Will my students have to make new accounts?

No, because on bernard there are no student accounts at all. That is a design decision, not a gap. A student is enrolled by their email address and gets in through a link sent to that address, so there is no password to set, no account to migrate and nothing for them to lose. You bring your student list; each student gets a link to the same course they had before.

What happens to my half-finished courses when I move?

They stay private. A course on bernard is a draft until you publish it, and a draft shows nothing to the public: no page, no enrolment, no 'coming soon' you didn't ask for. You preview it exactly as students will see it, and it goes live when you say so and not before. The same is true of every edit to a course that is already live: draft first, approve, then live.

Does bernard take a cut of my course sales?

No. Course payments are taken on your own Stripe account and bernard takes nothing per sale, on any plan. That also means the money side is genuinely yours: if bernard vanished tomorrow, your Stripe account, your customers and your subscriptions would carry on without him. Courses are a £600 addition to the £200 yearly plan, so £800 a year, and the comparison to the platforms is set out honestly in the costs article, including where bernard is not the cheap option.

Will moving my course site hurt my Google rankings?

Moving is the moment of risk, and it is a manageable one. Every page keeps its address or gets a permanent redirect to its new one, which is the mechanism Google itself relies on when sites move. Course lessons on bernard are real pages with the video transcribed on them, which search engines and the AI tools that now answer questions can actually read - most course platforms keep that text locked inside a player. The whole subject has its own page: how to move without losing your rankings.

Report · 28 August 2026

Can I move my online course without losing my library?

If you sell what you know, your library is the business. Years of lessons, recorded, ordered and priced, sitting inside a platform or a plugin. And when the platform gets dearer, or takes a bigger cut, or just stops fitting, the thought of moving runs into one fear that outweighs the arithmetic: what if I lose it?

That fear deserves a straight answer, not a reassurance. So here is the inventory: what survives a move to bernard, what changes shape, and what does not come across at all.

What "the library" actually is

Worth naming, because the platforms blur it. Your library is the lessons and the words in them. The videos. The order it all goes in: which lessons make a course, which are free tastes, what each course costs. The knowledge checks, if your courses have them. And around the library, two things that are not content but matter as much: your students, and the record of who has bought what.

The platform's pitch is that all of this is one thing, theirs, kept safe as long as you keep paying. It is actually a set of things, most of which were always yours.

What survives the move

The lessons and the words: everything. Lessons come across as pages, in their order, in their courses. Bernard does the moving; it is not an export button you press and hope.

The videos: everything, and they come back better. Your video either stays where it lives now, on your own YouTube or Vimeo, or is brought in and hosted by bernard. Either way, every lesson video comes back transcribed, with captions, chapters and a searchable transcript, without you typing a word of it. That matters beyond convenience: a lesson whose words are on the page is a lesson that search engines and AI tools can read, which is how new students find a course. On most platforms those words are locked inside the player.

The knowledge checks: yes, marked automatically. Quizzes with instant marking, pass marks and per-student progress are part of bernard's courses. One accredited provider's move brought 146 of them across, questions, answers and all, so this is not a promise, it is a thing that has already happened.

The students: yours, by design. Your student list is a list of email addresses, and it belongs to you, not the platform. On bernard a student is enrolled by email and gets in by a link sent to that address. There are no student accounts, so there are no passwords to migrate and nothing for a student to set up again. From where they sit, the course moved and they got a fresh link to it.

The money: on your own Stripe, untouched. Payments for courses and memberships run on your own Stripe account. Bernard takes nothing per sale, and if you leave, the subscriptions keep billing because they were never his to switch off. You can export your members and your content whenever you like. A library you cannot take with you is not really yours, and that cuts both ways: it applies to bernard too.

What does not come across

Honesty about the other column, because it exists.

The old platform's internal records do not move: its analytics, its completion statistics, its login history. Those were the platform's records about your library rather than the library itself, but if you rely on them, screenshot or export what you need before you cancel anything.

