Hi HN! I'm Greg, solo founder of AlterClass (https://alterclass.io/), a platform to build and sell better programming courses with no restrictions and a fair-revenue sharing model.
I'm a software engineer who got into creating programming courses back in 2019. I wasn’t
satisfied with the resources I found on the web to learn and master React.js, so I decided to build and launch an online course to help people learn everything they need to become successful React developers.
However, I didn't want to develop a video-based only course where students would be passive, just listening to me and reproducing every keystroke I type on my keyboard. How can you learn a skill as practical as programming just by watching hours of video of someone coding? It's like trying to learn how to drive a car only by watching someone else driving. It doesn't work like that. Programming (or any other technical skills) requires
a significant amount of practice to really acquire and master the skill.
So I came up with a project-based course that included a ton of practical content: quizzes, coding assignments, mini-challenges, real-world projects, and more. The problem is, creating such a course takes time, let alone building an audience and finding customers. Plus I had to build my own platform to create the course content and host it. I couldn't find any affordable (with a fair revenue sharing model) and easy-to-use tool out there that could help me with this.
After spending months building all of this, I realized how much work it was just to launch one course. But I was more than ever convinced that students want and need more than just video-based or code-along courses to learn new skills. The natural next step was to work on building a platform to make this much easier.
So, I built AlterClass, a modular and easy-to-use platform for creating and selling your programming courses online. AlterClass lets you build engaging and interactive programming courses using diverse blocks to compose your lessons without being restricted to a single format. You can choose between quizzes, code snippets, embedded coding environments, videos, rich-text articles, and more. Then, it provides support for getting paid for your course once it is ready. AlterClass instructors receive up to 100% of all the sales wherever they come from. Plus, I never alter your prices and never run any promotional campaigns on your courses. So you keep most of the revenue for yourself and the control over your courses.
You can also fund courses with pre-orders before they get released. Coming soon, you’ll be able to host them on your own domain.
About the tech stack, I’ve built the platform using React / Next.js, NextAuth.js, Tailwind CSS, FaunaDB, and Stripe. And everything is deployed on Vercel.
You can use AlterClass for 14 days for free (no cc required): https://alterclass.io.
My goal is to help developers create better and profitable online courses and save months of work in the process. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask! Any feedback is much appreciated as well!
In reply to the author's top-level comment, which for some reason I can't reply to.
Not sure I'd call 10% transaction fees plus card processing a "fair revenue sharing model" when I'm already paying a monthly fee? And not sure it's really ethical to say "No transaction fees" for the more expensive plan when I'm still going to be the one paying card processing, not you.
Thanks for your comment. The payment processing fee is what Stripe charges and unfortunately I can't change anything about it. However, it is very low and I believe it is fair to take it out from the sales amount. In other words, if you make 10,000 (or more) sales a month, AlterClass cannot cover the Stripe fees for all those sales just with the monthly subscription. Finally, you can check out the following page where I compare Udemy to AlterClass for instructors. There is a nice revenue calculator and a detailed comparison table. Let me know your thoughts.
I agree with the original poster - if you say no transaction fees it should mean no transaction fees.
What Stripe charges you is your expense/cost. If you want to pass that on to the customer, then that's fine, but that is you charging a transaction fee to cover the cost (not Stripe - because it is you billing it to the subscriber).
Thanks for your feedback. I've tried to be as transparent as possible about the fees on the platform, so that's why I've differentiated between AlterClass cut/fee and the Stripe fees for processing the payments. So when I say no transaction fee, I mean no extra cut/fee from using AlterClass. I'll try to make it clearer and obvious to the customer. Thanks for pointing this
Sure, maybe you could say 'Zero Commission and Low Transaction Fees' :) Understand where you are trying to get to.
Good luck with your business - the site looks great and it's clear a load of work has gone into it. Wish you every success! A few other notes:
- Unsure why your login system needs full access to all my user data on GitHub - seems excessive but maybe I just don't understand what 'full access' means in this context?
- Agreed with other posters on price, it seems like a free tier would be mutually beneficial for both you and the course writers. Also not sure how you are planing to police preorders in particular, but it's worth making sure that you don't lose your shirt if someone doesn't make with the goods (i.e. as this is a preorder rather than a pledge, if you already paid the creator and they never delivered the course, I assume you might be liable for refunds unless you are very careful).
