Our LearnWorlds vs Teachable comparison already walked through the feature-by-feature case between those two platforms, including a first look at Teachable fees. For creators specifically weighing course tools already in the WordPress ecosystem, our roundup of the best online course creation platforms is a useful companion read. This post is narrower and more specific: it’s entirely about the money, and about what a course creator actually gives up, beyond the money, by building a business on a platform they don’t own.
Teachable’s current pricing structure has five tiers, and the framing matters more than the numbers alone. The Starter plan runs around $39 a month billed monthly, or roughly $29 a month billed annually, and it charges a 7.5% transaction fee on every sale. To get to 0% platform fees, a creator has to move up to Builder, at roughly $89 a month monthly or $69 annually, or higher. Growth and Advanced sit above that, at higher monthly costs with the same 0% platform fee once you clear the entry tier. On top of whatever tier you’re on, Teachable.pay, its Stripe-powered payment processing, still charges standard card processing fees on every transaction, typically 2.9% plus 30 cents for US cards. That processing fee is unavoidable on any platform, including a self-hosted one, so it’s not really part of this comparison. What is part of this comparison is the 7.5% platform cut that only goes away once you’re already paying a meaningfully higher monthly subscription.
Teachable fees: the “0%” claim is true, with an asterisk that costs real money
Teachable’s marketing isn’t lying when it says 0% transaction fees. It’s just describing a state you have to pay to reach. A creator on the Starter plan selling a $200 course loses $15 to the platform fee on every single sale, on top of the subscription and processing fees, until they upgrade. Run the numbers on that: at ten sales a month, that’s $150 a month gone to platform fees alone, which is more than the entire price difference between Starter and Builder. The break-even point between the two tiers lands around $533 a month in course revenue on annual billing. Below that line, staying on Starter is cheaper. Above it, the 7.5% fee costs more than just paying for Builder outright.
The uncomfortable part of that math is what it implies about who the Starter tier actually serves. It’s priced to look like the accessible entry point, but it’s structured so that the moment a creator’s course starts actually selling well, the fee eats disproportionately into the exact growth that should be the reward for building something people want. A creator who hits early traction gets penalized for it until they pay more to escape the penalty. That’s not predatory exactly, plenty of SaaS businesses use tiered take-rates as a growth lever, but it’s worth naming clearly rather than letting “0% fees available” read as “0% fees, period.”
Learnomy runs checkout directly through Stripe and PayPal at 0% platform fees, at every tier including free.
What a platform fee actually is, structurally
A platform transaction fee is different from a subscription cost in one important way: it scales with your success rather than staying fixed. A $69 monthly subscription is the same expense whether you sell one course or a hundred. A 7.5% transaction fee grows every single month your revenue grows, forever, unless you buy your way out of it with a bigger subscription. That’s the core design tension in any hosted course platform’s business model. The platform wants a piece of your growth, and the “upgrade to remove fees” tiers exist specifically to convert your best months into their best months.
None of this makes Teachable a bad business decision for every creator. Plenty of course creators value the hosted convenience, the built-in traffic and community features, and the polish of a mature all-in-one platform enough to accept the fee structure as the cost of that convenience. This isn’t an argument that hosted platforms are a mistake. It’s an argument that the fee structure deserves to be modeled honestly against your actual expected revenue before you commit, rather than accepted at face value from a pricing page.
What you give up beyond the percentage
Your domain, and the trust that comes with it
On the lower tiers particularly, courses live on a Teachable subdomain rather than your own domain. Even where custom domains are supported, the course experience is still built on infrastructure you don’t control, and the platform’s brand is present throughout the buying and learning experience whether you want it there or not. A course sold from your own domain, on infrastructure you own, carries a different kind of trust signal, particularly for B2B buyers or corporate training budgets that scrutinize where their money and their employees’ data are actually going.
