Udemy’s Pricing Model: How To Use It To Your Advantage As An Online Course Creator

This post has been updated to reflect Udemy’s course pricing model in 2020. Enjoy!

Udemy, a popular online course marketplace, has been making a lot of changes to their course pricing model over the years. On April 4th, 2016, for example, they announced that the price of all courses sold on Udemy will be capped at $50 (click here to see their official announcement). This was a big decision for them to make, one that affected thousands of online instructors that are selling online courses on Udemy.

One of the biggest concerns that Udemy instructors had was how this change would affect their online course sales and revenue. Prior to the pricing change, many courses on Udemy were selling their courses for several hundred dollars (up to a maximum of $300). With the new changes, they were forced to reduce their course prices to a maximum of $50 each. Understandably, many Udemy instructors were upset about the pricing restriction, to which Udemy later responded by settling on a maximum price of $199.99 USD for courses sold on their platform (see their current course pricing policy here).

In this post, we’re going to look at the arguments for and against selling online courses on Udemy, and then show you how to use Udemy’s pricing model to your advantage as an online course creator.

Before we dive in, feel free to watch Thinkific’s Co-Founder & CEO Greg Smith’s original response to Udemy’s pricing change back in 2016. Although Udemy has made more changes to their pricing model since then, his suggestions on how to use Udemy’s pricing model to your advantage are still relevant today:

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