Teachable vs Propiaterra - Video Course Platform Comparison
Propiaterra vs Teachable
Teachable has been around since 2014 and helped a generation of creators launch their first course. It's beginner-friendly, the setup is fast, and the student mobile app is included on every plan. Genuinely useful things. For someone testing an idea with a small audience, it's a reasonable starting point.
The challenge is that Teachable's pricing and terms have shifted significantly over the years - three full restructures in roughly five years. The June 2025 restructure alone removed the free plan, introduced hard limits on student and product counts, and migrated all users to new plan tiers with around 30 days' notice. No grandfathering.
Propiaterra is built differently. We build your course platform once - on Webflow, Outseta, Bunny.net, and Make - with every account set up in your name, billed directly to you. Your site, your student data, your content, your automations. We build it and step back. However if you require and request support, we're always here for you.
What Teachable is genuinely good at
Teachable's student experience is clean and well-considered. Video progress tracking with resume functionality works on all plans. The student mobile app - iOS and Android - is free on every paid tier and supports offline viewing, which is a real advantage over platforms that charge extra or don't offer it at all.
Certificates and quizzes are included across all plans. The checkout is solid, with support for order bumps, upsells, payment plans, and Buy Now Pay Later. For a creator who already has a marketing stack in place and needs a reliable course delivery system, Teachable does the delivery job well.
Where it gets complicated
The transaction fee on Starter. The entry plan ($29/month annual) carries a 7.5% transaction fee on every sale, on top of standard payment processing fees. On a $200 course, that's $14.80 going to Teachable and Stripe. The break-even point where upgrading to Builder ($69/month) saves money is around $667/month in revenue. Beyond that, staying on Starter costs more than the higher plan.
Hard limits introduced in June 2025. Teachable's previous plans had no published student caps. The June 2025 restructure introduced them for the first time. If you hit your limit, you're forced to upgrade. The caps: 100 students on Starter, 1,000 on Builder, 5,000 on Growth and Advanced. Product limits apply across all plans: 5 on Starter, 10 on Builder, 50 on Growth, 100 on Advanced.
The data ownership structure. This one is worth reading carefully. Per Teachable's Data Processing Agreement, both Teachable and the course creator are classified as independent data controllers of student data. That means Teachable retains independent rights to use your students' data for their own purposes - marketing, platform optimisation, and others - even after you leave the platform. Your students signed up for your course. Teachable treats them as their contacts too.
Email marketing is transactional only. Teachable handles abandoned cart emails, upsell notifications, and basic drip sequences. There's no visual email builder, no broadcast campaigns, and limited segmentation. Most creators running a proper email operation need an external tool regardless.
On cancellation, your school goes offline and students lose access to all purchased content. Admin access - including data export - becomes restricted after cancellation, which means you may need to re-upgrade to a paid plan just to retrieve your own data. Course content is stored in a proprietary format that, per Teachable's own help centre, "can't be opened or read by any other software." Individual video and image files must be downloaded one at a time.
Pricing history. Three restructures in five years is a meaningful pattern. Users on community forums report going from $348/year to over $1,600/year for broadly equivalent access. Each restructure came with limited notice and no grandfathering for existing customers.
What Propiaterra does differently
We build on Webflow, Outseta, Bunny.net, and Make. And every account is set up in your name from day one.
Your design, not a template. Teachable's site builder is functional but constrained. Webflow gives you a completely custom design. Your brand system, your typography, your layout, your custom video player. Your platform looks like yours.
Your videos on a proper CDN. Video is delivered through Bunny.net, a purpose-built global content delivery network. The player is custom-designed to match your brand.
Your CRM, email, and payments in your Outseta account. Outseta handles your CRM (contact management, pipelines, tagging), email marketing (broadcasts, sequences, automations), payments (Stripe-native subscriptions, one-time purchases, and trials), and help desk, all under your account. Your students are your contacts.
Your automations in your Make account. Every workflow - onboarding, progress tracking triggers, certificate delivery, re-engagement - runs in Make under your account.
Your student data sits in your Outseta account, where you are the sole data controller. Not an independent controller alongside Teachable , solely yours.
The ongoing tool costs are ~$85–150/month, billed directly to you at published rates. There's no monthly fee to Propiaterra after the build.
The upfront investment ($5,000–$12,000 depending on tier) is real. For a creator just starting out, Teachable's Builder plan at $69/month is a sensible place to begin. Propiaterra is designed for creators already earning consistently who want their platform - and their student relationships - to be entirely theirs.
A note on price
Teachable Builder at $69/month (annual) = $828/year, every year, with a pricing history that suggests it won't stay there.
Propiaterra Signature = $7,500 once, then ~$100/month in tool costs billed directly to you.
By year five, the Teachable Builder user has paid over $4,100, less than Propiaterra's build fee, which is worth acknowledging. But they've also had no control over price changes, own no platform asset, and their student data sits in a dual-controller arrangement. The Propiaterra client paid more upfront and has a platform that's genuinely theirs.
You can calculate your actual costs using our pricing calculator at the end of this article.
Which is right for you?
Teachable makes sense if you're in the early stages, want to launch quickly, and need a platform that handles course delivery cleanly without a significant upfront investment.
Propiaterra is worth a conversation if you're already earning consistently, want your student data to be solely yours, and want a platform built to your brand, not Teachable's.