Teachable costs $39+/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $1,404 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$39+/mo is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Lessonforge: the pay-once alternative
Lessonforge does the same core job for $49, once. Self-hosted LMS with modules, quizzes, progress tracking and PDF certificates — payments run through your own Stripe.
| Lessonforge | Teachable | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $49 once | $39+/mo |
| Transaction fee | 0% (Stripe direct) | 5% on Basic |
| Courses / modules / lessons | Unlimited | Plan-limited |
| Certificates | Yes | Pro plan only |
| Custom domain | Yes | Paid plans |
| Your data | Your SQLite file | Their cloud |
| Self-hosted | Yes | No |
Selling one course to a handful of students on Teachable Basic costs more in a single month than Lessonforge costs once.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Teachable's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Lessonforge is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Lessonforge — $49, once
Self-hosted LMS with modules, quizzes, progress tracking and PDF certificates — payments run through your own Stripe.