If you're a creator, chances are you've searched online for some version of "average price of an online course". I also know the chances are high that any number you found feels no more certain than before. The instinct is understandable and the answer is close to worthless, because a price is not a fact about a product. It is a claim about a specific product, sold to a specific audience, by a specific person, and almost none of those variables transfer between one creator and the next. So the honest way to price is to derive the number rather than look it up, which is slower to explain than "charge $197". And yes, prices ending in 7 are all the rage: I didn't know that back when I researched the psychological benefits of ending prices with a 9, and only found out afterwards! I still kept my prices ending with 9 though, and I think it still worked fine.
My simple advice is to "just ask Claude" or whatever AI you prefer, giving all your information and then coming up with a fair value and/or a strategy. But before that, read this blog post to learn more, also indirectly through my experience and advice. If you're a creator, I'm sure you will know better that you can't outsource your thinking to an AI, and understanding it is paramount to avoid many pitfalls!
Why cross-niche averages are noise dressed up as guidance
Two courses can be identical in quality, length and production value, and still be correctly priced twenty times apart. The difference sits in things an average cannot see.
The first is who is paying and out of which pocket. A course that helps a freelancer land contracts is bought with business money against an expected return, so $800 can be rational. The same length of material teaching a weekend hobby comes out of discretionary spending, competing with a night out, and $80 can feel steep. Averaging those two buyers produces a number that describes nobody. The second is how much of you the product consumes, because anything with live calls, feedback or a group carries a per-customer cost in hours that a recorded course does not. The third is the reputation you bring to checkout, since someone who has answered questions in public for two years can charge more for identical material than a stranger can. Price is partly a trust instrument, which is one reason trust is the real asset.
There is exactly one comparison worth making, and it is narrow. Look at people selling something close to yours to an audience close to yours, and read their pricing as positioning rather than truth: you are learning where they placed themselves and where the gaps are, not finding a correct answer they already worked out. Often the useful move is to sit deliberately outside their range, because being the cheapest or the most serious option in a niche is a position, while being the fourth thing priced at $197 is not. That is how micro-creators with small, specific audiences win against much larger accounts.
Set the floor and the ceiling yourself
From first principles, only two numbers are really yours to compute.
The floor is what serving one more customer costs you, in hours and support and platform fees, plus whatever margin makes the work worth doing. For a purely self-paced product this is nearly zero, which is why self-paced pricing feels so unanchored. For anything involving your time it is concrete, and it is the number that stops a launch turning into an unpaid support job.
The ceiling is what the outcome is worth to the buyer, in their own currency. Sometimes that is money earned or saved. More often it is time, avoided frustration, or the confidence to finally start, which is exactly what your sales page has to name. You will never charge the full ceiling, because the gap between what a course is worth and what it costs is the reason anyone buys it.
Between those two numbers, the price is also a category signal buyers read before they read your page. A low price says self-serve library. A high price says access, structure and a date in the calendar. Charge $1,200 for a video library and the buyer feels the absence of you. Charge $97 for something with live calls and you have promised more of yourself than you can afford to give. This is the failure described in why most creators fail at monetization, seen from the price tag instead of the offer, and it gets easier once you are clear on the real job your audience is trying to get done.
When in doubt, start low and keep the room to climb
Having found a range, most creators still freeze. The default that works is to launch near the bottom of your range and say plainly that it is a launch price.
The reason is not modesty. A price set too low still generates information while a price set too high generates silence, and silence is uninformative: you cannot tell whether the number was wrong, the offer was wrong, the page was unclear or the timing was bad. Early buyers at a low price give you testimonials, completion data, the questions your material fails to answer and proof the thing works, which is the raw material for the higher price later. You are paying for evidence with margin, a good trade early and a bad one forever.
Say the launch price is not coming back, then keep your word. Founding pricing works because it is scarce, and a creator who reruns the same launch offer three times has taught their audience that waiting is free. Yep, I made the mistake and I'm paying it by basically only selling my course during promotional windows. It still works, so I can't complain, but I'm not sure this was the best way to handle it!
The trap in that advice, which nobody mentions
Anchoring cuts both ways, and this is the part worth thinking about before you pick $29.
Your launch price does not just capture your first buyers. It sets what your work is understood to be worth, for them and for everyone who saw the page. Going from $29 to $149 later is not a pricing change so much as a claim that the product is now a different product, and audiences ask you to prove it. In practice that means adding modules, an MCP (you can do so, using Sherpo!) or additional files and resources, so the low launch price quietly commits you to expanding scope on a schedule. Sometimes the product genuinely improves. Sometimes it is a treadmill where every price rise costs a month of building, so beware of falling into that trap.
The way through is to keep the climb short. Start low, but not so low that closing the gap becomes a second job. A doubling is easy to justify with a few improvements and a stronger track record, while a tenfold jump means you are building something else and would do better launching it as a separate, higher tier.
The alternative: a fair price held steady, with promotional windows
The other approach suits creators who know their niche well enough to price with some confidence. Set the number you actually believe is fair against the value delivered and what comparable options cost, publish it, and leave it there. Then, when you want a push, run time-boxed discounts instead of moving the real price.
The advantage is that your anchor stays where you want it. A $400 course sold at $280 during a launch week is still a $400 course, so the discount does the work a permanently low price would have done, without the perceived-value cost or the awkward climb.
The failure mode is obvious once named: discount too often and the discount becomes the price. Three rules keep it honest. Bound every window with a real end date, give a reason so it reads as an occasion rather than desperation (a summer promo, an anniversary, Black Friday, a Christmas offer), and prefer tracked links over sitewide banners. Sherpo's custom coupons carry unique links, you can also set an always-on coupon, and the affiliate program does the same for recommendations, which turns a promotion into attribution data rather than just a smaller number. One practical tip: create several coupons with different discounts, run the same ad set on Meta or another ad platform paired with a different coupon each time, and compare performance. If roughly the same number of people convert across them, it's clear you should stick with the lower discount. Beware that this tactic can go against you, though, since Meta usually shows the same ad to the same person more than once.
Change how it is paid before you change what it costs
If you want maximum flexibility, make sure your product carries several prices, in whatever shape the offer actually needs. On Sherpo a single product takes multiple pricing plans at once: a straight one-off payment, a recurring subscription, or a subscription with an expiry date that simply ends rather than renewing, which is what a twelve-week cohort or a season-long program really is. You can also decide whether to gate access to certain course content in the various tiers, so you can create upsells.
Renewal length is yours to set too, so billing can run daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or on a custom cycle like every two days or every three weeks instead of being bent into whichever interval a tool decided was standard. The same course can therefore sell at full price, in installments, with an expiry date and at a member rate without rebuilding anything, with Stripe checkout and BNPL included. And because the whole customer history sits in one dashboard rather than in a fragmented stack, you can see which price and which window produced buyers who stayed.
One last thing worth holding onto. Almost half of US creators, 48.7% in a January 2026 survey of 1,000 of them, earn under $10,000 a year, and raising the price on an offer nobody is buying only produces a slower zero. Get the first real buyers, learn what they were paying for, and let that, rather than anyone's average, tell you what comes next. That is the loop the creator flywheel runs on.
Ready to test a price instead of guessing at one? Get started with Sherpo and give every product as many prices, plans and promotional windows as it needs.
Giacomo Di Pinto
Sep 7, 2026
7m reading time
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