What actually sends people looking
People rarely leave Teachable because it stopped working. The reasons that come up are narrower.
The first is fees. Some hosted plans take a cut of each sale on top of the processor’s fee, and that is easy to ignore at ten sales a month and harder to ignore at a few hundred. Plans change, so look at the current terms rather than a number from a blog post.
The second is control. A hosted platform decides what your pages can look like, what an export includes and when a plan changes. Some creators are fine with that. Others find the limit the first time they want something the platform does not do.
The third is that the business grew past one tool. A creator who started with a single course and now has a blog, a shop and a community on WordPress often wants the course on the same site.
Do the fee math with your own numbers
If fees are what sent you looking, put a real figure on them before you do anything else. A comparison page cannot do this for you, because plans, percentages and processing fees change and depend on your sales.
- Open your last twelve months of sales and write down the total you took.
- From your Teachable plan page, write down the monthly price and any per-sale fee that applies to your plan today.
- Add the payment processor’s cut, which you pay on any platform.
- Subtract the result from your total, and call that your net on Teachable.
- Repeat the sum for a WordPress setup: hosting, the processor’s cut, any email tool, and Learnomy Pro if you need it.
The gap between the two nets is what moving could save you in a year. Weigh it against the hours a migration and ongoing site upkeep will take. For a small catalogue the saving may be modest, and for a busy one it can be large enough to settle the question.
The usage fee on students who did not pay at checkout
Teachable’s Usage Fees page describes a per-student charge that is easy to miss because it has nothing to do with sales. Each school includes 100 countable students at no charge. Above that, each countable student costs $0.50 per month, billed on the highest count reached in the billing period. The page says the fee is the same on every plan.
A student counts when they were added by any route other than a paid Teachable checkout. The page lists admin imports, API adds, manual enrolments, $0 checkouts and 100%-coupon checkouts as examples. Students who bought through Teachable’s payment gateways at a price above zero do not count, and a student is counted once per school however many products they hold.
The page also says the current policy applies to schools created on or after 3 September 2026. Older schools stay on the earlier fee structure until their first renewal on or after 30 April 2027, unless they convert sooner. Read the page for your school’s date, because the rates differ between the two structures.
Here is a worked example with made-up numbers, so swap in your own:
- You run a free starter course that brings in 600 people, and 150 more arrive on a 100%-off coupon.
- That is 750 countable students. The first 100 are included, so 650 are billable.
- 650 students at $0.50 is $325 a month, or $3,900 a year.
- The 90 people who paid full price are not in the count at all.
The point is not that this is large or small. It is that a free lead magnet, which costs nothing on a self-hosted site, becomes a line on the invoice here. If you give away a lot of access, count those students before you decide.
On a self-hosted LMS the equivalent cost is your hosting, which grows with traffic and not with a headcount of free accounts. Learnomy’s licences are per site, and nothing in the plugin bills you by student count. Free students are rows in your own database.
How the field splits
There are two directions, and they solve different problems.
Another hosted platform. Thinkific, Podia and Kajabi keep the same shape: you rent a site and someone else looks after it. If your complaint is Teachable’s fees or its limits, one of these may fit better. If your complaint is that you do not own the thing, they will not help.
An LMS on your own WordPress site. Learnomy, LearnDash and Tutor LMS are plugins. The course lives on a site you control, with a theme and hosting you choose. You get more freedom and take on more work. That is the real difference from a hosted platform, and it is the whole decision: more control, more upkeep.
Money, receipts and tax: what you take on
A hosted platform quietly handles a handful of money jobs. On your own site some of them become yours, so it helps to know which.
Checkout runs through your own Stripe or PayPal account, and the money goes straight there, minus the processor’s fee. Learnomy keeps a transactions ledger, issues a receipt, and lets you refund from the admin, with partial refunds supported. It sells in a wide range of currencies, chosen once for the whole site.
Tax is the part to read carefully. Learnomy applies one flat rate on Stripe and PayPal checkout. Per-region VAT rules are delegated to WooCommerce, which you can use as a payment gateway. If you sell across many countries with different rates, work out your tax position before you launch, and talk to an accountant. The tax guide explains exactly what is covered.
What a student sees
Students do not care which platform you use, but they do notice when the experience gets worse. Learnomy gives each lesson one of seven content types: video, audio, PDF, an embed, a download, a live session or rich text. Video lessons track how much of a video a student has watched, and they play from YouTube, Vimeo or Loom links.
Students see a course outline that shows which lessons are open to them and which are locked, a progress bar, and a certificate with a public verification page when they finish. Quizzes come with six question types in Free and two layouts, with a timer, autosave and resume if the connection drops.
A protected video type appears only when the MediaShield plugin is active. If you host your video privately today, ask how your videos will play before you promise anything.
What Learnomy does and does not cover
Learnomy runs on your own WordPress site. The free plugin ships courses, six quiz question types, certificates with a public verification page, memberships, coupons, instructor commissions, and built-in Stripe and PayPal checkout. Pro adds content drip, cohorts, SCORM, xAPI, H5P and AI authoring.
What it does not have is a hosted platform’s everything-included feel. There is no built-in email marketing, no funnels and no website builder, and no course marketplace to send you students. You bring the traffic and connect an email tool. If you rely on any of those, read the strengths above before you go anywhere.
Moving the people, in detail
The student list is the most valuable thing you take with you, so handle it with care. Here is what happens when you bulk enrol from a list.
