Invite-Only Courses

Invite only is for a course where you add the students yourself. Nothing is shown for sale, there is no checkout, and nobody can enrol themselves. You put people in, one at a time or by CSV, and that is the only way in.

It is the model for internal training: a company teaching its own staff, a school running a class, an academy onboarding a client's team. Nobody in those situations is buying anything, and every price tag, Buy button and coupon field on the page is noise at best and a wrong promise at worst.

What you can do

Run a course that is never purchasable and never self-enrollable, with every commerce affordance removed from the course page, the catalog card and the mobile buy bar.
Add students directly under Course → Students, individually or by CSV.
Keep the course listed or unlisted independently, using the course's own Visibility control.

How to use it

Step 1 -- pick the model

In the course editor, open Pricing & Access and choose Invite only (you add the students).

No price fields appear, and no URL fields appear either. That is deliberate: there is nothing to price and nowhere to link to.

Step 2 -- add your students

Go to Course → Students and add people by email, one at a time or by uploading a CSV. They are enrolled with source=manual and no transaction is created, because no money changed hands.

Step 3 -- tell them it exists

An invite-only course does not advertise itself. Send your students the course link, or point them at their dashboard, where the course appears once they are enrolled.

What a student sees

Viewer	What the course page shows
Enrolled student	The normal course, with Start / Continue
Signed-in, not enrolled	Price reads "Invite only", and a note reads "Enrolment is by invitation." No Buy, no Enrol, no coupon field, no wishlist, and no "Lifetime access" line
Logged out	The same, subject to the course's Visibility setting

The wishlist and the "Lifetime access" line are hidden on purpose. A wishlist means "I mean to take this later", which presumes the viewer could enrol at some point — on an invite-only course that action is never theirs to take. "Lifetime access" is a promise about what a purchase buys; here access lasts exactly as long as you leave it in place.

Invite only vs Closed

They are the same access rule — nobody may enrol themselves, nothing may be sold on-site, and the enrolment API answers 403 for both. They differ only in where the student comes from, and therefore in what the page should say.

	Closed	Invite only
Where the sale happens	Somewhere else — your own checkout, Gumroad, a CRM	Nowhere; there is no sale
Optional external link	Yes — a button pointing at where it is sold	No; there is nothing to point at
Catalog card reads	External	Invite only
Typical use	Selling off-site, then granting access	Internal training, a class, a client team

Pick Closed when someone can still buy the course, just not here. Pick Invite only when nobody buys it at all.

If you switch a course from Closed to Invite only, any external URL you set earlier stops being used — the course page and the mobile bar both ignore it, so a stale link cannot send your students off-site.

Settings and options

Visibility is separate. Invite only controls how someone gets in; the course's Visibility control (Public / Unlisted / Private) controls who can see the page. An invite-only course can still be publicly listed if you want people to know the course exists and ask to join.
No checkout, at any layer. The on-site checkout refuses an invite-only course, so a hand-built or bookmarked checkout URL cannot be used to buy one.
Bulk enrolment still works, and so does the external-enrolment webhook if you would rather add students from another system.

For developers

Course::is_closed( $course ) is true for both closed and invite_only. It answers the access question — may a visitor enrol themselves, may this be sold, does the webhook manage it. Always ask it through MODEL_ACCESS_MAP / access_for_model(); comparing pricing_model to the literal 'closed' returns the wrong answer for invite-only.
Course::is_invite_only( $course ) is the wording question, and the only place the two models differ.
The stored access type is closed for both, so anything already gating on access_type needs no change.