🎓 Lessonforge
The course platform you own forever — no monthly fee, no cut of your sales.
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.
Lessonforge screenshot is being captured — the app is shipped and real.
Features
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.
Instructor dashboard
Enrollment counts, average completion, completion rate and revenue per course.
Two separate auth realms
Instructor password from env plus student email/password accounts with scrypt-hashed passwords and fully separate sessions.
Lessonforge vs Teachable
Teachable at $39+/mo runs roughly $468/year — $936 over two years. Lessonforge is $49, once.
| 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.
Three steps, no subscription
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 and run it yourself for free.
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.
Add your Stripe key and sell
Set ADMIN_PASSWORD, optionally add STRIPE_SECRET_KEY, and paid enrollments land in your own Stripe account.
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — Lessonforge is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/course-builder-lms. 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.
Own Lessonforge forever
$49 once. Deploy on your own server — your data never leaves it. No renewal, no account with us, no meter. Or build it yourself from the MIT source — it's the same app.