Every few months someone publishes a post declaring online courses dead. The logic is usually the same: the market is flooded, prices have raced to the bottom, nobody finishes what they buy.
That narrative isn’t wrong. It’s just pointed at the wrong part of the market.
Generic courses taught by nobody in particular to everyone in general are in trouble. Expert-led niche courses taught to specific audiences who need a specific outcome are not. Those two things are not the same business, and conflating them is why so many people either pile into a saturated market or walk away from a real opportunity.
Here’s an honest answer to whether selling online courses is profitable in 2026, what the math actually looks like, and why the platform you choose is one of the biggest factors in your margins.
Why People Say Online Courses Aren’t Profitable
The pessimism is understandable. Here’s what actually happened.
From roughly 2015 to 2022, the online course market grew fast enough that almost anything would sell. Low-barrier platforms made it easy to package up content, run ads, and find buyers. A lot of people did that, including a lot of people without particular expertise or a real audience.
Then a few things converged. Ad costs increased. Every niche got crowded with generic courses. Udemy-style marketplaces drove prices toward zero. And buyers got more sophisticated. After buying a few $27 courses that didn’t deliver, people became skeptical.
The result: undifferentiated courses got harder to sell. Completion rates on low-cost marketplace courses were already terrible, and refund rates went up.
But none of that applies if you’re a genuine expert teaching a specific skill to a specific audience who already trusts you. That market was never the one dying.
What’s Actually Profitable in 2026
The courses that work in 2026 share three characteristics.
Real, specific expertise. Not “productivity tips,” but “how to run financial models for real estate syndications if you’re an operator doing your first deal.” The more specific the expertise, the more credible the course, and the less competition you face.
A defined audience with a known problem. You’re not selling to “people who want to improve their career.” You’re selling to mid-career engineers moving into management who have never had a direct conversation about compensation negotiation. The audience knows who they are. The course is obviously for them.
A specific, believable outcome. Not “transform your business.” Something measurable: finish this course and you’ll know how to set up your first paid media campaign, audit your own bookkeeping, or pass your AWS Solutions Architect exam.
These three things together make a course that can command real prices, generate word-of-mouth, and build a sustainable business. None of them are new. They just become the minimum requirement as the generic market gets more crowded.
The Math: Platform Fees and What They Cost You
Let’s run a simple model. You sell a course at $497. You sell 20 copies a month. That’s $9,940 gross per month.
Now let’s look at what different platforms take from that number.
Kajabi
Kajabi is an all-in-one course and marketing platform. Following its January 2026 repricing, plans run from Basic at $179/month to Pro at $499/month, with discounts for annual billing. Its built-in processor, Kajabi Payments, charges 2.7-2.9% + $0.30 per transaction depending on tier, and Kajabi takes no revenue share when you use it. If you would rather use your own Stripe account, Kajabi adds a surcharge on top of Stripe’s own fee: 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro. We go deeper in our Kajabi alternatives guide and our BuddyBoss vs Kajabi comparison.
The bigger cost on Kajabi usually isn’t the percentage. It’s that plans are tied to contact counts, so a growing email list can force an upgrade regardless of how many courses you actually sell.
Teachable
Teachable’s current lineup is Starter, Builder, and Growth, having retired the older Basic and Pro naming. Starter carries a 7.5% transaction fee, while Builder, Growth and Custom charge 0% through teachable:pay. On the Starter plan, that 7.5% on $9,940 gross runs over $700 a month, which is why most creators are better off upgrading once monthly sales get past a few thousand dollars: the subscription cost becomes cheaper than the transaction fee. We cover the trade-offs in our Teachable alternatives breakdown.
Thinkific
Thinkific charges 0% platform transaction fee on its paid plans when you use its built-in Thinkific Payments processor. A small additional fee applies only if you use a third-party processor instead, and it decreases by tier. Plans run from Start through Expand, with a custom Plus tier above that. Our Thinkific alternatives guide has the detail.
BuddyBoss on WordPress
BuddyBoss pairs with LearnDash or LifterLMS as the LMS layer, or handles course delivery natively through BuddyBoss Memberships and Courses, free on the Launch ($199/year) and Scale ($349/year) plans, all running on your own WordPress site. On Launch and Scale, there is no platform commission on course sales, so the only percentage-based fee on your revenue is your payment processor, typically Stripe at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. On $9,940 gross across 20 transactions at $497, that’s about $294 in processing fees. Everything else stays with you, beyond the annual software licence.
On a $9,940 a month course business, the difference between a platform taking several percent across various fees and one taking only Stripe’s cut adds up quickly. At higher revenue the gap widens, and it is real money either way. For a fuller breakdown across more platforms, see our LMS pricing comparison.