For the authentication, I'm using the Next-auth.js library, and what I get from Github is only your Id, name, email, and avatar URL. That's it. Not sure why you've seen "full access".
I'll think about the free tier. And for the pre-orders, yes this is something I've though about and this is definitely something I'd like to avoid. I'll probably unlock the fund only if the instructor delivers (for first time instructors for example) so that I protect the students from losing their money if the instructor does not deliver and run away with it.
I submitted a quick course for review. I love the concept and the execution is snappy. Like some others, I'm concerned about the pricing model because I have no way of exporting the content I create on the platform outside of it- so unless I want to lose my course it seems like I'll need to pay forever.
I couldn't find a way to reorganize blocks or lessons, or even insert a block in-between two other blocks. I was surprised to be confused here because the rest of the platform is really seamless.
Thanks for submitting your first course, "Building Typescript Libraries". I've received the notification, I'll look into it first thing in the morning tomorrow. Did you submit it just for testing AlterClass or for launching it for real? :)
I totally understand that the ownership of your course content is a concern for you and I'm working on a solution. I don't want to promise anything yet, but I do think hard about it. As an instructor myself, I understand that you want to own your course and have access to it outside the platform you used to create it. More on that soon.
Regarding the blocks/lessons order, it is not possible on the authoring system yet. I'm working on that too.
I would build out more of it and list it for free (I've dropped in a lot of TODO sections), I'm not sure if "progressive release" is possible, if it's not, we wouldn't want to release it as is. I have a lot of team members who I have to teach this type of build system, and the material online isn't very opinionated so I end up seeing a lot of incompatible configurations.
I see. Thanks for the update. Having TODOs is not a great experience for the students. If you'd like to list it for free, I suggest you, at least provide a first version of it that can teach something meaningful for the students. And then, you can still add more sections/lessons to it over time. I'll review it tomorrow morning and we will work on it together.
> I totally understand that the ownership of your course content is a concern for you and I'm working on a solution.
Ownership shouldn’t need to be “worked” out, the creator owns their content and either AlterClass supports that or they’re ripping off the creator. Especially since AlterClass is charging the content creator transaction fees and a subscription fee.
That seems to be backwards, as that means I am charging to be able to put in time and effort to make the content that the learners use, which generates the product that you are selling. This just doesn't seem to make sense.
Running, maintaining, and improving AlterClass is a full time job and it is costly. I'm putting a lot of time and effort into it. The monthly subscription is to help me make a living while helping others with creating and selling better online courses.
You seem to be missing the point the parent comment is making. Of course asking for money makes sense from your side, but the question here is about the content creators. Why would they choose your platform over competitors, many of which are free?
1- An easy-to-use interface to create the content of their course, specialized in technical/programming courses.
2- The freedom to organize their lessons as they wish. Instructors are not restricted to a specific format. Instead, they can choose from various blocks, as mentioned above.
3- The freedom to sell their courses for the price they want without worrying about any promotional campaigns from the platform, for instance.
4- Integrated payment processing, so they don't have to worry about setting it up themselves.
5- A marketplace to host and showcase their courses.
6- Tools to help them build up the audience they need to drive initial sales, such as offering free courses, presale courses, or using their custom domain (coming soon). I will also provide/include marketing tools to instructors to manage their audience right from AlterClass (coming soon).
As a primary goal for 2022, I will also keep driving highly relevant organic traffic to AlterClass. So that, on top of everything I mentioned, instructors could benefit from this traffic when launching a course with no audience.
I hope this helps you understand the benefits of choosing AlterClass to launch your courses. Please let me know if there is anything unclear, and as always, feel free to provide any feedback or idea you have. Thanks!
All of the features you listed are present on other sites I've seen, it doesn't really answer the question I had (which I suspect tells me everything I need to know about your service)
Then, what feature do you need/want that isn't on this list? Finally, what made you consider looking at another platform if you already have everything you need on others? Thanks for your feedback.
I'm still very early and I'm still experimenting with the business model and how it can fit as best as possible with the instructors needs. For now, I've chosen to have a low price subscription ($9/month) for the instructors that don't know if they'll make a lot of sales. The $9/month helps me with covering the cost of running, maintaining, and improving the platform by adding more and more features over time.