You paste the email addresses into the course, or upload a CSV, and press the enrol button. For each address that has no account, Learnomy creates one and emails an invitation to set a password. People who already have an account are enrolled, and anyone already enrolled is skipped, so a repeat run does nothing harmful. A summary tells you how many were enrolled, invited, skipped or failed.
Because the list is just emails, students arrive with no progress. Anyone who finished gets marked complete on a manual-completion course, which issues their certificate. Everyone else starts the new version of the course from lesson one, so tell them that before they find out themselves. The bulk enrolment guide has the screens.
Keep selling while you move
You do not have to stop taking money. Leave Teachable selling while you build, and decide on a cutover day for each course. Open sales on the new site for that course, close the old sales page, and keep the old course running for existing students until you have enrolled them.
A closed course in Learnomy is one you do not sell on the site. If you want to keep Teachable as the checkout for a while longer, the same setting works with the incoming enrolment webhook, although it needs a small relay you set up yourself, as explained on the Gumroad page. For most people, a clean cutover is simpler.
If you do decide to move
Be realistic here, because it is where people get surprised. There is no Teachable importer. Learnomy’s importer reads LearnDash, Tutor LMS and LifterLMS, and that is all. Nothing in Learnomy pulls courses, lessons, quizzes or students out of a Teachable school.
The move is manual, and it works. Plan it as four jobs:
- Export your student list from Teachable before you cancel anything. Keep the emails, and note who finished which course.
- Rebuild the courses in Learnomy: sections, lessons, video, files and quizzes. Download your own video and document files while you still have access.
- Bulk enrol students into each course. On the course’s admin page, open Bulk enroll from a list (CSV / emails), paste or upload the addresses, and run it. It creates accounts for new emails and sends a set-password invite, and it skips anyone already enrolled. One request handles up to 500 addresses by default, and it tells you how many remain so you can submit the rest.
- For students who already finished, set the course to manual completion and mark them complete.
Manual grants bypass payment, so a student you enrol this way does not pay again. Check each course’s access type first, and tell people what is happening before the first invite lands in their inbox.
For a large catalogue, script the enrolments through the REST API or the incoming enrolment webhook, or treat it as a custom migration. Do it on a staging site first and check one full course and one real enrolment before you point students at it.
For the straight two-way comparison, see Learnomy vs Teachable.
Coupons, launches and sales
Most course creators run launches, and discounts are part of that. Coupons are in the free plugin, as a percentage or a fixed amount, with usage limits and a start and end window. A sale price on a course can have its own dates, so a launch discount ends without you remembering to switch it off.
Memberships can be sold with a trial period, and a lifetime tier works as a one-time purchase. If you want to bundle several courses, a membership plan that includes them is the way to do it.
What you will not find is a built-in affiliate system or a funnel builder. If your launches lean on affiliates, price a plugin for that before you decide.
Your student records afterwards
Your students’ accounts, enrolments, progress and orders sit in your own database. You can export them, report on them and join them to other tools, and nobody has to approve the request.
Privacy requests work through the standard WordPress tools. Learnomy adds exporters and erasers for the data it holds, so one request covers the learning records too. Financial and audit rows are kept but unlinked from the person, and a deleted student’s certificate stops verifying.
Before you close any hosted account, export what you can and keep the files somewhere safe. Check teachable.com for what its export contains, so you know what you are keeping and what you are losing.
When something breaks, who do you ask
This is the question hosted platforms answer better than anyone. When your course page fails on a hosted platform, there is one company to contact. On WordPress the fault might sit with your host, your theme, another plugin or Learnomy, and finding which one is part of the job.
Staging helps a lot: test every update there first, and you catch most problems before a student does. For anything that looks like a plugin problem, the support page shows where to ask.
Be honest about whether you want to own that diagnosis. If the answer is no, a hosted platform is a good answer and you can stop reading.
What Learnomy does not do for you
Learnomy has no built-in email marketing, funnels, website builder or marketplace. It has no affiliate programme either, so referral tracking needs a separate tool. It has no built-in live video, no single sign-on and no native mobile app, though a REST API with token sign-in lets a developer build an app.
The importer reads only LearnDash, Tutor LMS and LifterLMS, so nothing moves across from Teachable by itself. Everything on the list above is something you can add with another plugin or service, but each is a decision and a cost you make for yourself.
A realistic first month
Aim for one course live and sold by the end of the month, and the rest following. Week one is build and test purchase. Week two is certificates, quizzes and the sales page. Week three is bulk enrolment of your existing students. Week four is moving sales across and answering the questions that follow.
Resist moving everything at once. A half-finished move of ten courses is harder to support than a finished move of one. A single course with a handful of real students teaches you what the full move will need, and the cost of a mistake is small. Once that course is steady, repeat the pattern for the next one.
Plan a short pause between courses, so that support questions from one batch do not collide with the next.
Write down the questions students ask during the move, because they become the first draft of your help page. Keep a short log of anything that surprised you, and share it with your support person if you have one. See the guide to selling courses on WordPress for the sales side of the setup.
Where this leaves the decision
Teachable earns its place on simplicity and on not having a site to look after. Nothing in a comparison table makes up for that if it is what you need.
If you already run WordPress and the fees or the lack of control are what bother you, the free plugin is a cheap way to find out. Build one real course, put a price on it, and see whether the site you end up with is one you want to own.