Your student data
Student enrollment records and progress data, along with quiz results and payment history, all live inside Teachable’s systems. You can typically export some of it, but you don’t own the underlying database, and you’re subject to whatever data retention and access policies the platform sets, which can and do change. On a self-hosted plugin running on your own WordPress installation, that data lives in your database from day one, under your control, with no platform intermediary who could change the export rules or the access terms.
Portability if you ever want to leave
Migrating away from any hosted platform is harder than migrating between two pieces of software running on infrastructure you already own. Course content, video files, quiz banks, and certificate records built inside a closed hosted system have to be extracted through whatever export tools the platform provides, and those tools are rarely built with departure in mind. A WordPress-based LMS keeps everything in your own database and file system from the start, so there’s no extraction step because there was never a walled garden to extract from.
Checkout and pricing flexibility
Hosted platforms standardize checkout to keep their own systems simple, which means less flexibility to customize the buying flow, run non-standard pricing experiments, or integrate checkout with other systems you already run for a broader business, like a separate storefront or a membership tier that spans more than just courses.
Where the fee money actually goes
It’s worth being fair about what a course creator is paying for when they accept a platform’s transaction fee, because it isn’t pure profit extraction. Hosted platforms bundle video hosting and delivery infrastructure into that fee, plus customer support, uptime and security maintenance, and continuous feature development. For a creator with no interest in managing hosting, plugin updates, or infrastructure, that bundle has real value, and building the equivalent yourself on a self-hosted plugin does shift some of that operational responsibility onto you or whoever manages your site.
The honest framing is a tradeoff, not a scam: a hosted platform’s fee buys convenience and offloads infrastructure risk. A self-hosted, 0%-fee plugin buys ownership and keeps more of your revenue, in exchange for taking on hosting and maintenance yourself, which for anyone already running a WordPress site (which describes most of the audience reading a WordPress community blog) is usually a cost that’s already sunk rather than a new one.
Running the numbers: three creators, three outcomes
Concrete numbers travel better than a general argument, so here are three illustrative scenarios using Teachable’s published tiers and a WordPress-based alternative charging 0% platform fees at every tier, including free.
A creator selling $3,000 a month in course revenue on Teachable’s Starter plan pays roughly $29 in subscription costs plus $225 in platform fees (7.5% of $3,000), for a total platform cost around $254 a month, not counting card processing. The same creator on Learnomy‘s free tier pays $0 in subscription and $0 in platform fees, since checkout runs directly through Stripe or PayPal with no percentage taken by the plugin. Only standard card processing applies either way, so that portion is a wash between the two.
A creator selling $10,000 a month faces a clearer decision point. On Teachable, upgrading to Builder at roughly $69 a month (annual billing) removes the 7.5% fee entirely, which at this revenue level is obviously worth doing, since 7.5% of $10,000 is $750, dwarfing the subscription cost. That’s the tier where Teachable’s own economics start making sense for the creator, not just the platform. On the WordPress-based route, the entire $10,000 stays with the creator regardless of scale, with the option to add Learnomy’s Personal Pro tier at $104 a year only if a specific Pro feature like Cohorts or Content Drip is actually needed.
A creator just starting out, selling under $500 a month while validating whether their course idea works at all, is the case where the fee-versus-subscription math matters least in dollar terms but matters most in principle. Every dollar counts at that stage, and paying either a 7.5% cut or a monthly subscription before you’ve proven the course sells is exactly the up-front cost a free-first, 0%-fee plugin is built to avoid entirely.
Compounding the fee over a longer horizon
Monthly comparisons understate the real gap because course businesses that work tend to grow, and a percentage fee grows right alongside them. Take a creator who starts at $2,000 a month in course revenue and grows steadily to $15,000 a month over three years, a realistic trajectory for a course that finds its audience and keeps expanding its catalog. Staying on Teachable’s Starter tier the entire time because the 7.5% fee never felt urgent enough to address would mean paying that percentage against a revenue base that’s grown sevenfold, turning what looked like a manageable cost early on into a serious drag on margin later. Even accounting for the sensible move to Builder once revenue crosses the break-even point, the total fees paid across that growth curve, plus the higher fixed subscription from that point forward, add up to a meaningful five-figure sum over three years that never gets returned.
