How to Sell an Online Course for Free in 2026 (Step-by-Step)
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If you searched for a free course platform any time before last year, Teachable or Thinkific probably came up. Neither works anymore. Thinkific pulled its free plan in March 2026, replacing it with a free trial; its cheapest ongoing plan is $40/month billed annually. Teachable dropped its free tier too, and its cheapest plan (Starter, $29/month billed annually) still charges a 7.5% transaction fee on every sale.
That leaves a narrower field than it used to be. Systeme.io still has a genuinely free course platform: one course, 500 students, drip content and quizzes included, no card required, no expiry date. Here's how to set one up, and exactly where the free plan stops being enough.
What "free" actually gets you
| Platform | Free plan in 2026 | Entry paid plan | Transaction fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Systeme.io | 1 course, unlimited students (capped by the 2,000-contact database) | $17/mo (5 courses) | 0% on every plan |
| Teachable | None (removed) | $29/mo (Starter, annual) | 7.5% on entry plan |
| Thinkific | None (removed, trial only) | $40/mo (annual) | 0% |
The 0% transaction fee on Systeme.io's free plan matters more than it looks. A platform with a free login but a per-sale cut isn't free once you have paying students; it's a commission arrangement with extra steps. Systeme.io and Thinkific both skip that, but only Systeme.io does it without a monthly fee attached.
That fee difference compounds with price. Sell a £200 course to 20 people on Teachable's entry plan and 7.5% works out to £300 gone to fees before the monthly subscription is even counted. The same 20 sales on Systeme.io's free plan cost £0 in platform fees; you only pay whatever your card processor takes (typically around 1.5-2.9%, unrelated to the course platform itself). For a first course, where you don't yet know if 20 people or 2 will buy, not paying a monthly fee on top of a per-sale cut is the difference between testing an idea for free and paying to find out it doesn't sell.
Before you start
- A free Systeme.io account. No card needed.
- Your course content in roughly its final shape: video files, or a script you can record from, broken into modules.
- A price in mind, even a placeholder. You can change it later, but the checkout step needs a number.
Building the course
- Go to Courses > Create a course. Give it a name a stranger would understand from the title alone, not an internal project name.
- Add modules, then lessons inside each module. A module is a chapter; a lesson is one video or one piece of text. Five to eight lessons per module is a normal pace, not four minutes each.
- Upload video directly or link to a hosted file. Systeme.io hosts video natively, so for most solo creators this is the simplest path: no separate video host, no embed code to manage.
- Turn on drip content if the course should be paced. Under the course's settings, you can release modules a set number of days after enrolment rather than dumping everything at once. Useful for cohort-style courses; skip it for a reference-style course people dip into as needed.
- Add a quiz to any module that needs one. Multiple-choice, auto-graded. Good for confirming someone actually watched the lesson before moving on, less useful bolted onto every single lesson out of habit.
- Set the price and connect payment. A course becomes a product with a price, linked to a funnel with a checkout page. If you already built a funnel for a lead magnet, add the course as a new offer inside it rather than starting from nothing.
- Turn on the completion certificate if you want one. It exists on every plan: your logo, a signature, the student's name and completion date, auto-generated once someone finishes every lesson. It isn't a design tool, so if you want something more customised than logo-and-signature, you're building that separately.
- Publish and enrol yourself as a test student. Watch the first lesson through the actual student view, not the editor. The two look different enough that mistakes hide in the editor and show up in the student view.
The honest limitations
The 2,000-contact database is the free plan's real ceiling, not the 1-course limit. Systeme.io doesn't cap course students directly, but every enrolled student becomes a contact, and the free plan holds 2,000 contacts total across everything. Most solo creators launch one course anyway, so the single-course cap rarely bites first. Reaching around 2,000 students is a milestone most creators would be glad to hit and then need to solve. At that point the $17/month Startup plan lifts the ceiling to 5,000 contacts, so the upgrade is cheap relative to what triggered it.
The certificate isn't a design feature. It proves completion; it won't look like something a graphic designer built. If certificates are a selling point of the course itself (a professional accreditation, for instance), test the actual output before promising it in your sales copy.
Only one automation rule on the free plan. You can auto-enrol a student in an email sequence when they buy, which covers the essential case, but branching logic ("if they complete module 2, send email B; if not, send a reminder") needs a paid tier.
Who this is actually for
- A first course, testing whether the idea sells at all → ideal. You can validate demand and take payment before spending anything.
- A cohort-based course that leans on branching automation (different emails depending on progress) → workable at first, but you'll hit the one-automation-rule wall once the cohort logic gets specific.
- A course you're relaunching from Teachable or Thinkific because your old plan changed → also a good fit, since migrating video and modules across is mostly re-uploading, not rebuilding a system from scratch.
Before you launch
Send yourself the actual checkout flow with a test card, not just the course content. A course that plays perfectly in preview but has a broken payment button converts nobody. A course is simply a product sitting behind a checkout page, the same structure as any other funnel. If you're still deciding whether the free plan is the right home for this at all, our Systeme.io free plan review covers the rest of what's included alongside the course platform: email, funnels and a blog, all under the same free login.
Start building your course on Systeme.io free, no card required
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