How to Sell Courses on Teachable: Step by Step

What Teachable is

Teachable is a platform for creating and selling online courses, coaching, memberships and digital downloads from your own branded “school” (your storefront on Teachable). It hosts the lessons, runs checkout, and, with its built-in Teachable Payments, collects sales tax and pays you out. Students learn on the web or in Teachable’s iOS and Android apps.

This guide covers the selling side: plans and fees, building and pricing a course, getting paid, and promotion. Plan details are on our Teachable pricing and review page.

Step 1: Choose a Teachable plan

Every self-serve plan includes unlimited students. What changes is how many products you can publish, the transaction fee and the selling extras.

USD, from teachable.com/pricing read from a US connection on October 17, 2026. *0% applies when you use Teachable Payments; card processing fees still apply. A course, coaching offer or download counts as one product; memberships, bundles and drafts don’t.

There’s no free plan. On October 17, 2026 the plan buttons offered a 7-day free trial while a pop-up on the same page offered 30 days, so check the length when you sign up. Paid plans have a 30-day money-back guarantee.

What you keep from each sale

Two fees can come out of a sale: Teachable’s transaction fee (Starter only) and payment processing (every plan). Processing on Teachable Payments is 2.9% + 30¢ for US cards, 3.9% + 30¢ for international cards, 3.49% + 49¢ for US PayPal, 4.99% + 49¢ for international PayPal, and 6.99% + 30¢ for buy now, pay later. Here’s the maths for one $100 sale:

Our calculation from Teachable’s published rates on October 17, 2026, assuming the 7.5% is charged on the full price. Excludes taxes, any tax-handling fee on Teachable Payments’ Standard bundle, chargebacks ($15 each) and currency-conversion costs.

When Builder pays for itself: Builder costs $50 a month more than Starter on monthly billing. The 7.5% fee equals $50 once you sell about $667 a month. On yearly billing the gap is $40 a month, so the break-even is about $533 in monthly sales. Below that, Starter is cheaper; above it, Builder is.

Step 2: Create your course

From the dashboard, click Create new product (or the + next to Products, or New course on the Courses page). A wizard opens:

1. Basic details: course title, author and an optional description, then Continue.
2. Thumbnail (optional): 16:9, 1024 × 576 px.
3. Pricing plan (optional): you can skip it and add one later (Step 4).
4. Outline: choose Generate with AI, Start from scratch, Bulk upload (one lesson per file) or Copy from another course, then Finish.

You then land on the course’s Setup Guide checklist, which walks you through the rest.

Step 3: Build the curriculum

A Teachable course is made of sections (groups of lessons) and lessons (video, text, files, images and quizzes). Before you sell, decide three things:

• Preview lessons: lessons marked as public preview can be watched free by anyone, which works as a sample on your sales page.
• Drip: release lessons on set dates or a set time after each student enrolls.
• Published lessons: students only see published lessons, and a course needs at least one before students can access anything.

Completion certificates and removing Teachable branding are on Growth and Custom only.

Step 4: Price your course

Open the course’s Pricing tab and click Add Pricing Plan. Pick a type, then fill in price, currency and a name:

From Teachable’s “Price your products” help article, October 17, 2026.

Things to know before you set a price:

• Teachable supports more than 120 currencies; the minimum price is $1 or the equivalent.
• You can’t edit a plan’s price, currency or type later. You archive the plan and make a new one, and archiving also invalidates its coupons.
• Checkout shows one plan; to show several options, put them on the sales page. The top plan sets the price shown in your catalog.
• You can cap enrollments or limit how long access lasts (not for subscriptions).

Step 5: Set up payments so you get paid

Teachable Payments is Teachable’s built-in checkout, run on Stripe. It’s available in 41 countries, including the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and most of Western Europe. To set it up:

1. Go to Sales > Payment Settings and select the country where your business is based.
2. Complete Stripe’s onboarding: legal name, date of birth, home address, the last 4 digits of your SSN (US) or an equivalent ID, and your bank account.
3. Back in Payment Settings, choose a bundle (Standard or Global), turn on payment methods and set checkout branding.
4. Submit your tax form: W-9 for US persons, W-8BEN (or W-8BEN-E for companies) otherwise. Schools earning over $100 must submit one, and payouts are held once earnings reach $500 without it.

Payouts go to your bank daily, weekly or monthly; daily payouts run on a 2-day rolling delay. Teachable Payments also calculates, collects and remits sales tax and VAT in 45+ markets, and sends a Form 1099-K by January 31. It doesn’t handle your income tax.

If your country isn’t supported, Teachable routes you to a Custom Payment Gateway: you connect your own Stripe account (and PayPal if you want). It works in every country and on every plan, but tax, refunds and affiliate payouts become your job, and checkout offers fewer payment methods. Only one gateway can be active at a time.

Step 6: Choose a sales page and publish

In the Setup Guide, pick a sales page: Teachable’s course sales page, a product details page, or an external URL if you sell from your own site. Choose a thank-you page, preview the curriculum, then click Publish course in the top-right corner. When asked, choose Yes, publish all to publish every lesson too, or No, just publish course to keep lessons hidden until they’re ready.

If a sales page has no pricing plan selected, it shows “This course is closed for enrollment”, so check that your plan is attached.

Step 7: Promote and sell more

• Coupons on specific pricing plans for launches and email offers.
• Order bumps and upsells at checkout, such as a workbook or coaching call.
• Cart recovery and embeddable buy buttons to sell from your own site or newsletter.
• Affiliate program (Builder and up) so partners earn a share for each sale they refer.
• Bundles and memberships, which don’t count toward your product limit.

Teachable gives you the store, not the audience. Traffic usually comes from your own channels: email list, social media, search, or a separate landing page (see our best landing page builders if you want one outside Teachable).

Is Teachable right for you?

Who it’s for: creators who want to sell courses, coaching and downloads from one school without handling sales tax themselves, and who expect enough sales to justify Builder’s 0% fee.

Skip it if: you want a free plan, unlimited courses at the entry price, or email marketing and a full website built in. Consider these instead (prices billed yearly, checked October 17, 2026):

• Thinkific: unlimited courses from its Basic plan ($40/mo billed yearly). See our Teachable vs Thinkific comparison.
• LearnWorlds: interactive video and assessments; Starter is $24/mo plus $5 per paid enrollment.
• Kajabi: email marketing, funnels and a website in one, from $143/mo billed yearly.

Comparing options before you commit? See our Teachable alternatives with a full year’s cost, or browse every online course platform we cover.

Visit Teachable

How we wrote this guide

Every step and fee comes from Teachable’s pricing page, homepage and help center, read on October 17, 2026; prices were read from a US connection. The “what you keep” figures are our own arithmetic from those published rates. We haven’t run a Teachable school ourselves yet, so menu names may differ slightly if Teachable changes its admin.

FAQ

Sources

All checked October 17, 2026.

• teachable.com/pricing
• support.teachable.com/en/articles/11682451
• support.teachable.com/en/articles/11682476
• support.teachable.com/en/articles/15624639-set-up-teachable-payments-and-start-selling
• support.teachable.com/en/articles/11682555
• teachable.com/