Run the same growth curve through a 0%-fee plugin and the number is simple: zero platform fees paid at any point along the curve, regardless of how large the business gets. The subscription cost, if any Pro features get added along the way, stays modest and predictable rather than scaling with revenue. This is the part of the comparison that a single month’s snapshot hides. A percentage fee isn’t a one-time cost to evaluate once. It’s a permanent tax on every future dollar of growth, and the earlier a creator locks in a 0%-fee foundation, the more of that future growth they actually keep.
What selling through a community adds that a standalone hosted platform can’t
Course creators reading a WordPress community site’s blog are often not building an isolated course business, they’re adding courses to a community, an audience, or a broader content operation that already exists. That context changes the calculation further, because a hosted platform like Teachable is built to be the whole business: its own audience tools, its own community features (bolted on, not native), its own marketing automation. A course sold through a plugin running on your existing WordPress site instead plugs directly into whatever community, content, or audience infrastructure you’ve already built there, without needing to duplicate a second platform’s version of features you may already have through other tools.
That’s not a knock on Teachable’s own community and marketing tooling, which is genuinely useful for creators who are building their entire audience from scratch on the platform itself. It’s a note that for anyone starting from an existing site with existing traffic, duplicating an audience-building layer inside a second, separate hosted platform is often redundant work, on top of the fee structure covered above.
The migration question: moving off Teachable
For creators already selling on Teachable and reconsidering because of exactly this fee math, the honest answer is that migration takes real work regardless of the destination. Course video and quiz content, along with student records, all have to move, and no destination platform has a purpose-built Teachable importer the way Learnomy’s migration wizard covers LearnDash, Tutor LMS, and LifterLMS specifically. That’s worth stating plainly rather than glossing over: moving off a hosted platform like Teachable is a heavier lift than migrating between two WordPress LMS plugins, because you’re extracting from a closed system rather than moving between two systems that both understand WordPress’s data structures.
That doesn’t make the move a bad idea for creators at meaningful scale where the ongoing fee cost outweighs a one-time migration effort. It does mean the migration should be planned as its own project, with a full export of student and content data confirmed and backed up before any cutover, rather than assumed to be a quick weekend task.
A practical sequencing that reduces risk: build the new course library on the destination platform first, using existing recorded video and written content, while keeping the Teachable school live and selling. Run both in parallel for a short window, directing new enrollments to the new platform while existing students finish out their access on Teachable. Once the new platform has proven stable with real paying students, wind down the Teachable school rather than cutting over all at once. This costs a little more coordination up front but avoids the scenario where a rushed migration interrupts active students mid-course.
Keep a written checklist during the migration covering every content type separately: video files and their captions, quiz question banks with correct answers verified, certificate templates and any already-issued certificate records, and student email lists with consent status for future communication. Missing any one of these categories quietly during a rushed move is the most common way creators lose real value in a platform switch, well after the price question has already been decided.
If you plan to bring on other instructors
Our guide to course creation software for coaches and consultants covers instructor-facing tooling in more depth, but the fee conversation gets more complicated the moment a course business grows past a single instructor. Teachable’s own model is built around a single seller taking full checkout revenue, and layering in a multi-instructor revenue split typically means building that logic yourself on top of the platform, since it’s not a first-class feature of how Teachable’s checkout works. A creator planning to eventually open their platform to other instructors, the way many course marketplaces and cohort-based programs eventually do, is adding complexity on top of an already fee-heavy foundation.
Learnomy supports Udemy-style instructor revenue sharing natively, along with instructor applications and dashboards, which matters specifically for this scenario. An instructor accepted onto the platform gets their share of checkout revenue according to whatever split the site owner configures, without the site owner needing to build custom payment-splitting logic from scratch. Combined with the 0% platform fee on the whole transaction, that means more of the total revenue actually reaches instructors and the site owner, rather than a chunk disappearing to the hosting platform before the internal split even happens.
