Here is how to create an online course for free: draft it in a free AI chat, build the lessons in Genially’s free plan, then host it and sell it on systeme.io’s free plan, which charges no transaction fee and gives you one custom domain. The cap isn’t how many people can buy it. It’s that you get one course, and the platforms most people recommend for this don’t have a free plan at all, so a weekend set aside for building can go on a route that dead-ends at a checkout you can’t switch on. This guide walks the $0 route in order, then names the four places free stops: the badge on your course, who can see it, taking money, and what you can carry out with you.
Key Takeaways
- One person can build a course, put it on their own domain, charge for it and keep 100% of the payment on systeme.io’s free plan. The cap is one course.
- Eight of the platforms most often recommended for a free course publish no free plan at all, only a trial of 7 to 30 days.
- On Genially’s free plan you can’t keep a creation private and you can’t download a copy of it. Both start on Pro, at €6 a month billed annually.
- On several free plans, charging for the course is itself the paid feature.
- Free-to-build, free-to-give-away and free-to-sell-on are three different products, and only the last one ends in a sale.
Mini Course Generator has no free plan either – 14 days of full access, no credit card – so it is not on the list below. What the plans include is on the pricing page.
Free Means Three Different Things
Before you pick a platform, decide which kind of free you actually need, because the word covers three different products.
OpenLearn Create, the Open University’s platform, calls itself “a free platform for open learning” where “individuals and organisations can publish their open content, open courses and resources”, and where “content on this site is made available under Creative Commons licences”. There’s no checkout anywhere on it, because selling isn’t what it’s for. That’s free-to-give-away, and it’s completely free forever.
SendPulse’s free education plan is the second kind. You can build a course and teach 200 people on it, and paid plans are what let you charge them. That’s free-to-build, with a wall at the till.
systeme.io’s free plan is the third kind. One course, 2,000 contacts, one custom domain, and zero transaction fees on what you collect. That’s free-to-sell-on, and it’s the only one of the three that ends with money in your account.
If your course is a lead magnet or a pilot, any of the three will do and you should pick on how fast you can build. If the course is the offer, your list is short before you start, and it starts in the next section.
If you’re building training for a team rather than a product to sell, you’re in a different market with different free plans. What free means when you’re training a team is counted separately.
The $0 Route, Step by Step
There’s a sequence one person can walk this weekend that costs nothing at every step, and every step has a ceiling with a name on it. Pick the row that matches what you’re doing, not the row that sounds best.
| Step | The free option | What it costs you | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|---|
| Draft the outline and the lessons | A free AI chat tier | Nothing | Judgment. It drafts, you decide what’s true |
| Build the lessons | Genially Free (500 AI credits a year, 2 GB) | Nothing | No downloads, no private sharing, Genially’s name on it |
| Host it and charge for it | systeme.io Free (1 course, 2,000 contacts, 1 custom domain) | Nothing, 0% transaction fee | One course |
| Host it without charging | SendPulse Free (1 course, 200 students, 1 GB) | Nothing | You can’t charge |
| Sell it as a download instead | Gumroad | 10% + $0.50 per sale, 30% through Discover | Not a course. No lessons, no progress, no completion |
| Run it on your own WordPress | LearnPress (free plugin) | Hosting, domain, backups, your hours. The checkout is a paid add-on | Your time |
| Publish it openly instead of selling | OpenLearn Create | Nothing, ever | You can’t charge, and it publishes under a Creative Commons license |
Draft the outline and the lessons
A free AI chat tier writes the first draft of an outline and a script faster than you will, and it doesn’t know which parts are true or which parts your people actually get stuck on. You do. Treat it as a typist with a good memory, keep the section where you explain the thing only you know, and cut the rest. How the drafting step actually goes is a separate walkthrough, including the prompts that produce a usable outline rather than a table of contents.
Can ChatGPT write the course for you? It writes a draft. It doesn’t decide what’s correct, it doesn’t know the three questions your clients ask every single time, and it doesn’t host, deliver or sell anything. Budget an evening on the draft and a day on the edit, not the other way around.
Build the lessons
Genially‘s free plan gives you 500 AI credits a year and 2 GB of storage, and you can build interactive pages with it without paying anything. It’s the platform most often recommended when someone asks for a free course creator, and the recommendation is fair as far as building goes.
Its ceilings arrive later: Genially’s name stays on your creation, you can’t download a copy, and you can’t keep it private. None of the three stops you starting tonight.
