Sales · Side quest build
Build your own Teachable
A school with one teacher: you. Teachable charges $39–$159 per month — that’s $468–$1908 a year — for something you can replace with focused software of your own. Here is the honest scope, the honest timeline, and the exact prompt to hand your coding agent.
Who this replacement is for
This build targets one creator selling a few of their own video courses. The goal: publish a curriculum, take payment, and let students watch lessons and track progress. If you need more than that, keep paying — the point of building it yourself is owning a tool shaped exactly like your workflow, not re-implementing a venture-funded roadmap.
Same build, different logo: this v1 also replaces Kajabi, Thinkific and Podia — they all solve the same core job.
How long it actually takes
One number would be a lie, so here are three. Each tier is a real, usable product — pick the one that matches how much of Teachable you actually use.
| Estimate | What you get |
|---|---|
| 4 days | courses, hosted checkout, video lessons, progress |
| 2 weeks+ | signed video urls, landing pages, certificates |
| 3 months+ | affiliates, coupons, drip funnels, payout compliance — the part you should probably skip |
What a minimal Teachable alternative needs
- courses with ordered sections and video or text lessons
- a landing page per course with pricing and preview lessons
- checkout through a hosted payment provider
- student accounts with lesson completion and resume position
- course completion state with a simple certificate page
Data model
Course, Section, Lesson, Student, Enrollment, LessonProgress
Integrations
one payment provider’s hosted checkout, transactional email
Capability context
Astro, D1, R2
The guardrail
Grant course access only from a verified payment webhook and serve videos through signed, expiring URLs.
Deliberate non-goals
Do not build a marketplace, affiliates, coupons, drip email funnels, or community features in v1.
The complete build prompt
Copy this into your coding agent of choice. It is scoped for a useful v1 — journeys, screens, business rules, data model, security, tests, and acceptance scenarios included. Pick your stack:
You are building a production-ready software product named “Courseshed”, a deliberately focused alternative to Teachable. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one creator selling a few of their own video courses. Primary outcome: publish a curriculum, take payment, and let students watch lessons and track progress. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Teachable. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The creator builds a course from sections and lessons, uploads videos, marks two lessons as free previews, sets a price, and publishes the landing page. 2. A visitor watches a preview, pays through the hosted checkout, receives an account email, and lands in lesson one with the curriculum unlocked. 3. A student returns days later, resumes the last watched lesson, finishes the final section, and sees the course marked complete with a certificate page. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Curriculum builder: course settings, ordered sections and lessons, video upload with processing state, text editor, preview flags, and publish control. 2. Course landing page: title, description, curriculum outline, playable preview lessons, price, and a buy button leading to hosted checkout. 3. Student player: lesson video or text, curriculum sidebar with completion marks, previous and next navigation, and a mark-complete control. 4. Creator dashboard: courses with student counts and revenue, recent purchases, refund flags, and per-course completion rates. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. courses with ordered sections and video or text lessons 2. a landing page per course with pricing and preview lessons 3. checkout through a hosted payment provider 4. student accounts with lesson completion and resume position 5. course completion state with a simple certificate page DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Enroll a student only after verifying the payment provider’s webhook signature; treat the checkout redirect as untrusted. 2. Serve lesson videos through short-lived signed URLs tied to an enrolled student, never public bucket paths. 3. Process each payment webhook idempotently so retries create exactly one enrollment and one receipt email. 4. Track progress per student and lesson; course completion derives from lesson records and is recomputed, never hand-set. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Course, Section, Lesson, Student, Enrollment, LessonProgress. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Start with server-rendered Astro pages and ordinary HTML forms. Use HTMX for form submissions, partial navigation, and server-driven updates, then Alpine.js only for small local browser state. The core workflow must remain understandable if either enhancement layer fails. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with the AHA stack: Astro for routing, layouts, and server-rendered pages; HTMX for interactions that benefit from HTML fragment responses; and Alpine.js for small, local interface state. Prefer Cloudflare D1 for relational persistence, R2 for object storage, Workers for server endpoints and scheduled work, Durable Objects only for coordinated real-time state, and Workflows or Queues for durable background jobs—but only when the product requirements call for them. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, D1, R2 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with one payment provider’s hosted checkout and transactional email. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Grant course access only from a verified payment webhook and serve videos through signed, expiring URLs. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a completed checkout, the webhook enrolls the student and the confirmation email links to a working sign-in even if the browser redirect never arrives. 2. Given a refund recorded by the provider, access is revoked, progress is preserved, and the student sees a clear no-longer-enrolled page. 3. Given a non-enrolled visitor pasting a lesson URL, they see the landing page pitch instead of the video, with no signed URL issued. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build a marketplace, affiliates, coupons, drip email funnels, or community features in v1.