Common myths about “0% fee” platforms
A few misconceptions come up often enough to address directly. The first is assuming a free or 0%-fee plugin means a stripped-down product. On Learnomy’s free tier specifically, that’s not the trade: unlimited courses, all six quiz types with partial credit, Ed25519-signed certificates, and direct Stripe and PayPal checkout are all included without a paywall, which is a different model from platforms that use “free” to mean “limited demo.”
The second myth is that self-hosted automatically means more technical burden than most creators can handle. Installing a WordPress plugin and configuring a course is not meaningfully harder than setting up a Teachable school, and if you’re already running a WordPress site for anything else, you’ve already cleared the harder part of that learning curve.
The third myth is that transaction fees are the only cost worth comparing. As covered above, domain ownership and data portability are real costs too, and so is checkout flexibility, even when none of them show up as a line item on a pricing page.
FAQ
Is Teachable’s 7.5% fee only on the cheapest plan?
Yes. The Starter plan carries the 7.5% platform transaction fee. Builder, Growth, and Advanced all charge 0% platform fees, but each of those tiers costs meaningfully more per month than Starter, so the fee doesn’t disappear, it gets converted into a higher fixed subscription cost instead.
Does a 0%-platform-fee plugin like Learnomy really take nothing from sales?
Correct, checkout runs directly through your own Stripe or PayPal account, with no percentage taken by the plugin itself at any tier, free or Pro. Standard card processing fees from Stripe or PayPal still apply, the same as they would on any platform, including Teachable.
Is it worth switching if I’m only making a few hundred dollars a month right now?
At small revenue, the dollar amount at stake is modest either way, so the switch is more about avoiding a future fee-and-subscription treadmill than about immediate savings. Starting on a 0%-fee, free-tier plugin from day one means you never have to run this comparison again as your revenue grows.
What’s the biggest non-financial reason to prefer a self-hosted course platform?
Ownership of your student data and your domain. If your course business grows into something you want to sell, merge with a broader community platform, or build deeper marketing infrastructure around, owning the underlying data and domain from the start avoids a much harder extraction problem later.
Does moving off Teachable mean losing my existing students’ progress data?
Not necessarily, but it requires deliberate planning. Export what Teachable’s tools allow before any migration, and treat the cutover as a project with a data-integrity checklist rather than a same-day switch, regardless of which platform you’re moving to.
Does Teachable’s fee apply to one-time purchases, subscriptions, and payment plans equally?
The percentage applies against whatever revenue passes through Teachable’s checkout on the fee-charging tier, regardless of whether it’s structured as a one-time purchase, a subscription, or an installment plan. Splitting a course price into payment plans doesn’t reduce the total fee paid, since the fee applies to each processed payment.
Are there any hidden costs on the 0%-fee plugin route that don’t show up in the comparison?
The most honest hidden cost is your own time and hosting responsibility. Running a WordPress-based LMS means you (or whoever manages your site) is responsible for hosting reliability, plugin updates, and basic security maintenance, which a fully hosted platform like Teachable handles for you as part of what its fee pays for. For most sites already running WordPress for other purposes, this is a marginal addition rather than a new cost category.
If you’re deciding between a hosted platform and adding a course library to a site you already run, our practical walkthrough on adding a course library to your community site covers the setup steps this post doesn’t.
The real comparison isn’t features, it’s ownership
Feature checklists make Teachable and a self-hosted plugin look more similar than they actually are, because both can build a course, sell it, and issue a certificate. The difference that compounds over time is who owns the revenue percentage. Who owns the student data. Who owns the domain the whole business runs on. A 0% platform fee, available at every tier rather than unlocked by a higher subscription, isn’t a marketing line. It’s the difference between a course business that grows into higher and higher hosted fees, and one that keeps what it earns regardless of how big it gets.