Host it and take the money
systeme.io‘s free plan is the one route on this page where a single person builds a course, puts it on their own domain, charges for it, and keeps the whole payment. The plan includes 2,000 contacts, 3 sales funnels, 1 blog, 1 course, 1 affiliate program, 1 custom domain, unlimited email sends, and 0% transaction fees.
The cap is the course count. One. If your plan is one flagship course plus an email list, that’s a working business on a plan that costs nothing. If your plan is a library, you’ll pay before your second launch.
If you aren’t charging yet
SendPulse‘s free education plan says it plainly: “you can create 1 course, teach up to 200 students, and use 1 GB of file storage. With paid plans, you can add an unlimited number of instructors and students, create an unlimited number of courses, and make them paid.”
Read the last four words twice. Making the course paid is the upgrade. This is a good route for a free pilot, a cohort you already know, or a course you’re giving away to build a list. It is not a route to a first sale.
If it’s a download, not a course
Gumroad charges no monthly fee and takes a cut instead: 10% plus $0.50 per transaction on sales through your own profile or direct links, and 30% when a buyer finds you through its Discover marketplace. Nothing to pay up front, and a checkout that works in an afternoon.
What you give up is the course. A Gumroad buyer gets a file. There are no lessons, no progress, no completion, and no way to see who finished, which matters if the next thing you sell depends on the first thing working.
If you already run WordPress
LearnPress is free “and always will be”, in its own words on its own listing, and it will build a course inside a site you already own. Taking money is the part that costs: the WooCommerce add-on and the Stripe payment method are both listed under its premium add-ons.
So the free plugin builds the course and the checkout is a purchase. Worth it if the site and the hosting already exist. An expensive way to start if they don’t, for reasons that show up in what you can take with you later.
If you’re giving it away, not selling it
OpenLearn Create takes anyone’s open content, costs nothing at any point, and publishes under Creative Commons. If you’re a volunteer trainer, a charity, or a practitioner building reputation rather than revenue, that’s the shortest route to published there is. If you intended to charge, it’s the wrong door.
Most of the Platforms You Have Been Told Are Free Are Not
Eight of the platforms a solo creator gets pointed at publish no free plan at all: Thinkific, Teachable, Podia, Kajabi, LearnWorlds, Coassemble, Heights Platform and Teachfloor. What they publish instead is a trial of 7 to 30 days, and the buttons don’t always make that obvious.
Teachfloor‘s button says “Start for free”, above a plan ladder that begins at $89 a month. Kajabi‘s says “Try Kajabi for 1 month, on us!”, Podia‘s says “Try everything free for 30 days”, and Heights Platform‘s says “30 day free trial. No Credit Card Required.”
Here’s what arrives when the trial ends. Every figure is what the vendor publishes on its own pricing page.
| Platform | Entry plan | What it takes per sale | The catch on the entry plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Teachable | Starter, $39/mo ($29/mo billed annually) | 7.5% transaction fee | Teachable’s branding comes off on Growth, at $189/mo |
| Podia | Mover, $42/mo ($504/yr) | 5% transaction fee | Email list capped at 100 subscribers |
| LearnWorlds | Starter, $29/mo ($24/mo billed annually) | $5 per paid enrollment | The fee is per head, not a percentage |
| Heights Platform | Challenge, $29/mo ($23.20/mo billed annually) | Zero, beyond the payment processor’s own | One course, up to 100 active students |
| Thinkific | Basic, $54/mo ($40/mo billed annually) | 2.9% through Thinkific Payments, on every self-serve plan | Thinkific’s branding stays until Grow |
| Coassemble | Build, $3,000/yr ($250/mo), or $2,500/yr paid annually | Not published | The free sandbox sits behind a work-email gate |
Teachable answers the question in its own FAQ: “Teachable is a paid service that includes a 7-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee.” Thinkific answers it the same way: “No, instead, you can explore the whole platform with a 30-day free trial.” On Podia, the plan that drops the transaction fee to 0% and lifts the list cap to 500 is Shaker, at $84 a month.
Coassemble does run something free, and it’s a sandbox rather than a plan: a free environment with the full builder, behind a gate that reads “Please use your work email – free inboxes like Gmail or Outlook aren’t accepted.” Build it, prove it works, then buy. The buy starts at $3,000 a year.
Cross those eight off tonight and stop looking for a free plan that isn’t there. The shortlist that’s genuinely free is the route table above, and it’s short on purpose.
