Course Builder Tech Stacks to Keep Your Overhead Low

Attention, course creators: It is NOT necessary to spend thousands of dollars on a full website or all-in-one course hosting platform - especially if you’re just getting started. While these platforms are incredible as you scale and systemize your business, you want to have a proven offer before you go and invest hundreds of dollars a month. What does that mean? At the very least, before you start to build out your course, you should...

• Validate your idea
• Define your niche 
• Map out your offer, and ideally
• Pre-sell or do a Beta launch. 

This allows you to ensure that you have something that WILL SELL before you make the huge time and financial investment of building a digital product. (BTW - I cover exactly how to do each of those things in my Course Builder Blueprint. It’s a free resource you can grab here).

If you’re ready to start building, and want to keep your overhead super low as you test your course, keep reading… 

The Essentials 

Here are the critical tech components of a course launch:

1. Landing pages…  to create your early interest or waitlist page, as well as your sales page when you’re ready to open it up to the public. 
2. Email marketing software… to follow up with and nurture your “leads” – the folks who are interested in your offer. 
3. Checkout… to collect payments securely.
4. Course delivery… to give students a place to access their materials.

At this stage, you really want to focus on refining your offer. Don’t get distracted building out a website or setting up complicated funnels if you haven’t sold 10 spots in your course or program, or at the very least, your audience is already begging you for this content. 

Simple & Affordable Solutions 

When you're just proving your offer, it is best to keep your monthly spend under $100/month. This relieves some of the pressure that often happens when you sign up for a more advanced all-in-one platform. You're trying to create content, learn how the platform works, and put everything together... which takes time, so it can feel like you're "wasting money" if you don't get your course set up and generating sales in a short amount of time. 

Let's not go down that road... 

I’ve compared a lot of tech stacks, and this is one combo that works really well for a first-time course builder:

Flodesk is a really intuitive, user-friendly platform that covers 3 of the 4 must-haves.  

You can build your list of prospective buyers with a waitlist page, set up a sales page and checkout, and integrate your payment processor. It’s really affordable compared to some of the other “all-in-one” or “funnel-building” options, and for those who are less tech-savvy, you’ll find it convenient to have pretty much everything in one place.

For your course delivery, you can simply set up a private Facebook Community and add recorded videos or teach your material live, plus you’ll be able to engage with your students. The only downside is your members need to have Facebook, so if that’s an issue, an alternative would be organizing your materials in a Google Drive Folder or Dropbox. Whichever you choose, you would simply send an automated email with the link to your course after they purchase!

Here are some other options you can consider...

These are costs on the lowest available plans as of July 2023, and are subject to change.

A few notes on specific software... 

MailerLite - starts at $9/mo

This is definitely, in my opinion, the best low-cost email marketing solution out there. On top of your email marketing, they offer a website and landing page builder, which require no coding and are fairly easy to use. Like pretty much all email providers, your plan cost will increase as your email list grows, but overall value here is great. It will integrate with most other platforms using Zapier, and I have found their tech support to be really good! 

PayPal & Stripe - free 

It's totally free to have a business account with both of these payment processors, but you will pay processing fees - this is hard to avoid and just a cost of doing business. You can create invoice links with Stripe if you're using it on its own, but it integrates with all other checkout software (same with PayPal). Just a heads up: PayPal CAN withhold funds, and often does on large influxes of revenue. If you have a new account and you're doing a launch or expecting a big jump in sales, its advised to reach out and let them know, but just be aware this is a thing and can happen. If you really want your cash to be available and don't want to risk it, I would stick with Stripe. 

New Zenler - $67/mo 

Zenler is a great lower-cost alternative to all-in-one platforms like Kajabi. It does have a built-in mail system and you can create marketing funnels & landing pages. There are two trade-offs here... one is that you won't find a lot of design customization options, and they don't offer hosting, meaning you will need to upload your videos to Vimeo or unlisted on YouTube. If you're okay with that, you'll still enjoy a ton of other features like quizzes, certification and some good automation options. 

Thrivecart - $495 lifetime 

ThriveCart currently offers a lifetime plan at $495 US, which works out to $41.25 per month for the first year, and making it very cost effective in the long run. I personally love working in ThriveCart. The checkout pages are very customizable, you've got a ton of payment options (including subscription, multi-pay, and choose your price), it's user-friendly and support is generally good. ThriveCart: Learn was released in 2022, so you won't find all the features you'd get in a more established platform like Kajabi, but it will be powerful enough for most creators. The trade-offs? Again, you'll need to host your videos on Vimeo and you can't add downloads to the course, so you would need to provide your students a Google Drive link for any additional resources. There is also no community feature, so this would be best for self-paced courses, and it's not an "all-in-one" – you'll need an email marketing software, but there are lots of direct integration options. Overall, a very good option! 

Teachable - starts at $59/mo 

Teachable is a very well-established platform with a lot of great features. The things I don't like about it are the additional transaction fees – you'll pay an extra 5% to teachable on the Basic plan, on top of your payment processing fees. It will also cost a lot more as you scale. The next jump from the Basic plan is the $159 Pro plan, which gives you more products (courses, coaching & digital downloads), support options, and a bunch of other features like quizzes, certificates and upsells. At that price, I would recommend Kajabi because you can build highly customized landing pages, a website, host your podcast or a community, and more. 

Zapier - free to start

Sometimes, our platforms won't link together directly so you will need to use Zapier to create those automations. For example, when somebody purchases a product, subscribe them to a welcome email sequence. Most of the hosting platforms I suggested WILL integrate directly with MailerLite, so always check your Integration options first. If not, Zapier will have you covered! 

That wraps up my recommendations for low-cost tech stacks for new course creators! Have questions? Need help mapping it out, or implementing? I offer a 90-minute Tech Blueprint where I can help you figure out the simplest way to set up your tech stack based on your desired outcome. If you want to keep your system simple and have everything in one place, check out my post on my favourite all-in-one platform here.