Do you want to start a new online business using existing knowledge, skills, and experience?
If so, the Teachable free plan may be your best option to begin an entrepreneurial pursuit.
A free plan on a teaching platform allows you to explore your options, especially if your resources are limited.
With the Teachable free plan, you initially get to experiment with online course delivery without the commitment of monthly fees.
What does the Teachable free plan include and Is Teachable still free?
How does the free plan compare to paid options, and who should use the Teachable platform?
Does Teachable offer a free plan?
Anyone wanting to become an entrepreneur and wants to create online courses can use the Teachable free plan.
Teachable offers free and paid monthly plans, with a range of benefits for each plan that facilitate course creation, building your website, and marketing tools to support your success.
The free Teachable plan is ideal for first-time users who wish to monetize their education and skills.
Although the Teachable free plan is only accessible for two weeks, this is adequate time to test the site, check your technological skills, and see how it can benefit your entrepreneurial endeavor.
If you’re satisfied with the site’s performance, you will need to upgrade your plan to start selling your unlimited courses.
After your free trial period is over, you can opt to continue with a Basic, Pro, or Business Plan. All the benefits of each plan are visible on the site, allowing you several options to start your new business.
What does the Teachable free plan include?
Few people have the time or patience to experiment with many teaching platforms.
You can take the pain out of this process by experimenting with course creation on Teachable (see also ‘What Is Teachable?‘) (see also ‘What Is Teachable?‘). The Teachable free plan allows you to create online courses using various tools for professional lesson delivery.
Best of all, you don’t have to pay any upfront fees to use their free trial service.
Only when you know you’re serious about this route should you commit to a Basic or Pro plan to market your course.
Until you’re ready to take the next step, browse through the features of the free plan and how these can benefit your startup.
What you get from the Teachable free plan:
- Hosting of your website.
- The ability to host as many courses as you can offer in your teaching school.
- The potential to sell courses to an unlimited number of students.
- Unlimited video training uploads.
- Helpful discussion forums for inclusive teaching.
- Simple and basic quizzes to test student knowledge.
- Sales pages and integrated payment processing.
- Facility to offer free courses.
- A feature that includes student account management.
Once you have registered an account and set up your teaching platform on Teachable, you can make adjustments until you’re ready to go live.
After making this decision, you can upgrade your account to begin earning a passive or semi-passive income.
How does it compare to paid plans?
Now that you understand what a Teachable free plan gets you, a look at the monthly paid plans for 2021 will expand your options and horizons.
- The basic plan on Teachable costs $39 per month.
- A professional plan costs $119 monthly.
- The comprehensive business plan is $299 every month.
1. The basic plan
The Teachable basic plan is ideal for when you want to market your teaching courses effectively. Teachable provides you with the appropriate platform to offer and sell your courses.
Pros
- The basic plan offers everything available in the free plan and more. With this plan, you receive unlimited storage for videos and other teaching content.
- You can access an integrated email marketing tool with this plan to promote your courses to a broad audience.
- This plan also offers drip marketing of content.
- Promote your site further by offering coupon codes to encourage purchases.
- You can offer quizzes to students to test their learning.
- Access Teachable’s massive library for course content creation, called TeachableU.
- When students pay for courses via Teachable’s payment gateway, they are paid immediately–no waiting, ever.
- Integrate social media platforms like Facebook and all the features such as Zapier, ConvertKit, Sumo, MailChimp, and Google Analytics. All these features help keep you on top of marketing and analyzing your offerings to detect gaps in the website and marketing efforts.
Cons
- The biggest disadvantage of the basic plan is that Teachable takes 5% of all sales.
Once you’re selling over ten courses monthly, it may be beneficial to upgrade to the Professional plan.
2. Professional plan
The professional plan on Teachable is $80 more and is suitable when you’re confident that your income will exceed your overheads.
Despite this hefty price jump, the additional benefits of the professional plan far outstrips those of the Teachable free plan or the basic plan.
