Lessonforge vs Teachable pricing: $1,404 vs $49 once

OneTimeSuite Blog · Published 2026-07-21

Teachable charges $39 or more a month and still takes a transaction fee on your sales — $468 to $1,428 a year, forever. Lessonforge takes neither. It's $49 once, runs on your $5 VPS or your desktop, and paid enrollments go through your own Stripe account at Stripe's standard rates with zero platform cut.

This is the full pricing breakdown: what Teachable actually costs over one, two and three years, what Lessonforge gives you for $49 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.

What Teachable actually costs you

At $39+/mo, one Teachable subscription adds up to $468 every year — $1,404 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Lessonforge is $49 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.

Three years in, the gap is $1,355 — and every year after that adds another $468 to the subscription side of the ledger.

Lessonforge vs Teachable, feature by feature

Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:

What you get for $49, once

Self-hosted LMS with modules, quizzes, progress tracking and PDF certificates — payments run through your own Stripe. The highlights:

• 📚 Courses, modules, lessons — Video via YouTube/Vimeo embed or self-hosted upload up to 500MB, rich-text lessons, downloadable attachments, reorder everything.
• 🎟️ Three enrollment paths — Add a student manually, let them self-serve with a per-course access code, or take paid enrollment via your own Stripe Checkout.
• ✅ Progress and certificates — Mark-complete per lesson with a live completion percentage, and a PDF certificate generated the moment a student hits 100%.
• 📝 Quizzes per module — Multiple-choice and true/false with a configurable pass threshold and unlimited retakes; correct answers are never sent to the browser.

Selling one course to a handful of students on Teachable Basic costs more in a single month than Lessonforge costs once.

Switching is 3 steps

1. Buy once on Whop. 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.
2. Deploy or run desktop. docker compose up onto a $5 VPS to go public, or npm run desktop for an Electron window auto-logged-in as instructor.
3. Add your Stripe key and sell. Set ADMIN_PASSWORD, optionally add STRIPE_SECRET_KEY, and paid enrollments land in your own Stripe account.

When paying Teachable is still the right call

Being straight about it: the subscription earns its keep in three situations. If your team is large enough that Teachable's collaboration features, permissions and admin controls are genuinely load-bearing; if your workflow is built on its integrations and leaving means rebuilding that plumbing; or if you have enterprise requirements — SSO, audit logs, SLAs, a vendor to call — that a pay-once app doesn't come with. Everyone else is paying $39+/mo for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.

If that's you, Lessonforge is $49, once. For the deeper dive, read the Lessonforge vs Teachable head-to-head.

Frequently asked questions

Is it really free on GitHub?
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.

Where does my course data live?
In a SQLite file plus an uploads folder on your own server or machine. Nothing is uploaded to us.

Do you take a cut of my sales?
No. Payments go through your own Stripe account at Stripe's standard rates, and Lessonforge takes 0%. It's $49 once, no renewal.

More on Teachable pricing

Lessonforge — product page, demo & full feature list · All OneTimeSuite pricing breakdowns