Self-hosted and lightweight alternatives

#1. Self-hosted: LearnDash as the worked example

LearnDash, the dominant WordPress LMS plugin, prices as a flat annual license rather than a percentage of revenue: $199/year for one site, $399/year for up to ten, $799/year for unlimited sites, and 0% transaction fee on any of them. [Established] — this is the vendor's own published pricing; independent reviews consistently corroborate the same figures, which is a useful sanity check against a single-source vendor claim. LearnDash also offers a managed-hosting "Cloud" tier starting around $29/month billed annually, which trades some of the self-hosting labor back for a recurring fee closer in shape to the hosted platforms.

The real cost of "self-hosted," though, isn't the license — it's everything the license doesn't include: WordPress hosting (roughly $60–$900/year depending on traffic and host tier), a domain, a payment-processing integration you have to wire up and maintain yourself (Stripe directly, at its standard 2.9% + $0.30, with no platform markup on top), and, less quantifiably, the ongoing maintenance burden of a self-managed WordPress site — plugin updates, security patching, and the ordinary technical-debt accumulation of running your own stack. [Directional] — the hosting-cost range is a reasonable planning estimate corroborated across several independent reviews, not a vendor-disclosed figure, since actual hosting cost depends heavily on traffic and host choice.

#2. The crossover math

At meaningful revenue, self-hosted wins on pure fee math against every platform in the previous lesson except the top tiers of Teachable/Podia/Kajabi (which are also 0% platform-fee once you're paying $89–$499/month for them). A course doing, say, $10,000/month would pay roughly $290 in Stripe processing either way, plus whichever platform's fixed monthly cost — versus LearnDash's flat ~$17–$67/month license cost (annualized) plus hosting. The gap is real, but it's a gap that only matters once you're doing consistent revenue; below a few thousand dollars a month, the time cost of running your own WordPress stack (which is not zero, and is a skill most course creators don't already have) plausibly outweighs the fee savings versus just paying a hosted platform to handle it. [Speculative] — this crossover-point framing is this course's own arithmetic applied to the disclosed fee schedules above, not a sourced third-party finding; run your own expected volume through the actual numbers before deciding.

#3. Gumroad, as the lightweight-marketplace comparison point

Gumroad isn't a course platform in the LearnDash/Teachable sense — no drip content, no cohort structure, no progress tracking — but it's frequently used to sell a course as a simple digital-download bundle, and its fee structure is instructive as a contrast case. Gumroad charges 10% + $0.50 per direct sale, with no monthly plan at all; if a sale comes through Gumroad's own Discover marketplace/search feature rather than a link the seller drove themselves, the fee rises to a flat 30% on that transaction (all processing included). [Established] — Gumroad's own published fee structure. Layered against Stripe's separate processing cost, the effective take rate on a direct sale runs closer to 13% than the headline 10%, and — unlike every platform in the previous lesson — Gumroad's percentage does not step down as monthly revenue grows: a creator doing $40,000/month pays the same percentage as one doing $400/month. [Directional] — the effective-rate figure and the flat-regardless-of-volume observation are independently corroborated across several fee-calculator breakdowns of Gumroad's own published terms, not Gumroad's own disclosed "effective rate" (Gumroad discloses the headline percentage, not a blended effective rate). This makes Gumroad the right tool for testing an offer with zero fixed cost and the wrong tool for a course doing serious sustained volume, where its percentage never gets cheaper the way every hosted platform's does once you commit to a higher tier.

#4. What actually decides this choice

Three questions, in order, decide the platform-vs-self-hosted-vs-marketplace choice more reliably than a fee-schedule comparison alone:

• Do you need drip content, cohort scheduling, or community features, or just a checkout and file delivery? If it's genuinely just delivery, Gumroad or a bare Stripe checkout is simpler and cheaper at low volume than standing up any of the five hosted platforms or a self-hosted LMS.
• Do you already run a WordPress site, or would you be standing one up from scratch just to host a course? LearnDash's fee advantage assumes WordPress competence (or budget to hire it) you may or may not already have; if you don't, the "savings" are partly illusory once you price in the learning curve or a developer's hourly rate.
• Is the product a one-time course, or an ongoing membership/community? This is the same distinction the previous lesson drew between Teachable/Podia/Kajabi (course-commerce-first) and Circle/Skool (community-first); a self-hosted WordPress stack can do either, but LearnDash specifically is built around the course case, not the community case, and bolting community features onto it is a materially bigger project than the license fee suggests.

None of this changes the pricing and launch-sequence mechanics that come next — the platform is the distribution and delivery layer underneath a launch, not a substitute for having an audience and a priced offer worth launching.