How Much Does it Cost to Create an Online Course? (Worksheet)

There are many variables that go into calculating the cost of creating an online course. Much of it depends on the type of course you want to create and whether you plan to do the work yourself or outsource it to someone else.

As you go through this post, be sure to complete the worksheet (request below), and you'll have a very close estimate of how much it will cost you to create an online course and get it ready to sell.

A Breakdown of Costs for Creating an Online Course

Creating an online course is not as simple as throwing a script together and saying ‘ta da!’ There are a variety of factors that go into creating and launching a successful course that adds to the total cost. 

These factors can be broken down into the following categories:

• Labor: This will be the single biggest cost. If you want to free up time and hire a team of freelancers, virtual assistants, instructional designers, or project managers then it will add up to the total cost of creating your course.
• Software: This covers your course platform, your video editing tools, Microsoft Office (or other document software), and tools like Zoom for doing live sessions. 
• Hardware: If you want to use a webcam, your phone, a mic, or a professional camera then this will add to the total cost as well.

Take a look at a list of the tools and resources for creating an online course, many of which I use regularly.

In this article, I'll break down each phase of creating your course and tally up the investment as we go along.

What does the cost to create an online course depend on?

No two courses are the same. You can imagine, after reading the above factors, that there is a wide range that your online course could fall into.

The cost of creating your online course will depend on the following:

• The type of course you want to create: Will this require extensive video, or complex interactions from your audience? Or will this be a text-based course?
• The quality of the course videos: Will you film your course with a webcam, iPhone, or professional film equipment?
• How many people are involved: You could create the course all on your own, but for an advanced course you might want to consider hiring or outsourcing work. The more people you involve the higher the cost will go. 

Because hiring is by far the biggest cost-driver (aside from building a professional film studio, which we do not recommend), let’s examine that a bit further.

When is it worth it to outsource your course?

Even if you do everything yourself, it’s not exactly free. 

You either pay with time or money to create your course, so it all comes down to which is the most cost-effective. 

To help determine that, let’s start by assigning a monetary value to your time. 

To keep the numbers simple, we’re going to assume that your time is worth at least $50/hour (it may be much more than this, but this is just for illustration). Given an hourly rate of $50, we’ll multiply the time that would be spent on the activities required to create a course by $50 to work out the cost.

When you do your own estimates, be sure to insert your own hourly rate multiplied by the number of hours you think it will take you, personally, to complete those tasks.

For example, suppose that creating a course outline and the content will take you 25 hours (including mapping out the course, writing the script, and creating the videos). Well, your cost for this would be 25 hours x $50, which equals $1,250. This is what your time is worth, and what creating the course will cost your business. 

I'll use this illustration throughout the rest of this article to help you tally up the total cost and see for yourself when it is worth it to outsource your course creation.

How much does it cost to create a course?

We know the factors and what the cost depends on, now let’s get down to business. How much does it cost to create a course? 

Creating a course is a bit more complicated than turning on your camera and talking to the mic, so we’ll break down the costs of creating a course into the following phases:

• Choosing a topic
• Creating your course outline
• Creating your course content and assets
• Your online course platform
• Creating a sales page
• Hiring people to help you build your course

And then we’ll add it all up at the end. Remember to swap in your hourly rate to determine your true cost to create a course as you read through this next section.

The Cost of Choosing a Topic for Your Course

If you're going to sell a successful course then you need a good topic. 

Before putting pen to paper (or keys to your keyboard), you need to brainstorm your online course idea and focus. This ensures you pick a course topic that your target audience will want to enroll in, so it's one of the most critical parts to get right! 

Now, the tempting action to take here is to limit your brainstorming since it can quickly become expensive! The first 3 or 4 times you brainstorm, it will take longer. Over time, you'll refine the process, and it will become faster and more cost-effective. 

Once you've brainstormed your online course topic, make a note of how much you spent on brainstorming. If you use a tool for brainstorming, like a Miro Board or mind map software, remember to factor in that expense. Then write down your total cost.

Estimate the Cost of Brainstorming Your Course Idea and Focus

The Cost of Outlining Your Course

Once you have your online course topic and ideas, the next step is to outline all the key points and elements that will go into the course. 

Some prefer to outline using a mind map, others use bullet points, and some pour all their ideas into a Word document. If you're working with other people on your course, you may decide to use Google Docs to allow real-time collaboration. 

You may be tempted to skip over outlining your course, but don’t. Here’s a word of caution: if you don't properly outline your course, then you run the risk of producing a course that doesn't flow well, or worse, it confuses your customers. 