Here are the primary benefits you receive when you upgrade to the Professional plan.
Pros
- Teachable does not charge any transaction fees on any courses you sell.
- When you’re selling ten and more courses enough, this can be enough to make the professional plan viable.
- You receive five admin-level users on this plan, allowing assistants or partners in your teaching school to help manage the platform. Additional admin users on your site include the primary owner, business partners, or course authors. The user’s designation doesn’t matter much if colleagues can access the site as they don’t need the main password to make changes.
- You can focus on online course business branding as you are no longer obligated to use Teachable logos on your site or courses. The possible drawback here is that you and your unlimited students will still see Teachable branding in secure URLs when logging in or on checkout pages.
- Another valuable benefit of this plan is that you receive prompt customer support for any queries or when you need technical help.
- Additionally, you get to upgrade basic student quizzes to graded tests.
- You can also provide your students with course completion certificates on this plan.
- Teachable provides professional plan users with an advanced reporting function. This improvement enables you to check course information, student details, data about video usage, and upselling features.
- One of the best features of this plan is that you can use an integrated affiliate marketing tool that lets you harness student power to promote your courses in return for a commission.
Cons
- Insofar as drawbacks are concerned on this plan, there aren’t any. If you’re selling enough courses every month to pay overheads, your chances of selling more increase on the professional plan.
3. Teachable’s Business plan
Any business plan is going to be more expensive. Simultaneously, your benefits exponentially increase when you upgrade to the plan that offers more value.
Once you establish the foundations of your online lessons with the Teachable free plan and move through the upgrades, the Teachable business plan is perfect for a thriving organization.
Here are the benefits you receive when you upgrade your account on Teachable.
Pros
- At this level, you can add 20 users at the admin level.
- You can now assign customized user roles to help administer the site without parting with your password (see also ‘The Best Alternatives To LastPass‘) (see also ‘The Best Alternatives To LastPass‘).
- The business plan is appropriate to use once your online teaching school is established.
- You can use this plan to move to in-house Training for company employees, which Teachable provides.
- At this level, you receive premium customer service.
- A business plan also allows you to access calls for group coaching (see also ‘How To Start A Coaching Business‘) with customer success managers that Teachable also provides.
- Once your business is solid and prosperous, this plan enables bulk import students and enrollment.
Cons
An additional benefit of all Teachable pricing plans is annual discounts. If you pay for Teachable plans annually, you can expect to pay the following fees in 2021:
- Basic plan – $29.
- Professional plan – $99.
- Business plan – $249.
Anyone interested in offering education online should seriously consider starting with the Teachable free plan and growing their businesses with paid plans.
Who is Teachable for?
Teachable is a solid platform for course creators to sell a course.
You can use this platform as an individual who wishes to market courses based on formal education or a hobby you want to teach online.
Teachable is a suitable platform for any educational purpose. If you have a professional group of teachers, managers, or IT specialists, you can replace the Teachable free plan with a business plan.
A business plan offers extensive features that enable a comprehensive online school from which to sell courses.
If you are in the exploration stage and unsure whether you want to be an online entrepreneur, the Teachable free plan is ideal for testing your metal.
Whichever option you feel meets your needs, you don’t have to make any commitment other than the time when using the Teachable free plan.
This plan allows you to test yourself and whether you are serious about monetizing your courses and whether the platform performs to expectations.
Weigh your options when choosing a paid plan to determine whether the investment supports your teaching aspirations and marketing abilities.
If you have the energy and resources to create courses and source a target market, you will have an excellent chance of success.
Further reading:
Conclusion
The Teachable free plan is the perfect way to create and teach online courses.
Whether you want to examine alternative cash flow streams or make online teaching a career, a free plan is an excellent testing ground.
Only once you are sure about generating an additional income with learning courses should you consider one of Teachable’s paid plans to enjoy tremendous growth.
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