If you are planning to sell online courses, one of the first practical questions is money: how much does it actually cost to sell online courses from your own website? The short answer is that you can start for as little as $15–$40 per month, run a serious business for $100–$200 per month, and scale comfortably beyond that. But the honest answer is more nuanced, because the right setup depends on the platform you choose, the tools you already pay for, and how much you are willing to do yourself. This guide breaks down every cost layer so you can budget with confidence instead of guessing.

First, Understand the Two Ways to Sell Online Courses

Before looking at price tags, you need to understand the two fundamentally different approaches, because they produce wildly different cost structures.

Option 1: Marketplaces and All-In-One Platforms

Platforms like Udemy, Skillshare, Teachable, Thinkific, and Kajabi let you create a storefront quickly, often with a monthly subscription or a revenue share. The appeal is speed: no hosting setup, no payment integration, no plugin maintenance. The trade-off is control and cost over time. Marketplace giants take a significant cut of every sale (often 15–37%), and all-in-one SaaS platforms charge $30–$200+ per month, with the cost of transaction fees and add-ons on top.

Option 2: Your Own Website

Selling from your own domain means you own the storefront, the customer relationships, the email list, and the data. You pay for the building blocks — domain, hosting, a WordPress plugin or LMS, payment processing — but you keep nearly all of your revenue. Once your sales volume grows, this is almost always the cheaper path, and it is the only path where the platform cannot change its fees or policy overnight.

Fixed Costs: Domain and Hosting

These are the non-negotiables. You cannot sell online courses from your own website without a domain and a server.

Domain name: $10–$15/year

A .com domain typically costs $10–$15 per year. Buy it from a reputable registrar and enable auto-renewal. A domain is the cheapest part of your stack and the one you should never let lapse.

Web hosting: $5–$40/month

Hosting is where the biggest price spread appears. On a shared hosting plan, you can start for $5–$10 per month — fine for a new course site with a few hundred visitors. Managed WordPress hosting (better speed, security, and support) runs $20–$40 per month. If you expect video-heavy pages and meaningful traffic from day one, start with managed hosting and avoid the migration headache later.

The Course Platform Decision: Plugins vs SaaS Subscriptions

The single biggest cost decision is how you actually sell and deliver your courses. This is where “your own website” splits into two sub-options.

WordPress + a course plugin: $79–$200/year (or free options)

The most cost-effective route is WordPress with a dedicated course plugin. Premium plugins typically cost $79–$200 per year for a license, and that covers course management, student accounts, drip content, quizzes, and payment integration. Free plugins exist but usually push you toward paid extensions, so budget for a premium license. Even with hosting plus a premium plugin, your software costs stay well under $30 per month, which beats any SaaS subscription at scale.

SaaS course platforms: $30–$200+/month

Platforms like Kajabi, Teachable, and Thinkific charge a monthly subscription, often with transaction fees baked in or added on. These are excellent if you want everything out of the box — hosting, checkout, email, and marketing in one place. But the subscription is perpetual: it never ends, even when you are between launches, and it scales with you as your course library grows.

Payment Processing: Expect ~2.9% + $0.30 Per Sale

Every sale will pass through a payment processor such as Stripe or PayPal. The standard fee is around 2.9% of the transaction plus $0.30 per sale. On a $99 course, that is roughly $3.17 — about 3.2% of your revenue. This is not a place to skimp: a reliable processor is worth the fee, and the fee is unavoidable on any approach, marketplace or self-hosted.

One thing to watch is whether your platform charges an additional transaction fee on top of the processor. Some all-in-one platforms add 2–5% more. On your own website, the only fee is the processor’s. Over hundreds of sales, that difference is thousands of dollars.

Email Marketing: Free to Start, Then $15–$50/month

Selling courses is a relationship business, and email is the channel that converts. Most email services offer a free tier up to a few hundred subscribers, then charge based on list size — typically $15–$25 per month up to a few thousand subscribers, and $50+ per month as you scale. Budget for a real email platform even at launch; it is the single highest-leverage marketing tool for a course business.

Video Hosting and Course Creation Tools

Your course content itself needs a home. If your WordPress plugin or platform hosts video natively, great — that cost is included. If not, you will pay for video hosting. YouTube is free but looks amateurish behind a paywall. Vimeo starts around $20/month, and a course-focused hosting service can run $20–$50/month depending on streaming minutes. For recording, a decent USB microphone ($50–$100), a simple screen recorder, and good lighting are all you need to start; software like Camtasia or ScreenFlow is a one-time $150–$300 purchase.

Marketing Costs: Optional but Real

You can launch with zero ad spend, relying on organic search, social content, and email. If you want paid advertising — Google or Meta ads — budget at least $300–$500/month to test meaningfully. The good news: when you own your website, every dollar of traffic you buy lands on a property you control, and your content keeps working for you.

The Hidden Costs People Forget

Three costs sneak up on most creators. First, SSL and security: most managed hosts include an SSL certificate and basic security, but add $50–$150/year for a premium security service if you want extra hardening. Second, backups and maintenance: a good managed host handles backups, or you pay $10–$30/month for backup plugins and updates. Third — and most expensive — your time. Every hour you spend wrestling with plugins and patches is an hour you are not creating content. That is the strongest argument for choosing a stack you can actually maintain.

Realistic Monthly Budgets: Three Scenarios

Lean start (~$20–$40/month)

Shared hosting ($5–$10), a premium course plugin amortized ($10–$15), free-tier email, and no paid ads. This gets a real course business live with a professional checkout while you validate demand.

Standard setup (~$100–$200/month)

Managed WordPress hosting ($25–$40), premium plugin license, email at a paid tier ($15–$50), video hosting if needed ($20–$50), and a small marketing test budget. This is the sweet spot for a serious solo creator.

Scaling business ($300+/month)

Dedicated or high-performance hosting, larger email list, paid ads at scale, course translation or production help. At this level, monthly subscription costs are a rounding error compared with revenue — which is exactly why owning the stack pays off.

Conclusion: Start Lean, Own Your Revenue

You do not need a big budget to start selling online courses from your own website. A domain, shared or managed hosting, a good course plugin, payment processing, and free-tier email put you in business for about the price of a streaming subscription. As you grow, the cost curve stays gentle while marketplace and SaaS fees keep compounding. The real investment is your content and your consistency — the tools are affordable, and the revenue is yours to keep.

If you want the simplest path to owning your course business, Owwlish helps you sell online courses from your own website with everything you need to launch, deliver, and grow — no platform lock-in, no surprise fees.