, so 39 ÷ 4.90 = 7.96. Below eight sales a month, free is cheaper. From the eighth sale onward, the paid plan wins, permanently. Teachable's stack at $49 lands at ten sales ($59 ÷ $5.90). At $297, that same Teachable crossover collapses to about two sales.

The method generalizes to any pair of plans: divide the monthly cost difference by the per-sale fee difference. It takes under a minute with a calculator, and it settles the free-versus-paid question for your actual numbers instead of a reviewer's.

Match the Platform to Your Sales Tier

Put the three scenarios together and platform choice becomes a volume call.

Monthly sales	At $49	At $297
Under 8	Free tier, zero-percentage if available	Free only to validate; the flip hits at 2 sales
8 to 50	Cheapest paid tier, no transaction fee	Any no-fee plan, all within ~$2 per sale
50 to 200	Paid tier, add annual billing once stable	Fees stop deciding; pick on features
200+	Zero-transaction-fee plan, annual billing	Differences are rounding errors

A plain switching rule: the month your free plan's transaction fees exceed the paid plan's subscription price, upgrade. Two consecutive months if you want proof it was not a one-off launch spike.

Two honest caveats close this out. Among flat-fee platforms, the priciest tier is almost never the fee winner at any volume; in every scenario above, the $39 plan beat the $149 plan on money kept, and the premium bought funnels, automations, and support rather than lower costs. Those can be worth paying for once sales are real. And because migrating platforms carries its own cost, decide with the fee stack before you build, not after. The best online course platform for your side hustle is the one whose fees match the sales you actually have this quarter, and the arithmetic above identifies it in about a minute.