Whose Name Is on Your Course
On a free plan your course usually carries somebody else’s name, and on the platforms people reach for first, removing it isn’t a small upgrade. It’s a jump of two or three plans.
Genially’s branding comes off with the Brand kit, which starts on Master at €20 a month per seat. That’s the builder the route table sends you to for the building step, and un-branded output is not on its cheapest paid plan — it is a rung further up than that.
Teachable puts “Remove Teachable branding” on Growth, at $189 a month, or $139 a month billed annually, against an entry plan at $39. Thinkific puts branding removal on Grow, at $219 a month, or $164 a month billed annually, against a $54 entry plan.
Mini Course Generator includes badge removal on every paid plan rather than gating it to a higher tier. What the plans include is on the pricing page.
If the course is the front of a paid offer, price the badge before you build on a platform. It’s the cheapest thing on this page to get wrong and the most annoying to fix, because fixing it means rebuilding somewhere else.
Who Can Find Your Course
On Genially’s free plan you can’t stop a creation being reachable by anyone, and you can’t take a copy of it away. Both fixes start on Pro, at €6 a month billed annually.
Private sharing is a Pro feature, described by Genially like this: “Your creation can only be viewed using the link you share. Prevent your content from being seen by anyone on the Internet.” On the free plan that control isn’t available, so the course you built as the paid product, or as the teaser that protects the paid product, is reachable by anyone who has or finds the link.
Downloads are Pro too. PDF, JPG, MP4, QR and the offline viewer all start there. Free gets the 500 AI credits a year and the 2 GB, and no way to export what you made.
So the decision is worth €6 before you record twelve lessons, not after. If the course is free anyway, build on the free plan without a second thought. If it’s the offer, budget the Pro month from the start and treat it as the cost of a door that closes.
Getting Paid Is Where Free Usually Ends
On most free plans, charging is the paid feature. Where you can charge without paying a subscription, somebody takes a piece of every sale instead. There is one route on this page without either, and knowing which is which is the whole platform decision.
SendPulse is the clean example of the first kind: with paid plans you can “make them paid”. The course is free to build and free to deliver, and the till is the upgrade.
LearnWorlds is the second kind, and its fee is unusual because it’s charged per head rather than as a percentage. Starter carries $5 per paid enrollment, and the comparison table lists “None” on every plan above it. Thirty sales of a $20 course is $600 gross and $150 of enrollment fees, a quarter of the money, before the subscription and before the card fees LearnWorlds itself flags on the same page: “payment gateways usually charge fees … for example Stripe and Paypal currently charge 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.”
Gumroad is the third kind, a percentage with no floor: 10% plus $0.50 per transaction on your own links, 30% through Discover. Two thousand dollars of sales to your own audience costs roughly $200 plus processing, and it never stops, because there’s no plan to graduate onto.
systeme.io’s free plan takes 0%. That’s why it’s the spine of the route table and not just another name on it, and it’s the shape keeping the whole payment takes on a first course.
The rule is easy to apply. A percentage beats a subscription until your monthly sales cross that subscription, so a first launch of a handful of sales belongs on a percentage. A per-head fee gets worse with every sale, which is the wrong shape for anything you intend to grow. A free plan at 0% beats both until you need the second course, and putting the course behind a pay-wall is a setting rather than a build once you’re on one.
What You Can Take With You
Two things will matter on the day you leave a platform: a copy of your lessons, and the list of people who bought. Almost nobody publishes an answer about either, and you can check both before you build.
On Genially’s free plan there’s no download of any kind, so no copy of your course exists anywhere outside the platform. Whatever you record into it stays there until you pay.
systeme.io is the one vendor here that answers the leaving question in writing: “If you cancel and your list exceeds the free plan’s contact limit, your account reverts to the free plan and contacts above the limit are archived – they are not deleted.” That’s a published, checkable promise about the worst day.
Treat that sentence as the question to ask everywhere else. Before you record anything, find the platform’s own words about what happens to your course and your list on the day you stop paying. If there’s no sentence anywhere on the site, that absence is the answer, and you should plan for it.
If you’re a freelance designer building this for a client rather than for yourself, the export question decides it outright, because the client’s system has to accept the file: the tools that export cleanly are a shorter list than the tools that build nicely, and SCORM, the file format most corporate systems import, is where the shortlist collapses.
Mini Course Generator publishes its answer on the pricing page: “Your content is always yours, whatever your subscription status. You can export mini-courses as PDF files or SCORM packages at any time.” Plans and pricing are there too.