The Community Multiplier
Course businesses that build an active community around the curriculum tend to hold on to students longer, and the reasons are more logical than mysterious. Worth saying plainly, though: head-to-head data comparing community-based courses against standalone marketplace courses is thinner than the confident claims you’ll see elsewhere suggest. What follows is reasoning, not research.
Higher completion rates make sense intuitively. When a student is stuck, a community gives them somewhere to ask. When they hit a motivation dip, seeing other students making progress pushes them through. When they complete a section, they have peers to share it with.
Lower refund rates follow from higher completion. Students who finish, or even make meaningful progress, are far less likely to request a refund than students who opened the first video once and forgot about it.
For expert-led courses targeting a specific outcome, the community often is the product. The course is the curriculum. The community is where the learning actually happens.
BuddyBoss combines course delivery, whether native or through LearnDash or LifterLMS, with a full community platform: activity feeds, private groups, member profiles, direct messaging. Your students don’t have to go somewhere else to connect with each other. The course and the community live together.
The Saturation Myth, Examined Honestly
“The online course market is saturated” is true at one level of abstraction and false at the level where you actually operate.
There are hundreds of generic courses on email marketing. There are not many courses on email marketing for B2B SaaS companies selling to procurement teams at Fortune 500 companies, taught by someone who actually ran those campaigns. Those two things compete in different markets.
Saturation exists where the content is generic, the instructor has no particular credibility with the audience, and the price is low enough that buyers don’t feel the need to vet it carefully. Exit that tier of the market and saturation mostly disappears.
The harder question isn’t whether the market is saturated. It’s whether you have the specific expertise and specific audience to build a course that doesn’t compete in the generic tier. If the answer is yes, the market is less crowded than it looks from the outside.
The Honest Verdict
Online courses are profitable in 2026 if three things are true:
- You have real, specific expertise that’s meaningful to a specific audience
- That audience has a problem they’re willing to pay to solve
- Your platform doesn’t erode your margins with per-transaction fees or platform costs that scale with your revenue
The first two are about you and your market. The third is a decision you make before you build. A platform that takes several percent of your revenue across fees and subscriptions is a meaningful drag on a business that’s otherwise working. A self-hosted setup that only hands money to your payment processor is a different financial picture entirely.
The generic course market has real problems. The niche expert course market, run on the right infrastructure, is a different conversation.
Once you’ve settled the profitability question, the next one is what to actually charge, and we’ve covered how to create and sell online courses on WordPress step by step if you want to see the build side.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is selling online courses still profitable in 2026?
Yes, but not uniformly. Generic courses sold cheaply to broad audiences face genuine saturation, low completion and high refund rates. Expert-led courses aimed at a specific audience with a specific outcome remain profitable, because they do not really compete with the generic tier at all. The determining factors are whether you have credible expertise, whether your audience has a problem worth paying to solve, and whether your platform costs scale with your revenue.
What percentage do course platforms take?
It varies far more than the marketing suggests, and there are usually two layers. The first is the platform’s own transaction fee, which ranges from 0% on higher tiers to 7.5% on some entry plans. The second is card processing, typically around 2.9% + 30¢, which applies almost everywhere including self-hosted setups. Watch for a third layer too: several platforms add a surcharge if you bring your own payment processor rather than using theirs.
How much should you charge for an online course?
Most course creators price somewhere between $97 and $2,997, and the right number depends on the outcome you deliver, your positioning and the delivery format rather than the length of the content. Cheap pricing is not a shortcut to volume, because low prices signal low value in exactly the market where buyers have learned to be skeptical.
Is the online course market saturated?
At the generic end, yes. At the specific end, much less than it appears. There are hundreds of courses on email marketing and very few on email marketing for B2B SaaS companies selling into enterprise procurement. The narrower your topic and the more credible you are on it, the less saturation you actually encounter.
Do you need a community to sell online courses?
Not to sell them, but it helps considerably with everything that happens after the sale. A community gives stuck students somewhere to ask, gives wavering students visible proof that others are progressing, and gives finishers somewhere to share the result. Students who make real progress are far less likely to ask for a refund. For higher-priced expert courses, the community is often the reason people buy rather than a bonus attached to the curriculum.
Choose the Right Platform Before You Build
Platform choice is the one variable on this list you decide before you have any revenue, and the one that is most painful to change later. Total cost of ownership, transaction fees, contact limits and migration risk are all worth checking before you commit rather than after.
The generic course market really is crowded. The specific, expert-led end of it, run on infrastructure that doesn’t take a percentage of every sale, is a genuinely different business.
