How to sell an online course in 2026 - what you need, what it costs, and what trips people up

Selling a course sounds like one job. It is really five: deciding what you are teaching, recording it, putting a price on it, taking the money, and getting people to the end. Most of the advice online covers the first two and goes quiet on the rest, which is where people actually get stuck.

Here is the whole thing, in order, with real figures where there are real figures and an honest gap where there are not.

The five things you need

1. Something worth teaching. Not a subject. A result. "Sourdough" is a subject. "Your first loaf that is not a brick" is a result, and it is the one people pay for.
2. Video, and somewhere for it to live. Not your web hosting.
3. A page that explains it. Who it is for, what they will be able to do at the end, how long it takes, what it costs.
4. A way to take the money.
5. A way to let the people who paid in, and keep everyone else out.

That is the list. Everything else marketed at course sellers, and there is a great deal of it, is an improvement on one of those five.

Deciding what to charge

Price the result, not the running time.

This is the first place people go wrong, and it goes wrong in a specific way: they count the hours of video, decide it feels like a lot of work, and pick a number that reflects the effort. Buyers are not comparing your course to other courses by the minute. They are comparing it to how much the problem is costing them.

The useful sum is not a formula, it is arithmetic you already have the numbers for. Look at the audience you can actually reach: your mailing list, the people who follow you, the people who already buy from you. Decide honestly how many of them might buy in a year. Multiply that by the price you have in mind. If the answer does not cover the weeks it takes to make the thing, you have two honest choices, a higher price or a smaller course, and only one of them is more videos.

The other thing to decide early is whether this is a one-off purchase or ongoing access. A one-off is simpler to build and simpler to explain, and your income restarts at zero afterwards. Ongoing access, a monthly membership, is harder to earn and much harder to lose. Most people should start with the one-off and add the membership when they have something worth returning to every month.

Where the video lives

Video is large and web hosting is not built to serve it. Put a 2GB file on a normal hosting plan and the first day of real traffic will find the ceiling. So the video goes somewhere else, and there are three sensible answers.

Unlisted YouTube is free, fast everywhere in the world, and works on every device without you thinking about it. Its weakness is honest: unlisted means anyone with the link can watch, so a student who shares the link has shared your course. For a lot of small courses that risk is smaller than it feels.

Paid video hosting, Vimeo and its equivalents, gives you a private player, domain restrictions so the video only plays on your own site, and figures on who watched what. It costs money every month and it is the right answer once the course is worth protecting.

Whatever your course tool includes. Most course platforms host the video for you, and the storage sits inside the plan price. Convenient, and worth checking what happens to those files on the day you leave.

None of this is permanent. Start with the free one if you are unsure, and move when the course earns it.

Taking the money

You need a payment processor. In the UK that is almost always Stripe, sometimes PayPal, occasionally both. The processor takes a fee on every sale and it is unavoidable, on any platform, including ours.

Stripe's published UK rates, read from its own pricing page on 29 July 2026, are 1.5 per cent plus 20p on a standard UK card, 2.5 per cent plus 20p on a card from the European Economic Area, and 3.15 per cent plus 20p on an international card, with a further 2 per cent if the payment needs converting into your currency. So a £50 course bought on a UK card leaves you about £49.05 before anything else takes a cut.

The question that matters more than the rate is whose Stripe account it is. If the money lands in an account in your name, you are the merchant: you see every payment as it happens, you handle your own refunds, and if the tool you are using disappears tomorrow the account and its history stay yours. If the money lands somewhere else first and reaches you later, none of that is true. Ask the question before you sign up, because it is difficult to change afterwards.

The VAT question

Two separate rules, and people usually only know about the first.

The UK threshold. You must register for VAT once your total taxable turnover for the last twelve months goes over £90,000 (gov.uk, checked July 2026). Under that you can register voluntarily but you do not have to, and most small sellers do not. If you are not registered you do not add VAT to your course price, which means the price on the page is the price the buyer pays.

The digital services rule. This is the one that catches people. HMRC treats a service as digitally supplied when it is "automatically delivered over the internet, or an electronic network, where there's minimal or no human intervention". Its own examples are exact about courses: an "online course consisting of pre-recorded videos and downloadable PDFs" is a digital service, while the same course "plus support from a live tutor" is not. A webinar you actually turn up and teach is not one either, because a person is involved in delivering it.

