Build your own
online course platform

A SaaS course platform runs everything a course website needs — the site, video, payments, student access, lists and email — in the cloud for you. You pay monthly or yearly and never rent a server, install a plugin, or apply an update. What you are really buying is not having to look after it.

The difference between the three routes comes down to who carries the cost and the risk.

Self-hosting WordPress is the most flexible, but operations are 100% on you: plugin vulnerabilities, missed updates leading to a compromise, a hacked server leaking member and order data — those are everyday risks on that path.

Listing on a course marketplace is the fastest start and comes with existing traffic, but it takes a cut, and the people who buy your course are the marketplace's members, not your customers: you cannot email them directly, and when the platform changes its rules you simply live with it.

With a SaaS course platform the domain, the list and the brand are yours, while hosting, updates, security and payment integrations are the platform's job. The deciding factor is usually not the length of the feature list but whether the platform covers the way you actually sell — your local currency, your invoicing obligations, and the payment providers your buyers expect.

We take no cut of your course revenue and charge no transaction fees — what you sell is yours. There is only one thing that costs extra beyond the monthly fee: usage above what your plan includes.

Every plan includes 1,000 contacts and 1,000 posts. Contacts means student accounts, past buyers and newsletter subscribers combined and de-duplicated (the same email counts once; you and your co-admins don't count). Above that, each additional 1,000 contacts, or each additional 1,000 posts, costs US$5 per month.

In practice the vast majority of sites never reach that. And if you do pass 1,000 contacts, it usually means your site is already earning — at which point US$5 a month is a rounding error.

What matters most: going over never interrupts your service. Students keep registering, posts keep publishing — we don't use quota blocks to push you into paying. The difference simply shows up on your next invoice, and we email you before it does. If your usage drops back under the limit, the charge is removed automatically.

File storage for images and video is a separate allowance (5GB on the starter plan, 10GB on advanced) that you can top up yourself from the dashboard. Post text lives in the database and is counted separately from the file storage your images use.

The dashboard has a built-in 301 Redirect feature (available on both the Starter and Advanced plans). You map each old URL to its new page on the platform, so when a visitor or Google hits the old URL, they're permanently (301) redirected to the new location. Your search ranking and the link equity from external backlinks carry over—nothing resets to zero just because you moved.

Even with a lot of pages and posts, you don't have to add them one by one: under "301 Redirect → Bulk Import" you can paste the whole batch at once, one "old path, new URL" per line. Paste two columns from Excel or Google Sheets, or a CSV exported from the WordPress Redirection plugin (you can paste the full old URL straight into the old-path column too—the system extracts the path automatically), up to 2,000 rows at a time. Importing the same old URL again overwrites it rather than creating two conflicting rules.

How it works in practice: use “Import from WordPress” in the dashboard to bring your pages and posts across, then prepare an “old URL → new URL” mapping and paste it into Bulk Import — done. If your old site already had a redirect plugin like Redirection, those existing rules come over as well.

On the Advanced plan, you can even hand this off to your own AI—give it the list of old-site URLs and let it match them against the new URLs on the platform and build all the redirect rules in one batch.

One note: redirects are matched by "path" (for example, /2024/05/hello-world), so they still work even when you change domains—as long as you point your old domain at the platform, old links will automatically route to the new pages.

The biggest difference is this: there's no "server of yours" sitting online. With WordPress you're really doing three things at once—renting a web host, renting a database, and installing and maintaining an entire software stack yourself. That server runs 24/7, and anyone on the internet can try to log into it or scan it for holes. That's exactly where WordPress sites tend to get burned: a vulnerable plugin or theme lets malware slip in, a missed update leaves it locked up and held for ransom by automated attacks, or a compromised host leaks your members' and orders' data.

We use the same "serverless" cloud model that powers Google and Amazon (AWS): your site is code that runs on a global edge network only when a visitor arrives—executing at the nearest node, then finishing—with no fixed server left running. There's no operating system for you to maintain, no back door to be logged into, no outdated plugin waiting to be cracked. That entire category of WordPress security pain simply doesn't exist in this architecture.

