How to Build an Online Course Website Without Teachable or Kajabi

Kajabi starts at $89 a month. Their growth plan is $199 a month. On the basic tier they take a percentage of every transaction. Over twelve months on the starter plan, you are paying over $1,000 just for the platform, before a single course is sold.

Teachable is slightly cheaper on the surface but adds a 5% transaction fee on the free plan that quietly compounds as your revenue grows. Their paid plans start at $39 a month and still cap the number of students you can have on lower tiers.

Both platforms make sense if you are brand new and have never built a website before and need a hosted solution that handles everything. For anyone who has been selling courses for more than six months and has a real revenue stream, the platform fees are a meaningful ongoing cost for infrastructure you could own outright.

What your course site actually needs

Teachable and Kajabi sell you a long feature list. Community forums, affiliate programs, email marketing, landing page builders, quiz tools, certificates. Most course creators use none of these features or use separate tools that do them better.

What your course site needs to function is much shorter. A course catalog page showing what you offer. Individual course pages with a description, curriculum outline, and an enroll button. Student login so enrolled students can access their courses. A way to host or embed your video lessons. Stripe to handle enrollment payments. An automated welcome email when someone enrolls. That is it.

Video hosting is not something you need to build. Embed from Vimeo, YouTube (unlisted), or Loom. These are free or near-free and handle streaming better than any course platform's native video player. Your site just needs to display the embed in the right place for the right students.

The real cost comparison over twelve months

Kajabi at the starter plan costs $1,068 per year. Growth plan is $2,388 per year. Neither of those numbers includes transaction fees on some tiers or the cost of the email marketing tools many creators buy separately anyway.

A custom course site built once and hosted on a standard server costs roughly $20 to $50 per month for hosting depending on traffic. In year one you pay slightly more because you have the build cost. From year two, you are spending $240 to $600 per year with no transaction fees and no student caps.

The break-even for building your own versus staying on Kajabi starter is roughly six to eight months. After that, everything you are not paying Kajabi is margin you keep.

What to include in your prompt when building the site

Describe your courses clearly. How many you have, how they are structured, whether they have multiple modules or sections, and whether you have free preview lessons you want visible before enrollment.

Specify that you want Stripe enrollment payments with one-time purchase and optionally a payment plan option. Describe the post-enrollment experience: what does a student see when they log in, how are lessons organised, can they track their progress.

Include the automated emails you need: enrollment confirmation with login details, a welcome message with instructions on getting started, and optionally a completion certificate trigger when a student finishes.

Mention the admin view you need. A way to see enrolled students, manually enroll someone, update course content, and add new courses without touching code.

What you keep when you own the platform

Your student list is yours. Not Teachable's and not Kajabi's. If you decide tomorrow to move to a different platform or change your stack entirely, you export your list and take it with you. On most hosted platforms, your student data is stored in their system and subject to their terms.

Your course URLs are yours. Kajabi and Teachable courses live at yourname.kajabi.com or your custom domain pointed at their platform. When you own the site, your SEO equity for your course URLs builds over time and stays with you.

Your pricing is yours. No platform rules about what you can charge, no student caps based on which tier you are on, no transaction fees calculated as a percentage of your revenue.

When staying on a platform still makes sense

If you are launching your first course and have no technical confidence at all, a hosted platform removes every excuse to not ship. Get your first course live on Teachable, make some sales, validate the content. Then consider moving when you know it works.

If your community features are a core part of your offer and students actively use Kajabi's community tools, moving them to a custom site means rebuilding that community infrastructure separately. Factor that in.

If you are running a high volume of launches with complex email sequences deeply tied into Kajabi's native email marketing, migration is a real project. Worth it at some revenue levels, not worth it at others.

For everyone else, the course site you need is simpler than Kajabi makes it look. A catalog, individual course pages, student login, video embeds, Stripe payments, automated emails, and an admin panel. Build it once, own it outright, and stop paying a platform fee every month for infrastructure that is not doing anything Stripe and a good course site cannot handle.

CodePup builds online course websites from a single prompt. Describe your courses, your enrollment flow, and your student experience, and you get a complete site with student authentication, Stripe enrollment payments, and automated welcome emails. Ready in under 30 minutes.