In case, you plan to make a lot of sales (because you already have a huge audience on social media or Youtube for example), you can choose the other plan (Pro trainer), and pay no fee on each sale (expect for the Stripe fee). In either case, you can upgrade/downgrade at anytime and for no extra cost.
I'd definitely consider adding a free tier - even if it's just the ability to build a course without publishing it. It takes a lot of effort to build out a solid course. A lot of folks will take longer than 2 weeks. I think it's difficult for a content creator to justify a monthly fee until they're ready to publish and try to generate an income.
Only having paid options also increases friction for adoption. If something is free, I'm happy to give it a try and see if it's worth paying for. If I have to pay no matter what, I find myself a lot less likely to try something out.
I'm definitely interested in trying, but the lack of a free onboarding option makes me more hesitant (not sayings that it's 100% rational, just that it's my emotional response when looking for options :) )
Greetings Greg, really great work. Thanks for sharing this.
Now my greedy request: if you could take all this technology and make a blogging platform for developers, I would be greatly appreciative! And happy to pay a monthly fee!
I really need a coding blog platform where I can write interactive blogs for my readers.
What do you mean by interactive blogs? And what do you need that isn't solved by Wordpress? (Not a blogger, just know that most blogs use Wordpress or similar and curious what you're looking for.)
Right now, I'm focused on online course creation. I've no plan for building a blogging platform. But I do have a blog on AlterClass with in-depth tutorials. If you are interested, I'm looking for guest authors ;)
I used the free trial mechanism to play around with the site a little bit more in depth. Very clean all around and super intuitive to use. At the moment I have nothing to contribute to the site as in courses (at least at for the near future), but for others interested:
What will the Code playground block be for (compilation?, interpretation? of code?).
I see playground and sandbox to be very similar, so it might be beneficial to change CodeSandbox to CodeEditor in the future.
In terms of flexibility, have you thought about allowing non-YouTube video links within the course material (Vimeo or otherwise)?
Thanks you for taking the time to try AlterClass using the free trial. I really appreciate it.
Q1. I see the Code playground block as a mini code-editor that would give you the ability to run coding challenges your students will have to complete, much like what you find on Codecamedy for instance. Also, I'd like this code playground to support languages CodeSandbox doesn't, such as Python. Plus, in comparison to CodeSandbox, this block will feel more integrated to your course as it will be native to the AlterClass platform and not just an iframe embed into your lessons. Feel free to suggest any idea you have for this block :)
Q2. I thought about it and my goal is to add more blocks over time to give you as much freedom as possible in creating your lessons. I support YouTube videos as it is the most popular, but Vimeo is something I could easily add. I've added it to the backlog. Stay tuned ;)
fwiw, slip.so appears to be pivoting away from education marketplace. I received an email for a course I pre-purchased recently:
"We're pivoting our company away from the course marketplace idea, so we're reaching out to inform you about your purchase and what to expect next.
We'll be helping [redacted] migrate his/her content to a new platform, and make sure that if you've purchased his/her course on Slip, you will get access to it on the new platform, with no additional charges.
You'll receive instructions via email on how to access the course on the new platform."
First time I’m hearing about this. Checked my mail and nothing. Nothing on Twitter even on Kenneth’s profile.
Is there more details what are they pivoting to?
We’re making the announcement next week, but yes we’re pivoting away from the course marketplace but will still be doing something in dev education :)
We’ll send all our users an email early next week (though we’ve emailed a subset of users already. Namely those who have purchased a course that is already being migrated off the platform).
I invite you to try AlterClass and make your own opinion about it. AlterClass is free for 14 days (no cc required). I'd really appreciate your feedback.
Building a marketplace to sell something (Apps, courses, clothes, food, ...) is a very challenging problem.
I am an App developer who sales app in Google Play. The only thing I am concerning is, how much users are Google Play (marketplace) is gonna to bring to me? Rest of the concern factors are secondary to none.
Even if Google Play choose to charge higher fee, or providing a more crappy publishing tool, I still will stay with Google Play. Because I know if I try to sell my Android app elsewhere, I will get 0 customer.
