Course platforms: the cheap plan takes a cut, and the break-even is a number of students

The list price is the wrong thing to compare in this category, because the cheap plan is not simply a smaller version of the dear one. It is a plan that charges you less each month and takes a share of what you earn. Where that is true, the ranking of the plans depends entirely on how much you sell, and the point at which it flips is arithmetic rather than judgement.

LearnWorlds makes the cleanest example because both halves are printed. Its entry tier carries a flat fee on every paid enrolment; the tier above it carries none and costs more than three times as much. Divide the difference between the two monthly prices by the enrolment fee and you get the break-even, and on this ladder it lands on whole numbers: eleven paid enrolments a month on annual billing, fourteen on monthly. Below that the entry plan is cheaper. Above it, the plan costing three times as much is cheaper, and it keeps getting cheaper the more you sell. That is not a subtle effect at any real volume.

Podia does the same thing in percentage form. Its entry tier takes five per cent of each transaction and the two tiers above it take none, so the crossover is a revenue figure rather than an enrolment count, and the same logic applies: the entry plan is a good deal for a small catalogue and an expensive one for a working business. Kajabi extends the pattern in a third direction, reducing both its payment-processing rate and its third-party provider fee as you climb, so the dearer plan lowers your cost per sale as well as raising your fixed cost.

None of this is hidden. Every one of those fees is printed on the vendor's own page, usually in the plan card. What is missing is the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is where the decision lives. A comparison table that ranks these platforms by monthly price is ranking them by the half of the price that does not depend on your business.

The category's annual-discount claims are worth a look of their own, because they run the full range from scrupulous to badly overstated. Podia's annual total is exactly twelve times its monthly price on all three plans — no discount at all for paying yearly — and the page claims none, with no percentage, no strike-through and no 'save' language anywhere on it. That is a vendor declining to dress twelve monthly payments as a saving, and it deserves noting because the opposite is common.

Kajabi's arithmetic is equally exact and its claim is not. Every printed saving on its page reconciles to the dollar against the difference between its two billing figures — and the actual discount those figures describe is almost exactly twenty per cent on all three plans, while the page advertises a saving of fifty. The numbers are right and the summary of them is two and a half times too large. Teachable, by contrast, shows both billing figures on the same card and advertises no headline percentage at all, which is consistent, because its savings genuinely differ by tier.

Sensei sits outside all of this by selling no month at all. The word 'monthly' does not appear once on its pricing page; every paid product is an annual licence with the price expressed per month. There is nothing to compare between billing states because there is only one, and the figure in large type is a twelfth of a yearly commitment rather than a rate you can pay.

So the sequence for choosing here is short and it is not the usual one. Estimate your paid enrolments or your monthly revenue first, because that is the input everything else depends on. Find the per-sale charge on each plan you are considering — a percentage, a flat fee per enrolment, a payment-processing rate — and work out where the plans cross. Only then look at the monthly figures, and treat any advertised annual saving as a claim to be checked rather than a number to be used.