Pricing guide
E-learning platform pricing: hosted LMS, Moodle, or custom
The platform price is half the story; video hosting is the other half.
A trainer selling courses, a private school moving lessons online and a company building its internal academy are all technically buying the same thing — at three completely different prices. The rental route: a hosted LMS such as Teachable, Thinkific or LearnWorlds costs roughly €30–300 per month, plus sales commissions on the cheaper plans; your first course can be live in a weekend. The middle route: Moodle, the open-source LMS with zero licence fees, installed, visually customised and configured for your needs — around €2,000–10,000 plus hosting; the de facto standard in schools and corporate academies. The ownership route: a platform built for your exact business model, with recurring subscriptions, automatically issued certificates, community and gamification — €10,000–50,000, with the Romanian engineering rates behind that range being one reason European education businesses build here. Whichever road you choose, one cost stays stubbornly outside the initial quote: video delivery. Dozens of hours of good-quality footage need specialised hosting (Vimeo Pro, Bunny Stream) at roughly €20–200 per month — and whoever discovers this late discovers it through learner complaints about lessons that keep buffering.
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Key takeaways
Hosted LMS: €30–300/month
Teachable, Thinkific and their relatives: immediate launch, payments included, zero technical worry. Cost rises with learner numbers, and basic plans keep a 5–10% commission on every sale.
Customised Moodle: €2,000–10,000
Zero licence cost — you pay only installation, a theme matching your brand and configuration. Full control over learner data. The downside: an austere standard interface, and administration needs someone willing to learn it.
Your own platform: €10,000–50,000
Subscriptions, automatic certificates, community, role-based learning paths — built exactly on your business model, with no commissions and nobody else's limits. Justified only at consistent revenue or audience.
Video hosting: €20–200/month, always forgotten
Course video does not stream from ordinary site hosting: you need adaptive streaming and download protection via Vimeo Pro or Bunny Stream. Budget it from the start; it grows with content hours and views.
Which route for whom — and a break-even calculation
The independent trainer starting out has an easy answer: rent the LMS, because the unknown is not the technology but whether the audience buys the course — and €50/month is the cheapest way to find out. The private school or the company with an internal academy leans toward Moodle: learner data stays with the organisation, costs do not rise per user, and the pedagogical requirements (tests, gradebooks, progress reports) are exactly what Moodle has done for twenty years. The custom platform is for businesses where education IS the product: consistent monthly course revenue, needs no LMS covers, or a subscription-and-community model where the experience is the differentiator.
The break-even fits in two lines. A creator selling €15,000 a year of courses on a mid-tier LMS plan pays roughly €1,200 a year in subscription plus, on cheap plans, commissions that can double the figure. At €50,000 a year in sales, the same percentages become €4,000–6,000 annually — the point where a €6,000 customised Moodle, or even a platform of your own, starts amortising over 2–3 years while handing you control of pricing, data and experience. The honest rule: do not build a platform before you have proof of sales on a rented one; but do not sit on subscriptions and commissions once they exceed the annual cost of owning.
Frequently asked questions
Can I sell courses straight from my WordPress site, without a dedicated platform?
Yes, with LMS plugins like LearnDash or Tutor LMS, at roughly €200–400 a year in licences plus €500–1,500 of setup. It is a decent middle road for small catalogues, but at dozens of courses and thousands of learners, performance and administration turn fragile — WordPress-plus-LMS is a growth stage, not a destination.
How do I protect my course videos from piracy?
Realistic protection means streaming with expiring signed links, a watermark carrying the learner's email, and blocked direct downloads — all included in services like Vimeo Pro or Bunny Stream. Absolute protection does not exist: anyone determined can record a screen, and rampant copying is fought more effectively with fair pricing and frequent updates than with technology.
What does running Moodle cost compared with a rented LMS?
With Moodle you pay hosting (roughly €20–80/month for a few hundred active learners) and periodic security and version updates, about €500–1,500 a year if outsourced. The rented LMS bundles everything into the subscription — which is exactly why the fair comparison is total cost over 3 years, not the advertised monthly price.
Can the platform issue recognised certificates to learners?
Technically, any platform can auto-generate PDF certificates on completion — that part is cheap. Recognition, however, comes not from software but from your accreditation as a training provider (in Romania, ANC authorisation for officially recognised certificates); the platform only reflects the status you hold, it cannot create it.
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Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247