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Courseshed”, a deliberately focused alternative to Teachable. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one creator selling a few of their own video courses. Primary outcome: publish a curriculum, take payment, and let students watch lessons and track progress. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Teachable. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The creator builds a course from sections and lessons, uploads videos, marks two lessons as free previews, sets a price, and publishes the landing page. 2. A visitor watches a preview, pays through the hosted checkout, receives an account email, and lands in lesson one with the curriculum unlocked. 3. A student returns days later, resumes the last watched lesson, finishes the final section, and sees the course marked complete with a certificate page. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Curriculum builder: course settings, ordered sections and lessons, video upload with processing state, text editor, preview flags, and publish control. 2. Course landing page: title, description, curriculum outline, playable preview lessons, price, and a buy button leading to hosted checkout. 3. Student player: lesson video or text, curriculum sidebar with completion marks, previous and next navigation, and a mark-complete control. 4. Creator dashboard: courses with student counts and revenue, recent purchases, refund flags, and per-course completion rates. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. courses with ordered sections and video or text lessons 2. a landing page per course with pricing and preview lessons 3. checkout through a hosted payment provider 4. student accounts with lesson completion and resume position 5. course completion state with a simple certificate page DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Enroll a student only after verifying the payment provider’s webhook signature; treat the checkout redirect as untrusted. 2. Serve lesson videos through short-lived signed URLs tied to an enrolled student, never public bucket paths. 3. Process each payment webhook idempotently so retries create exactly one enrollment and one receipt email. 4. Track progress per student and lesson; course completion derives from lesson records and is recomputed, never hand-set. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Course, Section, Lesson, Student, Enrollment, LessonProgress. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Render with React Server Components by default. Use Server Actions for authenticated form mutations and add Client Components only for interactions that genuinely require browser state, browser APIs, drag-and-drop, or live updates. The core workflow must remain understandable before client-side JavaScript finishes loading. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with Next.js, the App Router, and TypeScript. Use Server Components by default, Server Actions for authenticated mutations, and Route Handlers for public APIs, OAuth callbacks, webhooks, feeds, uploads, and downloads. Use PostgreSQL through Drizzle ORM with versioned migrations and an isolated test database. Access S3-compatible object storage through a server-only adapter, and run slow or retryable work in a real job or workflow system instead of the request lifecycle. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, D1, R2 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with one payment provider’s hosted checkout and transactional email. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Grant course access only from a verified payment webhook and serve videos through signed, expiring URLs. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a completed checkout, the webhook enrolls the student and the confirmation email links to a working sign-in even if the browser redirect never arrives. 2. Given a refund recorded by the provider, access is revoked, progress is preserved, and the student sees a clear no-longer-enrolled page. 3. Given a non-enrolled visitor pasting a lesson URL, they see the landing page pitch instead of the video, with no signed URL issued. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build a marketplace, affiliates, coupons, drip email funnels, or community features in v1.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Courseshed”, a deliberately focused alternative to Teachable. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one creator selling a few of their own video courses. Primary outcome: publish a curriculum, take payment, and let students watch lessons and track progress. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Teachable. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The creator builds a course from sections and lessons, uploads videos, marks two lessons as free previews, sets a price, and publishes the landing page. 2. A visitor watches a preview, pays through the hosted checkout, receives an account email, and lands in lesson one with the curriculum unlocked. 3. A student returns days later, resumes the last watched lesson, finishes the final section, and sees the course marked complete with a certificate page. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Curriculum builder: course settings, ordered sections and lessons, video upload with processing state, text editor, preview flags, and publish control. 2. Course landing page: title, description, curriculum outline, playable preview lessons, price, and a buy button leading to hosted checkout. 3. Student player: lesson video or text, curriculum sidebar with completion marks, previous and next navigation, and a mark-complete control. 4. Creator dashboard: courses with student counts and revenue, recent purchases, refund flags, and per-course completion rates. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. courses with ordered sections and video or text lessons 2. a landing page per course with pricing and preview lessons 3. checkout through a hosted payment provider 4. student accounts with lesson completion and resume position 5. course completion state with a simple certificate page DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Enroll a student only after verifying the payment provider’s webhook signature; treat the checkout redirect as untrusted. 2. Serve lesson videos through short-lived signed URLs tied to an enrolled student, never public bucket paths. 