And if the WordPress route tempted you, price it honestly. A small VPS runs $20 to $50 a month, a domain and TLS $1 to $10, backups and object storage $5 to $20, and then 2 to 10 hours a month of your own time, which is the biggest line on the list at any rate you’d charge a client. For one person with one course it’s the most expensive free option there is. What running it yourself really costs has the full arithmetic.
One Course or Ten? The Rule That Tells You Where to Shop
Free means different things in the two markets that sell you course software, and the difference is a single number.
On the creator side, free caps the number of courses. systeme.io gives you one. SendPulse gives you one. The number of people who can take it is counted generously — 2,000 contacts on systeme.io, 200 students on SendPulse — because the platform expects you to grow by launching more products.
On the team side, free caps the number of people. ProProfs Training Maker stops at 10 learners, TalentLMS at 5 users, and courses are unlimited or near enough, because the platform expects you to train the same group on many things.
So the rule is: one course and many people who buy it, shop the creator market. Many courses and ten people who have to take them, shop the team market. Picking from the wrong shelf is how creators end up on a five-seat plan and how small teams end up paying per sale.
If it’s the second one, the free options on the team side are counted with their caps, including the ones that look free and aren’t.
What Your First Paid Month Should Buy
Free ends at a predictable place, and the upgrade you buy first decides whether you ever have to move again. Most creators upgrade for the wrong reason. They hit one wall on whatever platform they happened to start on, pay that platform’s price to get past it, and discover the next three walls are on the same ladder at higher rungs. The better move is to know which walls are coming before you build, then buy the one plan that clears all of them rather than the cheapest plan that clears the first.
The four walls, in the order they arrive
The badge. It’s first because it’s visible, and it’s the one you notice the day you send the link to a paying customer. Ask which plan removes it, not whether it can be removed. On Genially the answer is the Brand kit on Master. On Teachable it’s Growth, at nearly five times the entry plan’s price. On Thinkific it’s Grow. In each case the badge is bundled with things you didn’t ask for, which is why it costs what it costs.
Privacy and your own copy. These usually travel together, because both are downstream of the same question: does the platform let content leave. On Genially’s free plan a creation is reachable by anyone with the link and there’s no export of any kind, so neither the private version nor the backup exists. Both start on Pro.
The till. Either charging is the upgrade, as on SendPulse, or charging is allowed and somebody takes a slice, as on Gumroad and on LearnWorlds’ entry plan. The slice is the one that keeps costing after you’ve grown, so read it as a permanent tax rather than a starting fee.
The second course. The quietest wall and the one that arrives last. systeme.io gives you one course, SendPulse gives you one, Heights Platform’s entry plan gives you one. The day the first course works is the day you want the second, and that’s the day the bill starts.
| The wall | Where you meet it | What clears it |
|---|---|---|
| Somebody else’s name on your course | The first time you send the link to a buyer | A plan that lists badge removal, which on the big creator platforms is two or three tiers up |
| Anyone can reach it | Before launch, if the course is the paid offer | Private or link-only sharing, a paid feature almost everywhere |
| No copy of your own work | The day you want to move, or back it up | Export, usually PDF or SCORM, and usually paid |
| Charging at all | At the first sale | Either a plan that allows paid courses, or a per-sale cut |
| One course | The week after the first launch succeeds | A plan with a course count above one |
Price those five rows on any platform before you record a lesson, and the upgrade decision takes ten minutes instead of a weekend. Skip them, and you’ll make the decision under deadline, with lessons already built somewhere you can’t take them out of.
Mini Course Generator
Mini Course Generator is our product, so treat this entry as interested rather than neutral and check every line against the pricing page before you act on it.
It sits on the paid side of the line this article draws. Every plan opens with 14 days of full access and no credit card, and there is no permanent zero-cost tier waiting at the end of the trial, which is why it isn’t in the route table above. What it does differently is where the four walls sit. Badge removal is listed as included on every paid plan rather than reserved for a higher tier, so the thing Teachable reserves for its Growth plan and Thinkific for Grow is on the entry rung here. Content ownership is published in writing rather than left to be inferred: “Your content is always yours, whatever your subscription status. You can export mini-courses as PDF files or SCORM packages at any time.” On what it takes out of a sale, the pricing FAQ is equally short: “Not a cent. We don’t take commissions or transaction fees from your revenue.” Selling runs through the pay-wall gateway, and the payment goes to your account rather than through the platform’s.
