The real cost of a course launch: the platform cut at $2,000 a month in sales

By Marcus Webb · Pricing verified on vendor pages October 23, 2026 · Hands-on testing in progress — see note below

Platform pricing pages show you the subscription. A launch shows you the percentage. At $2,000 a month in course sales — a modest, real outcome for a first course — the difference between a 7.5% platform fee and a 0% one is $1,800 a year, which is more than every subscription on this page.

The same launch, four platforms

Assume $2,000 a month in course sales ($24,000 a year), 500 email subscribers, one course.

All prices vendor-published, annual-billing view, verified October 23, 2026, in USD. Payment processing (Stripe or the platform's gateway) is additional on every row and outside the platform's control.

What the table says

• The fee, not the subscription, is the launch budget. Teachable Starter's $468 subscription is a fifth of its real annual cost at this sales level. Podia Mover's fee costs more than its subscription costs on any Podia plan.
• Every entry tier with a fee is outgrown by $24,000 a year in sales. Both vendors' own upgrades exist for exactly this reason: Teachable Builder breaks even against Starter at $667 a month in sales; Podia Shaker breaks even against Mover at $840.
• systeme.io's number is real but incomplete. $204 a year is the cheapest complete answer here by a factor of five. It buys a rougher product, and it buys a contact cap (5,000) that a growing list will eventually price in. That trade is examined in Podia vs systeme.io.

At lower sales volumes the table inverts

The same arithmetic at $500 a month in sales ($6,000 a year):

Below roughly $6,700 a year in sales, the flat-fee-free options are dominated by their own subscriptions, and the percentage plans win. This is the part the "0% fees!" marketing never mentions: a no-fee plan is a bet that you will sell enough for the fee to matter.

The number that is not on any platform's page

Payment processing. Every row above excludes the 2.9%-ish plus 30 cents that Stripe or the platform's gateway takes regardless of platform. At $24,000 a year that is roughly $820 — larger than two of the subscriptions in the table. It is also the one cost that does not change with your platform choice, which is exactly why no platform leads with it. We did the same decomposition for invoicing in the cheapest way to invoice clients.

Before the launch, the honest sequence

• Zero sales yet: systeme.io Free (2,000 contacts, 0%, $0) or a payment link. The cheapest launch is the one where the platform is free until the launch works.
• First sales, under $500/month: percentage plans are fine. Teachable Starter or Podia Mover — you are paying for a small cut of a small number.
• Past $667-$840/month: you have crossed the break-even that the vendor designed the upgrade for. Take it; the fee has become the expensive part.
• Scaling past 5,000 contacts: the contact caps start to bind before anything else. Re-check the whole table at that point rather than assuming your current platform still wins.

The general method — add the fee to the subscription before comparing either — is in how to read a SaaS pricing page, and the reason we print these tables only with vendor-verified numbers is in why we do not publish unverified prices.

What we cannot verify

Subscription prices and fee percentages were read from vendor pricing pages on October 23, 2026, in USD, annual-billing view. We have not run a launch on any of these platforms; checkout conversion, fee application to upsells and payment plans, and refund handling are unverified. Whether each platform's fee applies to taxes added at checkout, and how refunds interact with already-taken fees, is not documented clearly enough on any of the pricing pages to print — that is a trial question. Payment-processing rates are shown as "~2.9%" precisely because they vary by card and country. See How We Test.