The course platform you own forever — no monthly fee, no cut of your sales.
Developers rent API docs, monitoring, secrets and webhook plumbing by the month for side projects that earn nothing yet. Self-hosted pay-once utilities cost less than one month of the SaaS they replace.
The tool this job usually means renting is Teachable, at $39+/mo — roughly $468 a year, every year. Lessonforge does the job for a one-time $49 — running on infrastructure you control.
Video via YouTube/Vimeo embed or self-hosted upload up to 500MB, rich-text lessons, downloadable attachments, reorder everything.
For developers, courses, modules, lessons pays off while you're shipping, not managing vendor accounts — and it's covered by the same one-time $49, not metered per month.
Add a student manually, let them self-serve with a per-course access code, or take paid enrollment via your own Stripe Checkout.
For developers, three enrollment paths pays off while you're shipping, not managing vendor accounts — and it's covered by the same one-time $49, not metered per month.
Mark-complete per lesson with a live completion percentage, and a PDF certificate generated the moment a student hits 100%.
For developers, progress and certificates pays off while you're shipping, not managing vendor accounts — and it's covered by the same one-time $49, not metered per month.
One payment of $49 gets you the packaged Windows installer, or clone the MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/course-builder-lms-mvp and run it yourself for free.
docker compose up onto a $5 VPS to go public, or npm run desktop for an Electron window auto-logged-in as instructor.
Set ADMIN_PASSWORD, optionally add STRIPE_SECRET_KEY, and paid enrollments land in your own Stripe account.
Lessonforge is $49, once. Teachable at $39+/mo — roughly $468 a year, every year. Selling one course to a handful of students on Teachable Basic costs more in a single month than Lessonforge costs once.
Selling one course to a handful of students on Teachable Basic costs more in a single month than Lessonforge costs once. Lessonforge costs $49 once; Teachable charges $39+/mo — about $468 a year. For developers, that fixed cost is the whole point: the tool is a one-time line item, not a monthly one.
Yes — Lessonforge is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/course-builder-lms-mvp. The $49 buys the packaged installer and 1-click setup; building from source is free.
In a SQLite file plus an uploads folder on your own server or machine. Nothing is uploaded to us.