Pros. Badge removal and a zero-commission checkout are both on the entry rung rather than two or three tiers up, and the leaving question has a published answer instead of no answer at all — that combination is what the free routes above make you choose between. Courses are built to be short and finished in one sitting, so the weekend plan in this article maps onto it directly. A custom domain is included from the entry tier, and courses can be shared by link, embedded in a page, or dropped into a site you already run.
Cons. There’s no permanently zero-cost route, so if your budget for this is genuinely nothing, the route table above is your page and this entry isn’t. The format is deliberately short, so a twelve-hour flagship curriculum with dozens of modules is not what it’s shaped for. Learner allowances are counted per year, which means a large giveaway launch consumes the allowance a paid launch would have used. And if you need learner SSO or an API to run courses inside your own app, that’s the top of the ladder rather than the middle.
Plans and pricing lists what each tier includes, and the trial runs without a card, so the honest test is to build the first two lessons in it and compare them against the same two lessons built on a free route.
What to Do This Weekend
Pick one row of the route table, by what you’re actually doing rather than what’s best in the abstract: selling it, giving it away, or piloting it with people you already know. Then build the first two lessons before you compare anything else, because an outline you’ve built is a better decision-maker than an outline you’ve read about.
Do one thing before you record: find the sentence on the platform’s own site that says what happens to your course and your list on the day you stop paying. If you can’t find it, that’s information too, and it’s the cheapest thing you’ll learn all weekend.
When the first course has sold to the people already on your list and you want a second one, the question changes from what’s free to what a sale should cost you. How the selling side works is where that next decision starts.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it actually cost to start an online course?
Zero is real for one course on a free plan, and you can get to a first sale without paying anything. The first three costs that arrive are branding removal, which starts at €20 a month per seat on Genially’s Master plan, private sharing at €6 a month on Genially Pro, and the cut somebody takes of each sale, which is 10% plus $0.50 per transaction on Gumroad.
Where can I host an online course for free?
systeme.io if you want to charge for it, on a free plan with one course and 0% transaction fees. SendPulse if you don’t, with one course and up to 200 students. OpenLearn Create if you’re publishing openly under a Creative Commons license.
Can I sell a course on a free plan?
Yes on systeme.io, at 0% transaction fees and with one custom domain included. No on SendPulse, where making courses paid is what the paid plans are for. On Gumroad there’s no monthly fee at all, but 10% plus $0.50 goes on every sale through your own links and 30% on sales through its marketplace.
What happens to my course if I stop paying?
On most platforms there’s no published answer, which is itself the answer. systeme.io publishes one: contacts above the free plan’s limit are archived rather than deleted when an account reverts. Ask for the equivalent sentence in writing before you build.
Can a free plan carry more than one course?
Not on any of the routes here. systeme.io’s free plan caps at one, SendPulse’s caps at one, and Heights Platform’s entry plan caps at one even after you start paying. Course number two is the upgrade on every free route on this page, which is worth knowing on the day you plan the first one rather than the day it sells.
How long does the $0 route actually take?
A weekend is realistic for a short course if you already know the material and have it half-recorded. Budget an evening for the outline and the draft, most of Saturday for building the lessons, and Sunday for the sales page and the checkout. What blows the estimate is not the building, it’s discovering on Sunday afternoon that the platform you built on can’t take payment.
Do I need my own website to sell a course?
No. A course landing page and a link do the job, and systeme.io’s free plan includes one custom domain, so the page can sit on your own address. If your audience is already somewhere else, delivering it by link or embed skips the website question entirely.
Sources
Plan limits and prices on this page are what each vendor publishes on its own site. Pricing pages read September 2026.
- Genially plans and pricing page, and its Brand kit and private-sharing feature pages
- systeme.io pricing page and free plan inclusions
- SendPulse education pricing page
- Gumroad pricing page and Discover marketplace terms
- LearnPress plugin listing and premium add-ons on WordPress.org
- OpenLearn Create, The Open University
- Teachable pricing page and pricing FAQ
- Podia pricing page
- Kajabi pricing page
- Heights Platform pricing page
- Teachfloor pricing page
- Thinkific pricing page and pricing FAQ
- LearnWorlds pricing page and plan comparison table
- Coassemble pricing page and free sandbox sign-up gate
- Mini Course Generator plans and pricing
- The free options on the team side, our source for the ProProfs Training Maker and TalentLMS caps and for the self-hosted arithmetic
