The Cheapest Way to Sell an Online Course (Honest Zero-Cost Guide)

Published May 29, 2026

Disclosure: Some links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we'd genuinely suggest to a friend. See our full disclosure.

You have a course idea (or a finished course sitting in a folder), and the last thing you want is to spend money before you’ve made a single sale. Good instinct. The dirty secret of the “course economy” is that you can absolutely sell your first course for $0 in software costs. The question isn’t whether it’s possible. It’s which cheap path costs you the least in money, time, and lost revenue.

This guide breaks down the three realistic low-cost routes, the trade-offs nobody mentions, and a specific zero-cost path I’d recommend if you’re starting from scratch.

What “cheapest” actually means

Before picking a tool, get clear on the three costs you’re juggling:

• Software cost — the monthly fee you pay to host and sell.
• Transaction cost — the cut a platform or payment processor takes per sale.
• Hidden cost — your time, plus revenue you lose to clunky checkout, limited marketing tools, or a platform that controls your audience.

A “free” tool that takes a big cut of every sale is not cheap if you sell a lot. A $0 tool with no email marketing can quietly cost you far more in sales you never made. Keep all three in view as we go.

Option 1: Course marketplaces (Udemy, Skillshare)

Marketplaces let you upload a course and tap into their existing audience. There’s no monthly fee to publish, so on paper it looks like the cheapest option.

The real trade-off is the revenue split and pricing control. On marketplaces, the platform owns the customer relationship, runs aggressive discounts, and takes a significant cut — especially on sales they drive through their own promotions. Exact splits and rules change often, so check current terms before you commit, but the pattern is consistent: you trade a big chunk of revenue and pricing power for access to their traffic.

Best for: Validating whether a topic sells at all, or earning passive income on a broad, evergreen skill where you don’t care about owning the audience.

Pros:

• No upfront or monthly software cost.
• Built-in audience and discovery.
• Handles hosting, video player, and payments for you.

Cons:

• Large per-sale revenue cut on platform-driven sales.
• Little control over price (platform-wide discounts can gut your margin).
• You don’t own the customer email — you can’t easily sell them anything else.
• Heavy competition; you’re one of thousands.

If your goal is a real business with repeat customers, a marketplace is a starting experiment, not a home.

Option 2: DIY stack (WordPress + plugins + Stripe)

The classic “own everything” route: your own website, a learning-management plugin, and a payment processor like Stripe or PayPal connected directly.

Here, your only unavoidable cost is the payment processor’s per-transaction fee (check current Stripe/PayPal pricing for your country — it’s typically a small percentage plus a fixed fee). No platform takes a slice of your course revenue.

The catch is that “free” is rarely free. You’ll likely pay for hosting, a domain, and possibly a premium LMS plugin or theme. More importantly, you become the tech support, the security patcher, and the person debugging why the checkout broke at 11pm. That’s the hidden cost.

Pros:

• Lowest per-sale cut (just the payment processor).
• Full ownership of your site, content, and customer data.
• Unlimited customization.

Cons:

• Real setup time and a learning curve.
• Hosting/domain/plugin costs add up — not truly $0.
• You own all maintenance, updates, and breakage.
• No built-in audience; you drive 100% of the traffic.

This is the cheapest per-sale once volume is high, but it’s the most expensive in time and the riskiest for a non-technical beginner.

Option 3: Free all-in-one platforms

This is the sweet spot most beginners miss. A few all-in-one platforms offer genuine free plans that bundle course hosting, a sales page, a checkout, and basic email marketing — with no monthly fee.

Systeme.io is the standout here because its free tier is unusually generous for selling a course: you can host a course, build a sales funnel and checkout page, and send email to a capped list size, all at $0/month. You connect your own Stripe/PayPal, so the only cost per sale is the payment processor fee — the platform itself doesn’t take a course-revenue cut on the free plan. Always check current plan limits and pricing, since free-tier caps change, but as a starting point it’s hard to beat.

The trade-off is the usual freemium one: contact and funnel limits, lighter design polish, and some advanced features locked behind paid tiers. For a first launch, those limits are rarely the thing standing between you and a sale.

Pros:

• Genuinely $0/month to start.
• Funnel, checkout, course hosting, and email in one place.
• You connect your own payment processor — no course-revenue cut.
• You own the customer email list from day one.

Cons:

• Free-tier caps on contacts, emails, and funnels.
• Less design flexibility than a full DIY site.
• Advanced automation/features require upgrading.
• All-in-one tools tend to be “good enough” at many things rather than best-in-class at any one.

The honest comparison

The marketplace wins on traffic, the DIY stack wins on long-term per-sale economics, and the free all-in-one wins on the combination beginners actually need: no monthly fee, no revenue cut, and you keep your audience.

The recommended zero-cost path

If you’re starting from nothing and want the lowest realistic cost without crippling your business, here’s the path I’d take:

1. Pick a free all-in-one platform and connect your own Stripe/PayPal. Start on Systeme.io’s free plan. Your only per-sale cost is the processor fee, and you keep the customer’s email.
2. Build one simple funnel: a sales page, a checkout, and a thank-you page. Skip fancy design. A clear promise and an honest outline outsell pretty.
3. Capture emails before you sell. Offer a free lesson or mini-guide in exchange for an email. Even a basic list is the single most valuable asset you’ll build.
4. Grow the list, then sell. Email people who opted in. Selling to a warm list tends to convert far better than cold traffic, and it’s free.
5. Upgrade only when limits actually bite. When you outgrow the free email caps, that’s a good problem — you now have revenue to justify a paid plan. If email becomes your main growth lever, a dedicated tool like Kit (ConvertKit) is worth comparing at that point, though it adds a monthly cost.

This gets you selling for the price of the payment processor’s cut — nothing more — while keeping ownership of your audience so your next launch is easier and cheaper still.

A quick reality check on “cheapest”

Cheap software is the easy part. The expensive part of selling a course is getting attention. No tool fixes a topic nobody wants or a sales page that doesn’t explain the value. Before you obsess over saving a few dollars a month, make sure you’ve validated that people will actually pay — that’s where most course revenue is won or lost. For the full picture of getting a first course off the ground, see our guide to launching your first online course, and if you’re weighing tools beyond the free tier, our comparison of the best platforms for course creators goes deeper.

Bottom line

The cheapest way to sell an online course is a free all-in-one platform connected to your own payment processor — you pay $0 in monthly software, give up no course revenue to a middleman, and keep your customer list. Marketplaces are fine for a quick validation experiment but cost you control and a big revenue cut. A DIY WordPress stack is cheapest per sale at scale but expensive in time and risk for a beginner.

Start free, prove people will buy, then spend money only when your sales justify it. That order — validate first, pay later — is the real secret to selling a course cheaply.