While Teachable is a premium online teaching platform, It is indeed free to teach on Teachable – if you have just one course, coaching or download to publish on the platform.
Teachable’s free plan is a great place to experiment with online teaching as a business without incurring any financial risks.
Teachable has 4 account tiers. You have the Free, Basic, Pro and Pro+ accounts.
Teachable Free Plan
This is absolutely free and there is no credit card required to sign up for this plan.
The plan’s transaction fees are set up such that you will be charged $1 plus 10% transaction fee of the price of the product you are selling on the platform. As mentioned earlier, this plan allows you to set up just one course, one coaching and one download.
The plan includes the no-code course builder and web pages and is enabled for student referrals. The plan also ships with teachable:pay to ensure seamless and integrated payment processing.
For this plan you can only have one (1) admin and one author seat.
Basic Plan
For more online tutoring that is more comprehensive than what the free plan can offer, Teachable has the Basic plan which has foundational tools and support that online course creators need to build their online teaching businesses.
The Basic plan comes at $39 per month, which is billed at $468 annually. The premium plan also has a 14 day free trial so you can test its features before you incur any costs.
This Basic plan includes all the features of the free plan plus additional features and functions outlined below.
The plan has a 5% transaction fee (making it more lucrative than the free plan). The plan allows you to publish 5 of each of the three product types: course, coaching and downloads.
The basic plan also allows you to set coupons and order bumps. On this plan you can connect your custom domain so that you have full control over your digital presence and branding and are not just confined to the Teachable platform for your branding needs.
For easy and secure domain registration and hosting we recommend Bluehost‘s domain registration and hosting service. With Bluehost You can register a domain and get it hosted for $9.95 per month.
The Basic plan also offers live group coaching which is great for fostering a sense of community and collaboration in the often too impersonal online learning environs.
Accelerator Challenge
Teachable‘s Accelerator Challenge Access is a limited-time program where instructors get expert and hands-on guidance and resources to accelerate their online course success.
The training and onboarding program includes training materials, webinars as well as access to community support focused on course content optimisation, driving sales, and marketing strategies.
The program is of great value for beginners that are new to the Teachable platform or the whole online teaching business. The program, which is included in the Basic Plan, will also train you to enhance the visibility of courses online, how to stimulate audience engagement and how to grow your revenue base.
Pro Plan
Teachable’s most popular plan is the Pro Plan. This plan comes with all features from the Free plan, Basic plan and the additional features outlined below.
This plan has 0% transaction fees, enabling course creators to pocket more from their sales than what they would get from the other low tier plans.
The plan allows up to 50 published products under each of the three content type categories: course, coaching and downloads.
The plan is enabled for affiliate marketing. So, over and above the integrated email marketing feature in the Basic plan, the Pro plan takes marketing capabilities a notch higher by enabling you to incentivise referrals to your courses through affiliate marketing.
Still on marketing, the plan has upselling capabilities that course creators can leverage to increase order value and unlock more revenue from each customer.
The plans also have live chat support which empowers course creators to get instant help and support from the Teachable support desk.
Teachable Public API
Teachable Public API (Application Programming Interface) enables course creators to interact with Teachable platform remotely through an API.
This gives course creators latitude for advanced use cases where, for example; course creators seek to interact with Teachable functions and features through their websites and applications.
The public API has the following capabilities:
Course and Content Management: As an instructor you can create, update and edit (manage) course content, including lectures, quizzes and assignments through the API.
User Management: Through the API you can create users and manage their roles (such as defining student and instructor) roles via the API. The API also allows you to handle enrollment and access student progress remotely.
Ecommerce and Payments: Teachable API enables course creators to process payments, manage refunds and track transaction data for each respective course sale.
The API also offers capabilities in analytics and reporting, user authentication, marketing and communication as well as third party integrations.
The benefit of Teachable‘s API is that it empowers advanced users and businesses who want to build seamless online teaching platforms and workflows to integrate the robust features of Teachable with their own digital properties.
This is great for advanced use cases and branding.
Just note that the API integration requires an expert developer competent in handling APIs.
The integration set up is not typically handled by Teachable.
Pro+ Plan
The Pro Plan goes for $119 per month, billed at $1,428 annually.
The Pro plan ships with advanced tools, more customer support and features designed to help you scale your online teaching business.
The features of the Pro+ plan are built to give course creators more products and custom user roles for online training businesses that are growing fast and need tools to scale.
For $199 per month, billed at $2,388 annually, the plan comes with all the features in the lower tier plans plus these additional features outlined below.
Pro+ has zero (0) transaction fees.
In this plan you can create 200 courses, 200 coaching products and 200 downloads. Not only that, the plan allows you to create 200 product bundles.
Product bundles enable you to extract more value from each customer through exposing learners to other products (courses) related to what they have purchased. Bundles can increase your revenue prospects exponentially.
You can also define custom user roles within this plan.
Benefits of Free versus Paid Teachable Plans
SO, yes you can teach for free on Teachable, through leveraging the features of the Free plan. The free plan is actually recommended as an excellent starting point for beginners who have no experience in online teaching and in navigating the Teachable platform.
The free plan is a great way to learn the ropes of this type of business and also get yourself to comfort levels in using the Teachable platform.
The free plan enables you to do all this without any upfront costs. If you are just starting out in the online teaching space, the free plan enables you to build your craft in a risk free environment.
The free plan also gives you a free opportunity to test the waters as well as to validate your online course ideas and concept.
As you start getting comfortable and your customer base starts to grow, you then need to start considering upgrading to a suitable higher tier plan. The good part with Teachable is that the platform has flexible upgrading options. Higher tier plans have many benefits such as:
- Transaction fee waivers
- Advanced features and customization
- Branding and professionalism
- Marketing and sales support
- Reliable hosting and support
Teachable is a top online teaching platform for various reasons. The platform has a user-friendly interface for both course creators and students.
The intuitive drag and drop course builder makes course creation and course management a breeze.
Customisation and Branding
Teachable also makes customisation and branding easy through its high customisation capabilities. With these features you can customize your Teachable online course platform to align with the branding and identity of your website and any other digital properties you may have.
Teachable also boasts robust marketing features and tools such as coupons discount features, email marketing and affiliating marketing capabilities that enable you to build a lucrative community around your course offerings.
The platform is also secure and reliable for both instructors and learners. It is also mobile friendly, enabling course creators and learners to interact with the platform conveniently through their mobile devices.
Leveraging course creation and selling platforms such as Teachable is a great way to start and grow your online teaching business. Teachable handles all the important critical and technical stuff such as hosting, security and maintenance.
This affords you ample time as an instructor to focus more on course creation and growing your business.
Final Thoughts
Teachable well balanced pricing plans, plus a free plan for beginners to test waters without any risks, position Teachable as one of the best online teaching platforms.
Teachable plans are structured to enable beginners to start risk free, while high tier plans are tailored to enable instructors to grow their businesses through powerful marketing and sales tools and features.
The high tier plans also enable instructors to scale their businesses with more features and tools to cater to a wider and growing learner community.
Lastly, Teachable offers excellent customer support for both instructors and learners. This goes a long way in assisting instructors resolve any matter swiftly and promptly, making the platform more credible and also landing credibility to instructors that use the platform.
Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned educator just venturing into the online space, Teachable has everything you need to start an online teaching business from scratch and grow it successfully.