0% Transaction Fees are Here

Why Transaction Fees in the First Place?

We started CourseStack in partnership with a handful of initial development customers with similar use cases and business models — selling courses with hands-on content. Implementing a transaction fee for course sales was a simple and fair way to charge for the value we provided as a platform, even if we weren't exactly sure how much they were charging for their courses.

As our customers grew, so would we.

But as our customer base expanded, so did the variety of use cases. There were quickly many scenarios where a transaction fee was either difficult to implement or didn't make sense at all. We struggled to tie the value we were providing for:

• • Live events & CTFs
• • Conference trainings
• • Totally free content
• • Internal training
• • Product demos

… to the same transaction fee based model. This prompted some deeper thinking.

What's the Real Value CourseStack Provides?

At its core, CourseStack helps educators deliver hands-on labs to their students. The full-fledged LMS and course sales processing is in support of this core value proposition, but not the heart of the platform.

Making it easy to build and deliver a variety of high quality hands-on content types is where we really shine.

We wanted this unique selling point to be reflected in our pricing model as well.

Introducing Labs-Based Pricing

We've always had a usage-based component to our pricing. A Credit is the usage metric which enables us to offer hands-on content super cost-effectively. Credits are close to a direct passthrough of the actual cloud costs associated with our customers' lab usage.

Keeping credits extremely cost effective is a priority; it's what enables our customers to offer great hands-on courses at approachable prices. We couldn't just jack up the price of credits and call it a day. That would fundamentally break the pricing structure of many of our customers' existing courses and platforms.

Instead, we're introducing Lab Capacity plans.

Lab Capacity plans allow our customers to run as many hands-on labs as needed for course development and student delivery, while keeping a predictable monthly spend.

We're also including 25 labs per month with every platform plan so customers can get started before jumping into a paid Lab Capacity plan.

See more details on all pricing changes on our pricing page.

Competing with Other LMS Platforms

Another benefit of these updates? Extremely competitive pricing with the other large course platforms out there.

While it's not the core value add, providing a robust LMS for courses, workshops, and live events like CTFs is still a very valuable part of our offering.

Many customers come to CourseStack with existing courses that don't yet have any integrated hands-on labs. This update lets them move from their existing course platform at a similar price point while they work on building out their hands-on content.

We feel our platform is really well suited for technical content. With markdown-based course authoring, webhooks, and a developer API available for every customer, we hope this pricing update will encourage anyone with existing courses out there to consider switching to CourseStack and leveling up their catalog with interactive, hands-on learning.

What's Next?

An ancillary benefit of this update is that it encourages the team to ruthlessly focus on what makes CourseStack special — integrated hands-on lab functionality in your courses.

We plan to push hard this year on additional content types like containers and isolated cloud accounts. We'll also be building out deep hooks into all our content types to let course authors understand what their students are doing in their labs at a deeper level. More to come on this soon.

Immediately next up is an LTI integration to let course creators serve their hands-on lab content through external LMS platforms like Canvas, Moodle, Brightspace, and custom-developed solutions.