Picking a course + product platform

The seven realistic options for selling courses, books, and templates from this site — with tradeoffs, take rates, and my picks.

The /courses and /products pages currently link to #newsletter for anything that isn’t shipped yet. When you’re ready to sell for real, pick a platform, drop the checkout URL into src/lib/courses.ts or src/lib/products.ts, push. That’s the whole change.

Here’s the shortlist, ranked by what makes sense for a technical audience selling to other technical people.

1. Lemon Squeezy — recommended for digital products

For: books, playbooks, templates, one-off downloadable products.

Why: Handles global tax (VAT, GST, US sales tax) as a Merchant of Record — you don’t. Clean checkout, license keys, refund handling, affiliate program. Playbook-style dashboards that make sense.

Take: 5% + $0.50 per transaction.

Setup effort: ~30 minutes. Add product → get checkout URL → paste into products.ts.

Tradeoffs: Slightly higher take than Stripe direct, but MoR means you never touch tax paperwork.

2. Gumroad — the classic

For: same as Lemon Squeezy, longer track record, simpler UI.

Take: 10% flat (all-in, includes payment processing).

Setup effort: 10 minutes.

Tradeoffs: Take is higher, UI hasn’t evolved much. Still fine for a first product to validate demand.

3. Podia — recommended for courses, single-tier

For: cohort or self-paced courses, hosted video, drip content, community + course in one.

Why: Purpose-built for course creators. Handles video hosting, quizzes, discussion, email — all in one bill. Clean student experience without you building it.

Take: ~5-8% depending on plan; monthly subscription ($33-$89/mo) instead of high per-sale take.

Setup effort: A few hours to build the first course page + video setup.

Tradeoffs: Students go to podia.com/yourcourse — you can point a subdomain but the experience is theirs, not yours.

4. Circle — recommended for community-heavy courses

For: cohort courses where community is a first-class feature.

Why: Best-in-class community product with course/paywall bolted on. If the value prop is “learn with a group,” Circle wins.

Take: Subscription-based, ~$89-$399/mo. No per-transaction fee once you’re on a plan.

Setup effort: Half a day.

Tradeoffs: Costs more up front. Overkill if you’re not doing community.

5. Kajabi — the “everything platform”

For: if you want CRM, email, funnels, courses, community, and a store from one vendor.

Why: Full-stack creator platform. Handles everything.

Take: ~$149-$399/mo, no per-transaction.

Tradeoffs: Expensive, opinionated, less friendly to technical audiences. Best for creators who don’t want to touch code.

6. Stripe direct + custom checkout

For: total ownership of the checkout experience.

Why: Lowest take (2.9% + $0.30), full control over UX, integrates with anything.

Take: 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. You handle tax (or use Stripe Tax at +0.5%).

Setup effort: A day or two to wire checkout, license issuance, refund handling.

Tradeoffs: You own everything — including compliance. For an engineer, arguably the best long-term play. For someone who wants to focus on the content, use Lemon Squeezy.

7. Roll your own on WorkIQ

For: later, once you have a few products shipping and want the whole stack owned.

Why: You already have the WorkIQ scaffolder, Cloudflare edge, Sanity CMS, and now a public site. Adding a product schema + Stripe checkout + license issuance is a WorkIQ app you could ship in a week.

Take: Just Stripe’s take (2.9% + $0.30).

Tradeoffs: Full ownership means full responsibility. Only worth it after $50K+ ARR in products/courses.

My recommendation for your v1

Books/playbooks/templates: Lemon Squeezy. Fastest to production, tax handled for you.

Courses: Podia for the first cohort. If the community piece matters (it usually does for cohort courses), Circle. Both let you validate before over-investing in tooling.

Consulting bookings: Cal.com. Free tier is fine, integrates with Stripe if you’re pre-charging for calls.

Migration path: every product and course on this site is defined in src/lib/products.ts and src/lib/courses.ts. Ship on Lemon Squeezy / Podia now. When one hits $10K/month or more, migrate that specific product to a WorkIQ-hosted checkout. No re-architect required — you’re changing a URL in a TypeScript file.