Speed and capacity aren't your problem either: pages are served from the nearest of 300-plus global edge nodes, so visitors get a fast connection wherever they are. A sudden traffic spike doesn't require you to "upgrade your server"—the underlying resources scale automatically. And because the whole platform runs on one shared codebase, when we upgrade, every site updates at once. You'll never be the site that "got attacked because it wasn't updated," because there's simply nothing for you to update by hand.

On cost: that "pay for actual compute and traffic" underlying expense is between us and our cloud provider, and it's on us. Your side is a straightforward monthly or annual plan fee—no nasty cloud bill landing in your inbox just because traffic spiked one day. Use it a lot or a little, we carry the underlying cost.

So how does it compare to Shopify or Shopline? On architectural security, we're in the same class—all of us are modern managed cloud platforms, none of us carry the "maintain your own server" security risk, and that's precisely where we all beat self-hosted WordPress. What we give you on top: your data is enforced-isolated per tenant right at the database layer, sensitive credentials like payment keys are encrypted at rest, backups run automatically off-site every day, and you can use your own domain. On top of that, we don't take a cut of your sales as a transaction fee (most e-commerce platforms skim a percentage), and the whole system is purpose-built for selling online courses—courses, video, students, and payments all in one place, no plugin patchwork required.

In one line: our security is the same modern cloud tier as Shopify and Shopline, with none of WordPress's "host getting hacked" risk—but we don't take a cut of your revenue, we let you use your own domain, and we're built specifically for online courses.

The dashboard has 301 redirects built in (available on both the starter and advanced plans). You map each old URL to its new page here, and visitors and Google hitting the old address get a permanent (301) redirect to the new one — so your search rankings and inbound-link authority carry over instead of resetting when you move.

With a lot of pages and posts you don't have to add them one by one: 301 redirects → Bulk import takes a whole list at once, one “old path, new URL” per line. Paste two columns straight from Excel or Google Sheets, or a CSV exported from the WordPress Redirection plugin (a full old URL works too — the path is extracted for you), up to 2,000 rows at a time. Re-importing the same old URL overwrites the rule rather than creating two that fight each other.

How this usually goes: use Import from WordPress to bring your pages and posts across, then paste an “old URL → new URL” mapping into the bulk importer and you're done. If your old site already ran a redirect plugin such as Redirection, those existing rules come across as well.

On the advanced plan you can also hand this to your own AI — give it the list of old URLs and let it match them to the new ones and create the redirect rules in bulk.

One note: redirects match on the path (for example /2024/05/hello-world), so they keep working even if you change domains — point the old domain at the platform and old links land on the new pages automatically.

Yes. The Advanced plan supports AI Assistant Integration: connect your own Claude or ChatGPT to your dashboard, then just chat to tell it what to do—no more clicking through page after page yourself.

How to connect: on the dashboard's "AI Integration" page, copy a URL, paste it into Claude's or ChatGPT's "Connectors" settings, and log in to authorize once—done (about two minutes, no engineer required).

Here's the kind of thing you can just "say" to it:

"Build me a sales page for my 'Vocal Expression' course: a full-width hero image up top, then three student testimonials, the course outline, an FAQ, and a sign-up button at the bottom—use my site's primary color." → The AI assembles the whole page (hero visual, multi-column layouts, buttons, countdown timers, FAQ, all supported) and saves it as a draft for you to preview.

"Write a 1,500-word blog post on 'How Beginners Can Train Their Voice'—open with a strong hook and lead into my course at the end." → The AI writes it and saves a draft; you review it before deciding whether to publish.

"How much did I sell this month? Which course sold best?" → The AI pulls together your revenue, order count, and top courses for you.

"Grant Wang Xiaoming access to the 'Advanced Class' course." "Create a 10%-off coupon, code SPRING10, limited to 50 uses." "Someone emailed support asking about a refund—reply to them for me." → All of these can be handed straight off.

On security, you stay fully in charge: the AI can only save pages and posts as drafts, and for "can't-be-undone" actions like publishing, sending an email newsletter, issuing refunds, or deleting a course, the AI can only propose—it won't actually run until you go into the dashboard and click confirm. You can also revoke the AI's connection with one click at any time, and see every single thing it did in the audit log.

And if you have a team or clients using your site, you get to decide "whose AI can connect and which features they can touch"—an AI can never do more than that person's own dashboard permissions already allow.