Teachable

What is Teachable?

Teachable is an online learning platform that invites course creators, coaches and other creatives to use its software to create courses and other digital products.

(This post may include affiliate links. You can read our affiliate policy here.)

How it works

If you want to set up on Teachable, you’ll set up a profile for both you and your school. You’ll then either connect your own website to Teachable’s classes or set up a website through Teachable’s drop-and-drag web builder.

While the site allows you to set up an account for free, you’ll eventually need to buy a subscription to offer classes here. Subscription prices start at $39 per month and go up to $200 per month for people who want to offer multiple courses and product bundles

Teachable Review:

Teachable helps you create and sell classes on everything from sewing to stocks.

The site offers an easily navigable process by which you create and upload your classes, decide on the length and number of sessions per class and direct people to the site. You also price your classes and determine if you’ll offer promotional discounts.

You own your content. Teachable simply licenses it for limited use so that people can buy your online classes. When a class sells, Teachable will remit payment to you 30 days after the date of sale to accommodate the site’s 30-day money-back guarantee.

Why teach classes?

If you have expertise in any topic, that could be broken into steps, teaching that skill to others can be a highly lucrative and largely passive source of income. After all, you put in the work once. But people can continue to buy this class for years to come. In fact, if you create a great class that gets good word-of-mouth recommendations, your income may increase as time goes on.

You can also use beginner classes to market more advanced — and more expensive — classes.

Once you’ve created your content, the only “job” you have is marketing. Otherwise, this becomes continuing passive income.

The down side?

The one risk? You need to be confident about your ability to draw clients willing to buy your course. Otherwise, the work of setting it up — and the cost of maintaining it online — can be prohibitive. That’s partly because Teachable charges monthly service fees, which are reasonable if you’re getting lots of sales…but are a waste, if you’re not.

Online courses work best for people who have some sort of social media or email presence, with enthusiastic followers who would likely be willing to pay for your course.

Site fees

At one point, Teachable offered a plan that didn’t charge monthly fees — only commissions. However that plan has been replaced with its “basic” offer, which gives you the ability to launch as many as five courses for $39 per month. This offer also includes an “accelerator challenge” that provides AI tools to help you launch and market your course.

When you’re on the basic plan, any course sales are also subject to a 5% Teachable commission.

If your course turns out to be wildly popular, you’d be wise to move to either the site’s Pro or Pro+ plans, which charge higher monthly fees, but eliminate site commissions on your sales. These plans also allow you to offer more courses and other products.

You can sign up to create a class on Teachable here.

Tools

Notably, Teachable also provides a wide array of tools to help you develop and market your class. This is important because the site does not do the marketing for you. It provides the software and tools, but you have to bring in the clients.

The site suggests that you build a community around the class topic on other social media sites, such as Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.

Another option is to offer a loss-leader class on Udemy, another teaching site that does provide more marketing help. (Udemy charges large commissions in exchange for the marketing, though. So, if you have the chops to market yourself, you’ll earn more on Teachable.)

Recommendations

If you have expertise in anything from building picnic benches to investing, we think this is a great place to develop and offer a class. We also like Teachable’s competitor, Thinkific.

But because neither of these platforms do much to market your class, we also like the idea of creating a low-value beginner class on Udemy. Udemy has some shortcomings in that the site can change your class pricing and charges big commissions when it brings clients to you. But it’s a great place to launch a loss-leader class that can fuel your course sales on other platforms like this one. You can read our full Udemy review here.

Want to sign up for Teachable?

Click here!

What their users say (from TrustPilot):

In 10 minutes I started an online business, verified it, linked it to my bank account, and got a payment page to share with my customers:)

We asked to enable 3rd payment payment collection via Stripe and were initially told that cannot be done for customers eligible for TeachablePay. Only after threatening to cancel our subscription was Stripe activated for us.

It’s fairly easy to set up a course on Teachable, but the support is quite limited. There are persistent issues with students being able to log in, as well as issues that Teachable doesn’t normally help with if you need assistance. Some glitches seem to be ongoing. I’m considering a different platform, especially since they are increasing their pricing by about 50%.

This platform is everything I need. A beautiful website, and my course portal. It’s also where people can find my latest coaching packages and offerings. I love the customization options that help my Teachable feel like me. Also, Teachable is extremely user friendly, which is super important to me, being that I struggle with tech. Everyone who has visited my Teachable website has loved it.

Teachable vs. Thinkific

SideHustleAcademy, which uses and is an affiliate for both sites, did a nice side-by-side comparison here.

Question and answer site Quora also has a whole string of answers to the question of whether Thinkific or Teachable is the better platform.

Updated 1/27/2025