Experienced course creators will be familiar with instructional design principles. While there isn't enough time here to give you a crash course in instructional design, there's a  process instructional designers use that you can follow:

• Assess your target audience's needs and establish the goals of the course 
• Design a learning experience that will engage students and achieve specific learning objectives
• Develop content that enables you to teach effectively and gives students what they need to learn and take action
• Evaluate the success of your course based on feedback and metrics tied to your course goals

Instructional design is a massive field in itself, but by taking care to bear the above principles in mind, you'll set your course up for success.

Most first-time course creators miss the instructional design part of the course creation process, and yet this is what makes your course "work". This is what reduces your refund requests and is the framework that gets your student motivated and ensures their continued participation. So be sure to estimate the outlining costs now and write it down.

Estimate the Cost of Outlining Your Online Course

As you can see, we're just two steps in and we've spent a minimum of $300 and possibly $1000. And all we have to show for it is a course outline! Towards the end of this post, I will share some options for low-cost, high-impact course creation. So if you're feeling disheartened, scroll down to the end of the post. 

The Cost of Creating Your Online Course Content and Assets

Now that you have a course topic and a well-thought outline, let’s get to work. 

The next step is to turn that outline into online course assets that will be combined into the course that you will sell. This is the most time-intensive piece of creating a course, so depending on your ability to create the course assets and skill in doing so, you may want to outsource this piece if your budget allows.  

Course assets can be anything, but usually take the form of:

• Powerpoint/slide themes
• Videos 
• Captions for your videos (required in the USA, UK, and EU, you can create Closed Captions easily with tools like Otter.ai or Rev.com)
• Workbooks
• Worksheets or quizzes

Estimate the Cost of Creating Your Course Content and Assets

When it comes to creating your online course assets, there may be things you don't have the skills for or don't have the time to do. You know roughly how much it will cost you to do it yourself, so you can see how it compares to hiring a virtual assistant (VA) to help you.  It might take a VA one hour to create a reusable PowerPoint theme, and it would take you 5 hours. This means outsourcing it will save 4 hours and $200. When you calculate the total cost, you know how much you will save! 

Estimate how much time you'll spend yourself creating online course assets, your software expenses, and any cost for outsourcing to a content developer or team member. Write it down. You can even starting adding everything to the workbook you can download at the bottom of this post.

The Cost of An Online Course Platform

Once upon a time, your online course platform options were limited. Now there's an abundance of choices. 

If you’re overwhelmed, slow things down and choose the one that will be the easiest for you. I use and recommend New Zenler, particularly if you don't have other tools already. It has built-in sales pages, video hosting, email marketing, and a slew of other useful tools (including Zoom integration). They even have a free version, with some restrictions, so you can try out the platform and see if it's for you. 

Now estimate how much time you'll spend choosing the best online course platform for you, along with its yearly cost. Then write that down and add it to your workbook.

Estimate the Cost of Your Course Platform

The Cost of Uploading Your Course to Your Course Platform

The course platform you choose determines how long it will take to upload your course. 

If it's drag-and-drop like New Zenler, you'll have your course uploaded and organized in 60-90 minutes. Other platforms may take longer. 

If you use an LMS with WordPress, you have to create each page individually, add your content to your video hosting platform, and then embed it into your WordPress page. You will have to set up login pages, and welcome areas. All of that takes additional time. So factor in the time you'll spend based on the platform you choose, and then add it to your workbook.

Estimate the Cost of Uploading to Your Course Platform

The Cost of Creating Your Course Sales Page

You’re doing this to make money, right?

If you want to sell your course, then you’ll need a nicely designed and effective sales page. 

The course platform you choose may have a sales page tool built in. You may wish to have a shopping cart, or use WordPress. We recommend investing in a sales page tool so that you can duplicate your pages for future courses. Sales page tools also have tested templates that present your offer more professionally, especially if you're not an experienced web designer.

The free version of New Zenler has a page builder built in, made from drag-and-drop blocks, and you can easily duplicate it for your next course. 

How much your sales page costs will depend on whether you write your sales page yourself, or you hire a copywriter and a VA (to upload the content).

Sales pages are probably the biggest investment you will make in your online course, from the page builder to the content to the page design. Our financial estimates here are on the low side. A copywriter alone can cost $2,500 for a sales page, and that may not include uploading it or the page design itself. 

Make your best estimate now for creating your sales page, and then add it to your workbook so you can calculate your total cost.

Estimate the Cost of Your Online Course Sales Page

The Total Cost of Creating an Online Course

Let’s pull it all together. 

