How Much Does It Cost To Create An Online Course? (In 2024)

"Thankfully, I was able to keep costs down. My designer friend gave me a disgustingly good deal on the visual identity ($1,500) and my other costs came out to less than *$100*, not counting my project manager’s salary."

Austin L. Church is the founder of Freelance Cake, a business growth course for freelancers and consultants that launched in December 2019.

"The only funding I did was paying Dee’s brother $2,200 to program the site. He hacked WordPress to create an e-learning platform and he used PayPal to take payments."

Gabriel Kramer is the co-founder of SI Certs, an online test prep business that helps construction inspectors pass certification exams.

"When I did market research to start the business I was planning on just doing a textbook, but one of the professors I spoke with told me that if I brought him a simulation he would for sure use that. We dreamt up what that simulation could be, and brought to market the world’s first digital marketing simulation in less than a year."

Stuart Draper is the founder of Stukent, a digital courseware company specializing in up-to-date educational products and simulations for digital marketing.

"In the beginning, we were outsourcing (we hired an external web development company to develop the platform for us, by our specifications) our platform, which cost us around $30K."

Jure Pučko is the founder of Doctrina, an educational platform for healthcare professionals that helps over 60 companies worldwide grow their businesses since 2013.

"My startup costs weren’t much either because initially, I was doing all the work myself -- the creation of the course, eBook, even a lot of designs were originally mine."

Caitlin Pyle is the founder of Proofread Anywhere, a business that started in 2014 and helps proofreaders earn extra income from anywhere in the world.

"The beauty of starting an online business is that there is very little overhead. We spent less than $500 in the entire first year of running our business."

Kelan and Brittany Kline are the founders of The Savvy Couple, a personal finance blog that helps families create more time and money in their lives. The blog is on track to make over $250,000 this year alone.

"Between hosting, a custom URL, and some basic screen capture software it cost me a whopping $50 to start my business and build/launch my first product."

Graham Cochrane is the founder of Recording Revolution, an online education company that started in 2009, which teaches musicians how to record and produce their music to a professional level.

"For the first course, what I did was contact as many business owners as I could find out who had a list of customers or a newsletter." "I created a 'launch' sequence, a bunch of free training videos I was giving away for free, and generated a poor man’s version of an 'affiliate link', using a hidden form field in my leading landing page’s opt-in form."

"My costs were pretty close to zero: $7/mo hosting, PayPal’s percentage of sales, and some software."

Adam Tal is the founder of Pushtak, an online education business that helps individuals with "money hacking" and "equity hacking."

"The only thing I bought to create this course was a good USB microphone to record my voice."

Lucas Chevillard is the founder of an email marketing course, a digital education business that has been taken by more than 1050 people.

"As mentioned briefly we also, in the beginning, wanted to create a website that allowed students to learn Chinese online and would put you in front of a Chinese teacher. We hired a website design company that ended up costing us $10,000."

Tom and Ula Cain are the founders of Mandarin Monkey, a Mandarin/Chinese content creation business that has produced over 250 videos and 62 podcast episodes, attracting a steadily growing audience.