Indie Hackers - What unsubscription rate can I expect for an online course?
Hello guys,
This is my first post here on Indiehackers, so thank you for your time in advance.
I am doing some calculations if it is better for me to switch my online course from a one-time payment to a subscription one. But unfortunately, I wasn't successful in finding online any reliable information about unsubscription rates in this industry.
Do you have some experience with how much % of people will unsubscribe each month? I know that it depends on many factors like quality of content, frequency, etc., but I was wondering about some broad benchmark if I should count with 10% every month or 30%.
In my mind, you will have two main leaving situations.
- After the first month (before second payment)
- After the end of the year, the business will do their accounting and revision of bank statements and find that they are paying for a platform that no one is using anymore.
Thank you very much and have a nice day
I don't think I ever heard of a single course priced as a recurring subscription? If it's a platform publishing new courses every month that's a different story of course.
Hello, Mirko I should give you more information, sorry for that.
I dont have a one-time course. I had a content hub about Figma. So I have two types of users right now:
2 Mid - Senior designers - they are looking for some specific issue in the course. So, for example, they will play an episode about "Dropdowns" today and an episode about "Preparing export for developers" next month.
This means that I am updating the course every month. Right now it's a one-time payment with lifetime free updates.
Thank you for your time ;)
Thanks for the info. Sounds like a recurring subscription may be suitable for your second type of users, but certainly not the first one.
If you offer the choice to pay monthly some people may just take advantage of that to consume the full course in a few days at the price of a single month.
Perhaps you could try something like: buying the course gives you 1 year of free updates, then you can pay an additional fee to renew access for another year. Not that I actually tried that myself.
I recommend checking out this video from Sunny where she discusses the trade-offs between one-time vs subscription vs other models. Background: she runs an 8-figure course business.
https://youtu.be/Yqp8Q0dSBtw
Thank you, i will :)
You may have seen my post earlier today, but I’m not a fan of subscriptions 😂 every single course I have seen that offers subscriptions (rare) also offers an LTD (e.g. https://learn.tanstack.com/p/react-query-essentials or https://www.learnenough.com/ruby-on-rails-6th-edition). The only exceptions are course marketplaces like Skillshare.
Curious, what’s the link to your course? I couldn’t find it