Build a Course / Coaching platform for $100/mo

Hosts the marketing site, the enrolled-learner experience, and the embedded video player on a single Next.js app.

Course content sites are mostly reads with bursts of writes (signups, completion tracking, comments). Vercel's edge handles the read path at zero cost, and serverless functions scale fine for the writes. Hobby tier is enough until you take your first paid customer; commercial use bumps you to Pro at $20/mo, which absorbs into the $100 cap easily.

• Hobby's commercial-use ToS is a non-starter for paid courses. The day you sell access, you owe Vercel $20 — bake it into pricing from the start.
• Long-running serverless functions (e.g., a video-completion webhook handler doing analytics) can hit the 10s timeout. Push that work to a queue (Upstash QStash or Cron job) instead.
• Image optimization is great until you hit Vercel's transform budget. Serve large hero images from Cloudflare R2 if your marketing pages are image-heavy.

Encodes uploaded videos to adaptive bitrate, streams them through a global CDN, and reports playback analytics.

Self-hosting video is cursed: encoding pipelines, CDN bills, mobile-network adaptive streaming, DRM if you ever need it. Mux does all of this and prices fairly: about $0.04 per minute of encoded video stored, and $0.0006 per minute streamed. For a typical small course (30 lessons × 15min average, 50 monthly enrollments watching most lessons), the monthly bill lands around $30. The player drops in as a React component.

• Encoding is one-time but the storage cost is monthly. Don't re-encode the same lesson on every content tweak — diff carefully.
• Streaming costs scale with traffic. A viral course launch can spike the bill 10x in a week. Set Mux's billing alerts on day one.
• Mux doesn't do DRM at the entry tier. If your courses include premium content that needs encryption, the next tier is significantly more expensive.

Drop-in auth with prebuilt UI, plus Organizations support for cohort-based courses where learners belong to a group.

Pro at $25 unlocks custom-domain auth pages (you sign in at app.yourcourse.com instead of clerk.yourcourse.com), which matters for brand. Organizations support — included on Pro — handles cohort-based courses where 10 students are enrolled together by a company. The free tier doesn't have either, and rolling your own auth + orgs is a multi-week distraction from teaching.

• Per-MAU pricing kicks in past 10k MAU on Pro — at scale Clerk gets expensive. Watch the math at 5k learners.
• Custom email templates require some customization work. Clerk's defaults are professional but generic; spend a day matching them to your brand voice.
• If you use Organizations, every learner needs to be in one (even solo learners). Build a 'personal workspace' org auto-creation flow.

Stores course structure, lesson metadata, enrollment records, completion tracking, comments, and any non-video assets (PDFs, slides).

Free tier is genuinely free for a small course catalog: 500MB DB, 1GB file storage, 50k MAU. Course data is small (lessons rarely have more than a few KB of metadata each), and the free tier covers it through several hundred enrolled students. Auth lives on Clerk so we don't use Supabase Auth — pure DB + Storage.

• Free tier pauses after 7 days of inactivity. For a course site that gets daily traffic this isn't an issue, but a quarterly paid course with no traffic between cohorts will hit it.
• Connection pooling is on the free tier but tighter than Pro's. Heavy serverless fan-out can saturate it; if logged-in pages start timing out, that's the symptom.
• RLS policies are silently wrong by default — start tests against the anon and authenticated keys, not just the service-role key.

Accepts card payments for course enrollments and recurring subscriptions, with no monthly platform fee.

Stripe has zero monthly fee — you pay 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction. For courses priced at $99–$499, that's $3.20–$15 per sale. Lemonsqueezy (Merchant of Record) takes 5% + 50¢, which is more — but Stripe makes you handle sales tax. For US-only courses with nexus in one state, Stripe + your accountant works. For broad international, Lemonsqueezy or Stripe Tax becomes the right call.

• Sales tax is your problem, not Stripe's, unless you add Stripe Tax ($50/mo + 0.5% per tx). At small course volume the manual approach is fine; at $5k+/mo MRR add Stripe Tax.
• Webhook event handlers must be idempotent. Stripe sometimes delivers the same event twice; non-idempotent code creates duplicate enrollments.
• Subscription dunning (failed renewal recovery) is built into Stripe but generic. For a course with strong unit economics, custom dunning emails recover an extra 5-10% of failed payments.

Sends enrollment confirmations, drip cohort sequences, lesson-completion notifications, and weekly digests.

$20 covers 50k emails — large enough for any small-to-medium course operation. Drip sequences for cohorts (Day 1: welcome, Day 7: midway check-in, Day 30: completion) are first-class with the React-email integration. Same provider as the SaaS stack, same templates, no learning curve.

• Resend is transactional-first; broadcast email (newsletters, course-launch emails to non-students) belongs on Beehiiv. Don't try to use Resend for marketing — the team enforces the distinction.
• Drip sequences need a worker or a cron job to schedule sends. Resend doesn't have a built-in scheduler beyond simple sends. Use a Render cron job or QStash.
• Domain verification (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) is unforgiving. Set them up before launch; after launch, deliverability complaints are real-customer complaints.

Lets learners book office hours, 1:1 coaching, or live Q&A sessions on a calendar that integrates with your real calendar.

Coaching platforms need bookings. Calendly is fine but $12/mo per user; Cal.com's free tier covers most needs and Pro at $3/mo unlocks workflows (auto-reminders, custom branding, Zapier integrations). If your course includes 1:1 calls, a 'coaching' tier, or office hours, Cal.com pays for itself.

• Cal.com's free tier hosts at cal.com/yourname; Pro lets you embed at yourcourse.com/book or similar. Course brand consistency benefits from Pro.
• If you use Google Calendar's free tier, two-way sync sometimes lags. Critical bookings should be confirmed via email even if the calendar shows them.
• Automated reminders (24h, 1h) reduce no-shows by 20%+. They're a Pro feature; turn them on day one.