Why it matters: if you sell a digital service to a consumer in the EU, there is no threshold to hide under. HMRC's guidance says a UK business in that position must either register for the Non-Union VAT MOSS scheme in an EU member state or register for VAT in each member state where it sells. That is a real administrative burden on a £40 course, and it is the sort of thing worth twenty minutes with an accountant before you launch rather than after.

Nothing here is advice, and your situation may be simpler than it sounds. But "will anyone in Europe buy this" is a question to answer on purpose, not by accident.

Keeping students to the end

Most people who buy a course do not finish it, and the ones who do not finish do not come back and do not recommend you. This is the part no platform solves for you, and it is worth more than any feature on any pricing page.

What actually helps is unglamorous. Make the first lesson short and make it produce something, so the student has a small win in the first ten minutes. Send a welcome email that says exactly where to start, because "you're in" is not an instruction. Break long lessons into short ones, since a fifty-minute video is a commitment and a seven-minute video is a coffee break. Give people somewhere to ask a question, even if that somewhere is just your inbox, because a stuck student with nowhere to go is a refund. And put one lesson outside the paywall as a free preview, so people can hear your voice before they decide.

None of that needs software. All of it needs deciding.

What the platforms charge

The course platforms have a pricing shape worth understanding before you compare anything. The cheap plan is not cheap, it is commission.

Read from each company's own pricing page on 29 July 2026:

Two things to notice.

The first is that every one of those prices is in US dollars. Not one of these companies publishes a pound price, so a UK buyer is quoted in a currency they do not earn in, on a card that will add a conversion spread, before anyone mentions tax. That is not a scandal, it is just a cost that never appears in the comparison articles.

The second is that a percentage is a bill that grows. Seven and a half per cent of a quiet year is nothing. Seven and a half per cent of a good year is the difference between the plans several times over. If you are choosing between a cheap plan with a cut and a dearer plan without one, the honest way to decide is to guess your yearly sales and do both sums.

Where bernard fits, and where he does not

bernard is not trying to be your Kajabi. If you already have a website you like, most of what a course platform sells you is a second copy of things you have: the site, the hosting, the email. The piece you are missing is lessons, enrolment and access.

That is what the courses add-on is. It is £600 a year on top of the £200 yearly plan, so £800 all in, and £800 is the number you pay, since bernard is not VAT-registered yet and nothing is added at the checkout. Nautilus Large, at £1,000 a year, is the same thing with a shop as well. The money goes straight onto your own Stripe account as a direct charge, and bernard takes nothing per sale, on every plan, with no condition about whose card processor you use.

What you get for it: a course with lessons in order, each with video, either pointed at your own YouTube or Vimeo feed or uploaded to bernard, and notes underneath. Automatic transcripts and captions, with the transcript searchable. One free preview lesson. Sell it one-off or as time-boxed access for a term. Three ways to enrol people, paid, free in exchange for an email address, or by invitation only. Students get in by a magic link in an email, so there is no password to forget and no account to create. It is all built by asking bernard in plain English, or by hand if you prefer, and nothing goes live until you say so.

Now the honest half, because it is longer than most pages will admit.

There are no quizzes, no marking and no certificates. There is no progress tracking, so no percentage-complete bar and no way to see who has watched what. There is no drip release, so everything unlocks at once. There are no live classes, cohorts or webinars. There are no payment plans or instalments on the page, so a course sold in three payments has to be handled elsewhere. There is no affiliate programme. And if your site was moved to bernard from somewhere else, the course pages currently render with a plain header rather than your own navigation, which is a known gap and not a design decision.

If any of those is the reason you are buying, buy something else. That is a shorter conversation than finding out in month two.

There is one more thing, added recently: memberships. You can charge monthly or yearly for ongoing access to everything you have made, on your own Stripe account, with a members' room and a discussion thread under every lesson. It renews on its own, a failed card gets a grace period rather than an instant lock-out, and a cancellation runs to the end of the period already paid for. It rides inside the same £600 courses add-on. It is new, so treat it as new.

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Paste your current address and bernard will measure up, free, and show you the new place before you decide anything.