3. Process each payment webhook idempotently so retries create exactly one enrollment and one receipt email. 4. Track progress per student and lesson; course completion derives from lesson records and is recomputed, never hand-set. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Course, Section, Lesson, Student, Enrollment, LessonProgress. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Start with server-rendered Blade views and ordinary forms. Use Livewire for focused server-driven interactions and Alpine.js only for small local interface state. The core workflow must remain understandable without relying on a client-side application shell. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with Laravel, PHP, Blade, Livewire, and Alpine.js. Use controllers and Blade forms for durable navigation, Livewire for focused interactions, Form Requests for validation, Policies and Gates for authorization, and small application actions or services for domain transitions. Use Eloquent with migrations, database constraints, and transactions; Laravel Storage for private S3-compatible files; queued Jobs for retryable work; the Scheduler for recurring work; and Notifications or Mail for email. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, D1, R2 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with one payment provider’s hosted checkout and transactional email. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Grant course access only from a verified payment webhook and serve videos through signed, expiring URLs. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a completed checkout, the webhook enrolls the student and the confirmation email links to a working sign-in even if the browser redirect never arrives. 2. Given a refund recorded by the provider, access is revoked, progress is preserved, and the student sees a clear no-longer-enrolled page. 3. Given a non-enrolled visitor pasting a lesson URL, they see the landing page pitch instead of the video, with no signed URL issued. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build a marketplace, affiliates, coupons, drip email funnels, or community features in v1.
You are building a production-ready software product named “Courseshed”, a deliberately focused alternative to Teachable. Build a complete, usable vertical slice—not a landing page, static mockup, or disconnected collection of components. WORKING AGREEMENT Before writing implementation code, produce a short technical plan that names the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, important state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. Resolve contradictions in favor of the narrow audience and non-goals below. Prefer a small, legible architecture over speculative abstraction, but do not omit persistence, validation, error handling, or tests. PRODUCT BRIEF Primary user: one creator selling a few of their own video courses. Primary outcome: publish a curriculum, take payment, and let students watch lessons and track progress. Product principle: optimize the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Teachable. A first-time user should understand what to do from the interface itself, without a tour or documentation. END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS Implement all of these flows through the real interface and persistent data layer: 1. The creator builds a course from sections and lessons, uploads videos, marks two lessons as free previews, sets a price, and publishes the landing page. 2. A visitor watches a preview, pays through the hosted checkout, receives an account email, and lands in lesson one with the curriculum unlocked. 3. A student returns days later, resumes the last watched lesson, finishes the final section, and sees the course marked complete with a certificate page. SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE Build these as coherent responsive views. Each screen must specify its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state. 1. Curriculum builder: course settings, ordered sections and lessons, video upload with processing state, text editor, preview flags, and publish control. 2. Course landing page: title, description, curriculum outline, playable preview lessons, price, and a buy button leading to hosted checkout. 3. Student player: lesson video or text, curriculum sidebar with completion marks, previous and next navigation, and a mark-complete control. 4. Creator dashboard: courses with student counts and revenue, recent purchases, refund flags, and per-course completion rates. CORE CAPABILITIES 1. courses with ordered sections and video or text lessons 2. a landing page per course with pricing and preview lessons 3. checkout through a hosted payment provider 4. student accounts with lesson completion and resume position 5. course completion state with a simple certificate page DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES Treat these as server-enforced product requirements, not interface suggestions: 1. Enroll a student only after verifying the payment provider’s webhook signature; treat the checkout redirect as untrusted. 2. Serve lesson videos through short-lived signed URLs tied to an enrolled student, never public bucket paths. 3. Process each payment webhook idempotently so retries create exactly one enrollment and one receipt email. 4. Track progress per student and lesson; course completion derives from lesson records and is recomputed, never hand-set. DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE Design a small relational schema centered on Course, Section, Lesson, Student, Enrollment, LessonProgress. Before implementing it, document: 1. Each table’s purpose, primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes. 2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, indexes needed by the named screens, and transaction boundaries for multi-record changes. 3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who may trigger each transition, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and what audit history must remain immutable. 4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files. 5. Idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where applicable. Use migrations rather than ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and retain named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, disabled button, or client-side check to preserve a business invariant. USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS Implement only the roles required by the stated audience. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not merely by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide an understandable signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed distinct users when multiple roles are required so permissions can be demonstrated and tested. INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and credible rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and consistent placement for primary actions. Start with server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must remain understandable if enhancement fails. Start with server-rendered Rails views and ordinary forms. Use Turbo for navigation, submissions, and server-driven updates, then Stimulus only for small browser-side behavior. Do not turn the product into a client-side SPA, and keep the core workflow usable when enhancement fails. Design mobile layouts intentionally instead of simply stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to communicate state. Destructive actions require clear scope and confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent. TECHNICAL DIRECTION Build this version with Ruby on Rails and Hotwire: Turbo for navigation, form submissions, and server-driven updates, and Stimulus for small browser-side behavior. Use RESTful controllers with strong parameters and explicit authorization, with domain transitions in testable models or small application services. Use Active Record migrations plus database-level constraints and transactions; Active Storage with an S3-compatible service for private files; Active Job with a durable queue backend for retryable work; Action Mailer for email; and Action Cable only when live updates are required. Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules instead of route handlers or UI components. Separate persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer ordinary HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when failure can be reconciled clearly. The product brief currently identifies Astro, D1, R2 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter appropriate to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface. Integrate with one payment provider’s hosted checkout and transactional email. For every integration: - List required environment variables in an .env.example without real secrets. - Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path. - Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported. - Keep credentials server-side, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs. - Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for any side effect that can be repeated. SECURITY AND PRIVACY Grant course access only from a verified payment webhook and serve videos through signed, expiring URLs. Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any intentionally accepted markup, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect the minimum personal data necessary for the named workflow. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces in this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections. ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most appropriate level: 1. Given a completed checkout, the webhook enrolls the student and the confirmation email links to a working sign-in even if the browser redirect never arrives. 2. Given a refund recorded by the provider, access is revoked, progress is preserved, and the student sees a clear no-longer-enrolled page. 3. Given a non-enrolled visitor pasting a lesson URL, they see the landing page pitch instead of the video, with no signed URL issued. TESTING Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and each external adapter’s success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run through a documented single command. OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable in both the interface and logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; do not silently swallow errors. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path appropriate to the stack. DELIVERABLES Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a concise README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should exercise the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state relevant to the product. DEFINITION OF DONE The app is complete when a fresh developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey using real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, and no core screen is left as a placeholder. NON-GOALS Do not build a marketplace, affiliates, coupons, drip email funnels, or community features in v1.
Build just one piece
Not ready to replace all of Teachable? Fine. These are the peculiar sub-problems hiding inside it — the parts that are actually interesting to build. Each one is a standalone prompt, scoped to an evening, no strings attached to the full build.
Enrollment that trusts the webhook, not the redirectThe thank-you page is a rumor. The signed webhook is the receipt.
Build the enrollment pipeline for a course platform using a hosted checkout: the payment provider redirects buyers back to your site and separately sends signed webhooks, and only one of those is trustworthy. Treat the redirect as pure theater: it shows a friendly processing page and grants nothing, because anyone can type the URL. Enrollment happens exclusively in the webhook handler: verify the signature against your signing secret before reading a single field, reject anything unsigned or stale, and then create the enrollment, the student account if new, and the receipt email. Make it idempotent keyed on the provider's event ID, since providers retry aggressively: five deliveries of the same event must produce one enrollment and one email. Handle the ordering problem where the buyer reaches your thank-you page before the webhook arrives: the page should poll or wait gracefully, and the confirmation email must contain a working sign-in path so access works even if the buyer closed the tab. Done when: a forged redirect grants nothing, a replayed webhook enrolls exactly once, and a buyer whose browser died mid-redirect still ends up enrolled with a usable sign-in email.
Video URLs that expire before they can be sharedSigned, short-lived, and tied to the student who asked.
