How Much to Charge for a Course: What You Actually Net

The statistic underpinning almost every article about course pricing is from 2015. It surveyed a single company's email list, and a third of the respondents were not charging anything at all. If you have been told that most courses sell for under $100, that is where it came from, and it should not be setting your price.

Here is current data, and the arithmetic on what you actually keep.

What do online courses actually sell for?

The most current figures with a disclosed sample come from Ruzuku's 2026 analysis of 72,162 paid price options across more than 32,000 published courses. It is vendor data, which is a real limitation, but it names its sample size and method, which puts it ahead of nearly everything else in this subject.

• Coaching and consulting: median $531, mean $812.
• Health and wellness: median $299, mean $386.
• Business and marketing: median $247, mean $529.
• Arts and creative: median $97, mean $189.
• Writing: median $70, mean $163.
• All niches: median $110, mean $416.

Two things to take from that. The coaching median is nearly five times the platform wide median, so a general benchmark is actively misleading if you coach. And the gap between the $110 median and the $416 mean shows a long tail of high ticket offers pulling the average up.

One inconsistency worth flagging: the same source puts the platform median at $99 on a page published a month earlier. Treat these as an order of magnitude, not a precise figure.

Where does the under $100 claim come from?

A survey published on 10 September 2015 by Mirasee, with 1,128 respondents, which found that 85.8 percent of course creators charged under $100.

The methodology, stated on the page: SurveyMonkey, respondents self selected from Mirasee's own email list and paid programme students. Mirasee has since filed the piece under Archived with a note that a later report superseded it.

The detail that kills the statistic: 31.7 percent of respondents were not charging at all, because their courses were lead magnets. Of all 1,128 people surveyed, exactly 10 charged $300 or more and had 50 or more students.

So the number describes a 2015 mailing list in which a third of the courses were free giveaways. It is being republished as current pricing guidance eleven years later, in at least one case without stating the year.

What do you actually keep?

This is the part nobody runs, and it changes the answer more than any pricing formula.

Selling on your own platform

Teachable restructured its plans in June 2025, retiring the old Basic tier and its 5 percent fee. Current published pricing: Starter $39 a month with a 7.5 percent transaction fee, Builder $89 at 0 percent, Growth $189 at 0 percent, Advanced $399 at 0 percent.

Note the direction of travel. The entry tier fee went up, from 5 percent to 7.5 percent. Every article still quoting Teachable at 5 percent is describing a plan that no longer exists.

Add Stripe at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents. On a $500 course sold through Teachable Starter you net $500 less $37.50 in platform fees less $14.80 to Stripe, which is $447.70.

Selling on a marketplace

Udemy publishes its instructor revenue share openly. You receive 97 percent when the sale comes through your own coupon or referral link, and 37 percent when Udemy's marketplace or advertising produces the sale. Both are calculated after Apple or Google take 30 percent on mobile purchases.

The same $500 course, sold organically through Udemy's marketplace, nets you $185.

$447.70 against $185. Identical course, identical price, 2.4 times the difference, driven entirely by which business you are in. Marketplaces sell for you and charge for it. Self hosted platforms make you find the buyer and let you keep the money. Neither is wrong, but pricing without knowing which one you are in is.

The platform fee structures behind those numbers are worth reading in full before you commit, because they change more often than the pricing advice does.

So how should you set the price?

Three checks, in order.

Start from your niche median, not the global one

If you coach, the relevant figure is a $531 median rather than $110. Starting from the global median is how a coaching offer ends up at $97 and stays there.

Price the outcome against what it replaces

A course that saves a client 40 hours is competing with 40 hours of their time, not with other courses. Say your client bills $200 an hour: that is $8,000 of value, and a $997 course is not expensive against it. This is an illustration, not a formula, and it only works if you can name the outcome specifically.

Work backwards from what you need to net

Decide the figure you want to clear, then add the platform fee, the processor fee and any affiliate share on top. Working forwards from a sticker price is how people discover their margin after launch.

What nobody publishes

• No platform publishes real refund or chargeback rates for courses. Every figure you see is either a policy default or an estimate.
• The widely quoted average Kajabi creator earnings figures do not appear in Kajabi's own press release. Two different numbers circulate, they contradict each other, and neither is in the primary source.
• The commonly repeated average Udemy instructor earnings figure traces only to secondary blogs.
• There is no credible aggregate on price versus completion or price versus refund rate for creator courses.

Ignore any pricing claim in this subject that does not link to its source. That rule alone removes most of what is written about it.

Key takeaways

• The under $100 statistic comes from a 2015 survey of one company's email list, where 31.7 percent of respondents charged nothing at all.
• Current median price for coaching and consulting courses is $531, against $110 across all niches.
• Teachable's entry tier now charges 7.5 percent, not the 5 percent still widely quoted. That plan was retired in June 2025.
• A $500 course nets $447.70 on Teachable Starter and $185 through Udemy's marketplace.
• Udemy pays 97 percent on your own coupon sales and 37 percent on marketplace sales, both after mobile app store cuts.
• Price from your niche median, not the global one, and work backwards from what you need to net.
• No platform publishes real refund or chargeback data, so treat any such figure as unsourced.

Common questions

How much should I charge for my first online course?

Start from your niche median rather than a global average. For coaching and consulting that median is $531. Price the outcome the course delivers against what it replaces for the buyer, then add platform and processor fees on top of the figure you need to clear.

Is $997 too much for an online course?

Not for coaching, where the median sits at $531 and the mean at $812. The high ticket tail is real. What matters is whether you can name a specific outcome the buyer values above $997, and whether you have the delivery to support that price after they buy.

What fees do course platforms charge?

Teachable Starter charges 7.5 percent, and its Builder, Growth and Advanced plans charge nothing. Payment processing runs about 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on top. Udemy takes 63 percent of marketplace sales and 3 percent of sales you bring yourself.

Should I sell on Udemy or my own platform?

Udemy finds buyers and keeps 63 percent of those sales. Your own platform keeps nearly everything but you find every buyer yourself. On a $500 course that is $185 against $447.70. Choose based on whether you have an audience, not on the fee percentage.

Before you set a number

Whatever you land on has to cover what the course cost to build, and production is usually the largest line. Working out that figure first tells you whether your price clears it in ten sales or a hundred.

EchoPulse builds course video, sales pages and launch sequences for coaches and course creators, published pricing and no contract. The $299 Pilot runs 14 days and you keep everything produced.