What a LearnDash and GrassBlade course site really costs in 2026

A WordPress course site does not send you a bill. It sends you several, from different companies, on different dates, and none of them adds up the total for you.

That is the whole problem in one sentence. Owners who could tell you exactly what Squarespace costs them often cannot say what their own course setup costs, because there is no single place that says. So here are the published prices, read from the vendors' own pages on 13 August 2026, and what the numbers are really asking you.

The parts, and what each one charges

The course plugin. LearnDash is the usual choice, and it now sells under Liquid Web rather than as an independent product. Three annual plans: Essentials at $259 a year, Pro at $399, Elite at $599. One licence, unlimited courses and learners, renewing annually.

The player. If your teaching was authored in Articulate Storyline, Rise or anything else that exports a SCORM or xAPI package, LearnDash cannot play it on its own. GrassBlade is the plugin that can, at $99 a year for one live and one staging installation.

The tracking store. This is the part most owners forget they have. When GrassBlade plays a package, the record of who watched what and scored what goes to a separate store, not into WordPress. GrassBlade's own hosted one starts at $15.20 a month, which is about $182 a year.

The page builder and the theme. Almost every WordPress course site carries a premium builder and a premium theme as well, because the plugins style themselves only so far. Elementor Pro and a paid theme licence are the common pair, and they renew annually too.

The hosting. A WordPress install running several heavy plugins needs a real hosting plan rather than the cheapest shared one, and that renews as well, usually at a rate that steps up sharply after the first year.

Add the small ones honestly, before hosting: a LearnDash Pro licence, GrassBlade, a tracking store and a builder is roughly $780 a year in plugin renewals alone, and that is before anyone has hosted anything or written a lesson.

The number nobody has

Here is the thing worth saying plainly: the exact figure matters less than the fact that almost nobody can produce it.

When we looked at a real WordPress course estate this month, the honest summary we could give the owner was that one licence was confirmed paid, five more were installed but unverified, and the hosting tier was unknown. Not because anyone had been careless, but because that is the normal state of a stack assembled over years. Installed is not the same as subscribed. Somebody has to pull the invoices.

If you are reading this with a renewal date coming, that is the first job, and it is worth doing even if you change nothing: you cannot make a decision about a number you do not have.

What the renewal date is actually asking

A renewal notice looks like a payment question. It is usually a different question wearing a payment's clothes.

The real one is: is this still a course-selling business? A stack renews whether or not anyone opens it. Plenty of them are still running for businesses that stopped selling courses years ago and kept paying to keep the archive reachable. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to want. It is just an expensive way to want it, and worth choosing on purpose rather than by default.

Two other things the date is asking, both easier to answer:

• Is my teaching earning anything outside the login? Course video sitting behind a members' area is invisible to search engines and to the AI assistants people increasingly ask for recommendations. Hours of good teaching can be producing precisely nothing in the way of new enquiries.
• Do I have my content, or does the platform? You should be able to answer this before the licence lapses, not after.

If you decide to move

The mechanics are covered properly elsewhere, because they differ by what you are running: moving off LearnDash, moving off GrassBlade, and the packages themselves if your teaching was authored in Articulate or exported as SCORM. Read the one that matches your setup, because the traps are different in each.

Two points of substance, though, because they change the shape of the decision.

It is a content move, not a rebuild. Courses, lessons, video and memberships are built into Bernard, so the work is carrying content across rather than recreating a platform. One recent migration carried 1,236 lessons across 13 courses out of a LearnDash site and into drafts the owner approved. Another, running now, has pulled 321 lessons and 98.7 GB of media out of a course platform and into safe storage. This is ordinary work here, not a first attempt.

What arrives is worth more than what left. Every video is transcribed, captioned and chaptered on the way in, which turns hours of teaching into text that people and search engines can read, that a student can search inside to find the exact minute they need, and that short clips and a course trailer can be cut from later. The teaching stops being a file behind a login and starts being findable.

And the sequencing matters more than the deadline: get your course export and your package files out while everything is still running. Once those are safely in your hands, renewing or not becomes a decision instead of a scramble.

The honest comparison

Bernard is £200 a year for the site, plus £600 a year for courses and memberships: £800, priced in pounds, with nothing taken from your sales at any level and payments running through your own Stripe account. See What an online course platform really costs in 2026 - Podia, Kajabi, Teachable and the rest for how that sits against the hosted course platforms, and WordPress 2026 pricing, explained - free to start, then the price climbs for what WordPress hosting costs once the introductory year ends.

Against a WordPress stack, the comparison depends entirely on which plugins you are actually paying for, which is why the invoice job comes first. What is reliably true is the shape: one renewal instead of five, one company instead of four, one price you can state from memory instead of a figure you would have to go and assemble.

That is worth something on its own, quite apart from the money.