And a student's half-finished progress through a course generally starts fresh. The course is the same and their access is the same; the tick marks against lessons they had already watched belong to the old platform's database. Tell your students that plainly and almost nobody minds. Surprise them with it and somebody will.

Drafts stay private, the whole way

The half-finished course is the tender spot in any move, so here is exactly how bernard treats it.

A course being built is a draft, and a draft is invisible: no public page, no enrolment, nothing announcing itself. You see a preview that looks exactly as it will look to a student, because it is the same rendering. When you publish, it goes live. Until you publish, it does not exist to anyone but you. The same discipline covers every later edit: changes queue in a draft, you look at them, you approve them. Nothing about your library goes live by accident, during the move or ever after.

That, more than any feature, is what "the library survives" means. It is not just that the files arrive. It is that nothing happens to them without you saying so.

What bernard's courses still do not do

The current honest list is kept on What an online course platform really costs in 2026 - Podia, Kajabi, Teachable and the rest and it is real: no drip release, no live classes or cohorts, no payment plans on the page, no affiliate programme. Completing a course is recorded and quizzes are marked on the spot; the printable certificate a student can download is still being finished. If one of those is the beating heart of your course business, bernard is not your move this year, and it is better to know that from this page than from experience.

The price, in one line

Courses are a £600 addition to the £200 yearly plan, £800 all in, with nothing taken per sale at any level. Against the platforms that also take nothing per sale, that is mid-table, not cheap, and What an online course platform really costs in 2026 - Podia, Kajabi, Teachable and the rest sets out the whole comparison with each platform's own current figures, including the cut-taking cheap plans that turn out dearer than they look.

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

Sources (checked 28 August 2026)

Platform prices and per-sale percentages: deliberately not restated here. They are sourced, dated and kept current on What an online course platform really costs in 2026 - Podia, Kajabi, Teachable and the rest, each figure from the platform's own pricing page. One page carries the figures; this one carries the reasoning.
The quiz migration figure: 146 quiz definitions moved for one accredited course provider, from bernard's own build records of that move (August 2026). First hand.
What bernard's courses do and don't do: from the product itself as shipped, not a roadmap: lessons, video with transcription and captions, magic-link enrolment with no student accounts, draft-then-publish, quizzes with automatic marking and per-student progress (shipped August 2026), payments and memberships on the seller's own Stripe with a 0% platform fee. The honest gaps are listed above.
Bernard's prices: £200 a year plus £600 for courses, from docs/prd/pricing.json (the file the pricing page is built from). Not VAT-registered, so the number is the number.

Questions people ask

Will my students have to make new accounts?: No, because on bernard there are no student accounts at all. That is a design decision, not a gap. A student is enrolled by their email address and gets in through a link sent to that address, so there is no password to set, no account to migrate and nothing for them to lose. You bring your student list; each student gets a link to the same course they had before.
What happens to my half-finished courses when I move?: They stay private. A course on bernard is a draft until you publish it, and a draft shows nothing to the public: no page, no enrolment, no 'coming soon' you didn't ask for. You preview it exactly as students will see it, and it goes live when you say so and not before. The same is true of every edit to a course that is already live: draft first, approve, then live.
Does bernard take a cut of my course sales?: No. Course payments are taken on your own Stripe account and bernard takes nothing per sale, on any plan. That also means the money side is genuinely yours: if bernard vanished tomorrow, your Stripe account, your customers and your subscriptions would carry on without him. Courses are a £600 addition to the £200 yearly plan, so £800 a year, and the comparison to the platforms is set out honestly in the costs article, including where bernard is not the cheap option.
Will moving my course site hurt my Google rankings?: Moving is the moment of risk, and it is a manageable one. Every page keeps its address or gets a permanent redirect to its new one, which is the mechanism Google itself relies on when sites move. Course lessons on bernard are real pages with the video transcribed on them, which search engines and the AI tools that now answer questions can actually read - most course platforms keep that text locked inside a player. The whole subject has its own page: how to move without losing your rankings.