Build protected video delivery for a course platform: lessons live in private object storage, and only enrolled students can watch. Never expose bucket paths. When a student opens a lesson, verify their enrollment server-side, then mint a signed URL scoped to that one video file with a short expiry, minutes, not days, and hand it to the player. The friction points: video players issue HTTP range requests for seeking, and every one of them must succeed against the signed URL, so sign in a way the storage layer honors for partial content. A lesson longer than the expiry needs the player to fetch a fresh URL when the old one dies, ideally without interrupting playback, so build a renewal endpoint the player calls on failure. A student whose enrollment is revoked mid-lesson keeps watching until the current URL expires, and that bounded leak is exactly why the expiry stays short. Log signed-URL issuance per student for rate anomalies. Done when: a pasted video URL dies for a non-enrolled visitor within minutes, seeking works throughout a long lesson including past one renewal, and revoked students lose access within one expiry window.
Progress that is computed, never setCompletion is a query over lesson records, not a flag someone flips.
Build progress tracking for a video course platform, built on one principle: course completion is always derived from per-lesson records, never stored as its own editable fact. Record two things per student and lesson: a completion mark, and a resume position updated periodically during playback. Completion of a section derives from its lessons; completion of the course derives from its sections; both are recomputed from the rows whenever asked, or cached with strict invalidation, but never hand-set by any code path. This pays off when the curriculum changes: a creator adding a lesson to a finished course flips returning students to almost-done honestly, and deleting a lesson can complete a course retroactively, both without a migration or a stale flag in sight. Resume needs its own care: write positions with a last-write-wins timestamp so a student switching from laptop to phone resumes from wherever played most recently, and don't mark a lesson complete until playback genuinely crosses a threshold near the end. Done when: adding a lesson un-completes the course for past finishers without touching their lesson records, resume follows the most recent device, and no write path exists that sets course completion directly.
The refund that revokes access but keeps the historyKicked out gracefully, progress preserved, dignity intact.
Build refund handling for a course platform: when the payment provider records a refund, access ends, but nothing about the student's history is destroyed. Consume the provider's refund webhook with the same rigor as purchases: verify the signature, process idempotently by event ID, and match the refund to the original enrollment through the payment reference. Then revoke by changing the enrollment's state to refunded, never by deleting the row, because the enrollment is also the audit trail connecting money to access. Lesson progress rows stay untouched, so a student who repurchases later resumes exactly where they left off. The revoked student's experience should be clear, not cryptic: lesson URLs show a no-longer-enrolled page with the course landing pitch, not a 403 or a broken player, and no new signed video URLs get minted for them. Handle partial refunds according to a policy you state explicitly, simplest is that any refund revokes, and reflect refunds in the creator's revenue dashboard. Done when: a replayed refund webhook revokes once, a repurchase restores access with old progress intact, and a refunded student hitting a lesson URL sees a courteous explanation rather than an error.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to build your own Teachable?
A basic version — courses, hosted checkout, video lessons, progress — takes about 4 days. Roughly 2 weeks+ gets you a solid v1 with signed video urls, landing pages, certificates. Matching everything Teachable really does (affiliates, coupons, drip funnels, payout compliance) is closer to 3 months+, which is exactly why you should scope down instead.
How much does Teachable cost if I keep subscribing?
Teachable runs $39–$159 per month on public paid plans, which is $468–$1908 per year. A focused self-built replacement costs your build time plus close-to-zero hosting.
What stack should I use to build a Teachable alternative?
The build prompt on this page ships in four flavors: the AHA stack (Astro, HTMX, Alpine.js), Next.js, Laravel, and Ruby on Rails. The capability context for this product is Astro, D1, R2. Pick the stack you already know — the scope matters more than the framework.
What features does a minimal Teachable replacement need?
A useful v1 needs: courses with ordered sections and video or text lessons; a landing page per course with pricing and preview lessons; checkout through a hosted payment provider; student accounts with lesson completion and resume position; course completion state with a simple certificate page. Everything else is scope creep until you personally miss it.
What should I deliberately not build?
Do not build a marketplace, affiliates, coupons, drip email funnels, or community features in v1.
Does this build also replace Kajabi, Thinkific and Podia?
Yes. Teachable, Kajabi, Thinkific and Podia all solve the same core job — publish a curriculum, take payment, and let students watch lessons and track progress. The scoped v1 on this page covers what most people use any of them for, so one focused build replaces whichever you currently pay for.