• Time/Labor: 30 - 85 hours of your time, according to the breakdown above.
• Software: Let’s assume you use New Zenler, which is currently $600/year (though it's steadily going up in price as they add more expensive features).
• Hardware: Let’s assume you use a simple $50 webcam and a $100 microphone (though this is optional if there is no video or audio in your course).

Based on this and a $50/hour estimate, the cost of labor will be $1,500 - $4250, which means the total cost to create your course will likely be somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000 (depending on extra equipment and software). And there will be any yearly subscriptions, such as your course platform. Again, this assumes your time is worth $50/hour. If your time is worth $100/hour, then creating an online course yourself is much more costly due to the time required.

While there is no upper limit to the cost of course creation, you'll find our higher estimates here are $4,000 plus course platform fees. You'll also have PayPal and Stripe fees for processing student payments, though those will get deducted directly from your payment processor. 

Remember, your time costs you money. If you're creating a course, you're not growing your business or servicing clients. So calculate the cost for every task. This way, if you want or need to outsource something, you know how much you are saving.

How much can you make from an online course?

That’s what you're here for, right?

How much you're willing to spend on creating your course will depend on how much you can earn from selling it. This is an “it depends” sort of answer.

If you have some following on social media, you can easily make one or two sales and validate your course idea. Remember, no matter how wonderful you think your course is, it's your audience who will decide whether to buy it or not.

With your first course launch, you will be lucky to recoup your initial costs back. This is to be expected! The next time you launch it, you'll have more experience and be able to attract more of your audience with your content. The people who took your course the first time around will be able to give you the social proof that will increase your conversions, and you'll be able to raise the price a little. Previous students can even become affiliates and promote your course. 

When marketing your program the second time around, you can adjust the sales page so it's more compelling, and offer enticing bonuses. You can even experiment with marketing your course with webinars and ads if you wish.

The second launch of your course is where you break even or start making a profit. By the time you've launched your course for the third time, you'll now be earning a great return on your investment. 

First-time course sellers who only launch their course once often feel disappointed that they've not made more money. Money comes with consistency and experience. Your determination to succeed with your course will get you there! 

By the time you're launching your course 3 or 4 times a year, you'll find you can easily make 5 figures with each launch.

Once you get the hang of it, why stop there?

Rather than intermittently launch courses, you can build a serious stream of passive income for your business by setting up multiple courses across price points. Savvy course-sellers have a sales funnel with at least one “low ticket offer”. A low-ticket offer is generally a one-problem-one-solution short course that sells for $27-$47 (depending on your audience). This low-ticket offer becomes your entry point to your course sales funnel, and the upsell is the first course you created. Take it a small step further, and you can add in "order bumps," like a planner or some templates. This increases the value of your shopping cart, naturally, but also increases the value for your students.  

As you sell more courses, you grow your email list with buyers, and over time they invest in more products and services that you offer. It's at this point you'll look into developing more courses and aim for the now highly-achievable 6 figures in profit! All it takes is creating and launching one course to get started.

How to Create Your Online Course for Less

As you can see, there's a lot of work (and money) that goes into creating a course. 

But there's an easier, more affordable solution that cuts out a lot of the work for you. It not only frees up your time, but it enables you to earn more money and have better opportunities. That solution is for you to use ready-to-go, White Label Courses.

That's what we do here at Content Sparks. We create white label courses (also called private label rights courses) with all the instructional design and course content creation built in. So all you have to do is brand the material, record the slides, upload your course, and sell it.  

Most people take 3-6 months to create their online course, if they get it completed at all. However, our customers can easily take one of our Blaze course kits on a Friday, and have it ready for sale on a Monday. 

Estimated Cost of Creating Your Online Course Using Content Sparks' White Label Courses

We not only sell the complete course funnel (such as a lead magnet, nurture emails, follow-up emails, evaluation forms, and more), but we also have extra lead-generating content - including assessments, challenges, blog post content, and social media updates. We didn't include any of the marketing or follow-up content in this post, because you're focused on getting your online course creation priced out first.

With all of the course content and extra marketing content done for you, we'll save you thousands of dollars and free up a lot of your time. We'll also make you look incredibly professional, keep your competitive edge, and grow your brand! Which reminds me,... the only other things you'll have to factor in is how long it takes you to choose one of our white label courses!

Most people find 10 hours, plus the cost of a Content Sparks course kit (about $247) is still much more economical than $2,000, which is the lowest rate of creating an online course. If you find yourself doing more for your course, you'll actually save several thousand dollars using our online course kits.  Take a look at the topics available now: