Learning and careers decision
Teachable
A capable developer can build a useful self-hosted course-selling MVP (hosting, Stripe payments, student accounts, video hosting) in a few months, but Teachable’s durable advantages—large scale, built-in international tax remittance, daily merchant payouts, and mobile apps—are expensive and operationally intensive to replicate.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Allow an instructor to create a course, upload videos and materials, publish a sales page, accept payments, and enroll students.
What it still won’t have
- Automated international tax collection and remittance across 45+ countries
- Built-in daily payouts and teachable:pay merchant flow
- Free built-in subtitles & translations (70+ languages) at platform scale
- Mobile iOS/Android student apps
- Enterprise features: SSO, sandbox school, dedicated success manager, SLAs, white‑glove onboarding
What remains hard
- Infrastructure at scale
100M+ students served on Teachable
- Infrastructure at scale
$10B+ earned by Teachable and Hotmart creators
- Compliance and regulation
Teachable automatically collects and remits U.S. sales tax and EU/UK VAT taxes for your transactions.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted online course platform using Node.js (Express), PostgreSQL, React for the instructor/admin UI, and AWS S3 + CloudFront for video hosting. Implement: (1) course/lesson CRUD with drip scheduling and basic quiz support, (2) video upload to S3 and streaming via CloudFront, (3) server-side transcription using a configurable speech-to-text API, (4) Stripe checkout and webhook handling for payments and enrollment, (5) student authentication, enrollment tracking, and progress, (6) admin sales page builder with coupon support and abandoned-cart email via SendGrid, (7) simple REST API endpoints and webhooks for enrollments. Out of scope: automated multi-country tax remittance, mobile apps, enterprise SSO, and large-scale translation/localization. Include error handling, input validation, unit tests for core services (payments, enrollments, media processing), and a Docker Compose setup for local development. Provide deployment scripts for a small production setup on one AWS EC2 + RDS instance and CloudFront, and documentation for configuring Stripe/webhook secrets and the transcription API key.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Pay verdict base20
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-6
- Evidence score25
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productTeachable — official product
- official pricingTeachable Pricing
- official docsTeachable AI Hub
- open sourcecodelitdev/courselit
- open sourcefrappe/lms
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
