How To Determine The Cost of Building Your First Online Course

To keep things organized, we divided all things to consider when calculating the cost of the course development process into 3 categories:

Let’s get started.

Different multimedia elements are used in online courses that determine their level of engagement.

Some common elements include:

Let’s have a more in-depth look at the key elements that contribute to the cost of online course development.

Where direct, simple, text-based eLearning material is provided to the learners.

The purpose is to deliver information in a classic text or image design that doesn’t make use of interactive functions.

Limited interactivity courses include:

These eLearning courses blend theory and practice in an attempt to instill motivation.

An online course that includes:

All these elements contribute to a more personalized learning experience.

Online courses with moderate interactivity focus less on theory and more on practice.

These types of online courses require learners to interact with the screen at each step of the presentation.

Some elements that are included are:

And more.

These elements require high-end interactive tools which are more complex, more expensive, and need more time to develop.

You need to plan and choose your course materials wisely as they’re a great contributor to the final cost of online course development.

There’s a wide variety of video cameras available, so we’ve compiled 4 options, from low budget to high budget:

Choosing the best video camera adds to the overall quality of your course videos.

However, there’s no shame in starting from the bottom and working your way up!

Even if you choose to record your videos on your smartphone, we recommend getting a quality lavalier microphone.

Here are 3 microphone options, from lowest to highest price:

The microphone you choose will be one of the most essential pieces of your equipment.

A unique lighting system helps with the following:

Whether you record your content indoors or outdoors, you need proper lighting equipment to ensure high-quality videos.

Some affordable lighting equipment includes:

If you’re looking to make your footage crisp, sharp, and colorful, we recommend using the correct lighting equipment.

If you plan on doing a demo as part of your online course, adding a screen recording can make your tutorial easier to follow.

Here are 3 popular screen recording software systems:

If you’re going to be creating videos you will need to choose reliable video editing software.

Video editing can sometimes be a daunting task for first-timers.

However, with the right video editing software, you’ll be a pro editor in no time.

3 top picks for editing your videos include:

Some more good news: You don’t have to be a pro designer to create stunning course slide presentations either!

We recommend a design tool, like Canva. It provides templates for nearly any type of visual content that you can imagine.

Canva offers a 30-day free trial, an Enterprise plan of $30 monthly, and a Pro option that costs $119.99 annually.

Alternatively, you can use Google Slides’ free library of presentation templates to create attractive and professional-looking slides for your online course.

The LMS you choose has an important role in your course development.

This program oversees the distribution of course materials and keeps track of student progress.

Therefore, you need to be sure that your choice of system meets your needs in terms of features.

Many course systems make it simple to launch training programs, set them up, and create pages and content.

We suggest systeme.io as an all-in-one solution, which you can try out for free.

And others.

The prices here might differ if you choose to hire others to create the courses for you.

You’ll have to either develop the course content yourself, delegate it to your team, or hire a professional to do it for you.

If you decide to use an in-house team or hire a third-party developer, you can expect higher costs in most areas of online course development.

Let’s have a look at the implications and costs of each option.

And more!

You can always reduce the effort and time spent building, by starting small.

A downside to this is, however, that you might not have employees with the necessary skills to execute the job and end up having to hire other people after all.

Members that you need to bring to the table include:

However, for smaller projects, you might not need all these people.

To sum up the first category’s costs, here is a list of the main expenses thus far:

As you can see, there are enough options to explore, without having to break or alter your budget.

Also, please note the above prices are subject to change, so we suggest you pick a favorite and set up an Amazon alert for when those products are on special.

In the next section, we will have a look at the business costs that you’ll encounter.

After creating your online course content, you’re ready to upload, publish and sell your online course.

Your online course business will be incomplete without a website.

A good first step would be to find the best domain name for your website.

GoDaddy.com boasts of being the world's largest domain registrar, having an enormous selection of names and award-winning support.

With GoDaddy.com, you’re also able to register your domain name for one or more years upfront.

In GoDaddy’s offer, you’ll find not only domain names but also website hosting with monthly costs from $2.50 to $20.

With Namecheap.com you get:

Not only does Domain.com have a great name, but they’re also a popular competitor when it comes to registering domain names.

Our prices range between $0 and $97 monthly.

Here’s a summary of category 2’s costs:

In the next section, we’ll have a look at the marketing costs that are generally involved in the complex process that is online course development.

Now that you have all the tools to build and host your online course, the next step would be to market it to your learners.

This calls for a marketing plan.

Here are a few ways you can market your course:

Let’s have a more in-depth look at the above marketing strategies.

The main advantage of social media marketing is that it reaches a large number of people at one time.

A summary of the marketing costs:

Another option to save some money is by developing the entire online course by yourself.

You could also rent the necessary equipment for your first course and if you decide to continue building courses you can buy it all.

Finally, you can partner with a platform such as systeme.io!

And so much more!

Naturally, our Unlimited plan is the best option, as it offers unlimited access to all our features.

Our Free plan is forever-free and you can upgrade to a more premium plan whenever you want to.

By now you’ve been introduced to all online course development phases and how much each element involved therein will cost.

You have all the information you need to determine your budget and create an incredible and profitable online course.

A few last words of wisdom:

If you’re serious about creating a course and using a platform that makes the whole process much easier, then check out systeme.io and sign up for our Freemium plan today!