Move my courses and members off Podia
Podia is pleasant to use and very difficult to leave. There is no export button, no download, no way to ask for your data. Everything you have built is visible on your screen and reachable no other way. That is not an oversight in a product that is otherwise thoughtful - it is the shape of the business.
It can still be done. It is just work, and you should know what it costs before you start.
Get your video masters out of storage first
Before anything else: find your original video files.
Podia lists the file you uploaded but serves a compressed copy to students, and that copy is what can be recovered. Measured on a real library, the served versions run at roughly a quarter to a third of the size of the originals. If you kept your masters, they are better than anything that comes back off the platform. If you did not, this is the part that cannot be undone, and it is worth knowing now rather than later.
What the move actually looks like
- You lend us access for a few days. Your store stays open and trading. The reading never changes, publishes or deletes anything - it only looks.
- An inventory comes first, and takes about a minute. How many courses, how many lessons, how much video, how many members, how many conversations. This is your honest quote for the work, and the number everything afterwards is checked against.
- The content is read out - lessons in order, your written notes, the images inside them, your product pages.
- Your courses are rebuilt on your site as private drafts (Understand how a course is put together), which you walk through before anybody else can reach them.
- You decide about members - see below, because this is the part that needs planning rather than technology.
Your members have to re-subscribe
This is not a bernard limitation and it is worth being blunt about it: a card authorised to pay one company cannot be handed to another. Nobody can transfer a live subscription between platforms. So the list of who your members are comes across, and the payments start again on your own account.
That means the move needs a message to your members, written properly and sent before anything changes, rather than a silent switch that reads as a billing error. The upside is worth saying out loud too: from then on the money arrives in your own payment account, with no platform taking a share (Sell a course from my own website, Where the money goes when someone enrols).
What you gain besides the money
Your courses stop being invisible. Everything inside Podia is behind a login, which means no search engine and no AI assistant has ever read a word of your teaching. Rebuilt as lesson pages on your own site, the free parts can be found by the people looking for exactly what you teach (Use my teaching to win work instead of selling it, What bernard improves automatically when it moves your site).
And you can sell things Podia never could - physical work alongside the teaching, on the same site (Move my Shopify shop across).
The prompt
“I sell courses on Podia and want to move to my own site. I have [number] courses and [number] members - what do you need from me, and what can I not get back?”
Press Copy, then paste it into your AI and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard first - a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI.
Questions people ask
- Podia has no export button. So how does anything come out?
- By reading it out of your own account. You lend us access for a few days, the reading is done with your permission and never changes, publishes or deletes anything, and your store stays open and trading the whole time. What comes out is rebuilt as private drafts you approve before publishing.
- Do I get my original video files back?
- No, and this is the single most important thing to know. Podia serves a compressed copy of each video rather than the file you uploaded, so what can be recovered is the version your students watch, not your master. If you still have your originals on a hard drive or in Dropbox, dig them out before you do anything else - they are better than anything the platform will give back.
- Do my members and their subscriptions transfer?
- The list of who they are comes across. The payment arrangements cannot - a card authorised to pay Podia cannot be handed to somebody else, on any platform. So members re-subscribe on your site, which is a real piece of work and needs planning and a warm email rather than a surprise.
- What about my community posts?
- They can be read out the same way as the courses. Where they end up is worth a conversation, because a members' community can live on your own site or stay somewhere built for it, and that choice is yours rather than automatic.
- Can I do this myself in a browser?
- No. This one is run by our team rather than by you, because there is no file to upload and no button to press. You lend access, we do the reading, and you approve everything that results.