Thanks for your comment and feedback on the marketplace. Right now, the AlterClass marketplace is more a way for people to launch their courses quickly without worrying about setting up their own platform and hosting the content. I won't compare myself to any app marketplace (like Apple or Google) as it is not my end goal. I want to give the instructors full control of their courses and give them the freedom to access beyond AlterClass. I'm still working on this, so stay tuned ;)
Hi Greg, congratulations on the launch. I've looked around a bit and you did a fantastic job to be honest. It inspired me to keep on crunching on my project as well! I wish you all the luck and success with this.
I think this is the right approach to make courses more interactive and also interesting!
Why not make a course on how you built alterclass on alterclass? ;)
All the best.
Thanks a lot for your message. I'm glad it inspires you. Regarding your suggestion, I may release a course on how to build a SaaS platform using modern dev technologies.
Great! Thank you for taking the time to visit AlterClass. I hope to see your courses launched soon :) If you have any questions or need help, feel free to reach out to me using the chat on AlterClass.io.
I was searching for such a platform. Thanks for building this Greg, great work. However two things which made me to think twice:
1. Per month subscription model Vs percentage cut per sales
2. Payment via paypal.
If changes will be made to these two things then I will jump in without doubt.
Q1. Yes, the pricing model is something that has been pointing out several time here. I'll think about it and probably open the "Starter" plan as a free tier + the 10% cut. How does it sound?
Q2. Payment via PayPal for students is something I'll definitively support in the near future. Stay tuned ;)
10% cut per sales sounds good. Payment to PayPal still sounds little complicated for some countries. Means if I am a course creator and I am from one of the developing country, then I may end up facing issues. What's about connecting Wise or Stripe or something like that ?
Thanks for pointing this. I'm only supporting PayPal for payout for now as I ran into a blocker with Stripe when trying to implement transferring funds to instructors. Indeed, as students can buy several courses from several different instructors, I can't just use the "destination charges' feature from Stripe, as you mentioned, since that's for 1-to-1 transfer. So, I've looked deeper into this and even contacted Stripe about it, and they suggested to process the payment with Stripe Checkout once, and then create multiple transfers referencing the successful Charge that's created. However, again, I can't really use this because it is a feature that Stripe only support for their US users and I'm in the EU: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/cross-border-payouts. Hopefully, they will release this feature for the EU soon so that I could offer you to connect your Stripe account to receive your payments as an instructor.
"You own your content" does not qualify. Lots of content companies have predatory contracts that give them perpetual licenses to content buried on page 13-b.
You're right. I'm about to add them to the website asap. But, I'd like to emphasise that my goal is to give the instructors full ownership and control over their content, but also give them access to it beyond AlterClass.
Since you're the merchant of record (as it's your Stripe account that's getting the money), how are you handling tax collection for those jurisdictions that require it?
Thanks for your feedback! The tutorials section provides in-depth technical content to anyone for free. In addition, it helps drive organic and relevant traffic to AlterClass so that instructors with published courses can benefit from it. No more relevant traffic on AlterClass, the more potential students for the instructors ;)
Most of the website/app is built with homemade components. For some of them, I've leveraged the UI components from Headless UI (https://headlessui.dev/) which is a project from Tailwind CSS.
Today, you can launch your course for free, or sell it for a price you select from $9 to $299. However, your students cannot choose the amount they'd like to pay for the course. But thanks for the suggestion. I'll think about it ;)
I'm a software engineer who got into creating programming courses back in 2019. I wasn’t satisfied with the resources I found on the web to learn and master React.js, so I decided to build and launch an online course to help people learn everything they need to become successful React developers.
However, I didn't want to develop a video-based only course where students would be passive, just listening to me and reproducing every keystroke I type on my keyboard. How can you learn a skill as practical as programming just by watching hours of video of someone coding? It's like trying to learn how to drive a car only by watching someone else driving. It doesn't work like that. Programming (or any other technical skills) requires a significant amount of practice to really acquire and master the skill.
So I came up with a project-based course that included a ton of practical content: quizzes, coding assignments, mini-challenges, real-world projects, and more. The problem is, creating such a course takes time, let alone building an audience and finding customers. Plus I had to build my own platform to create the course content and host it. I couldn't find any affordable (with a fair revenue sharing model) and easy-to-use tool out there that could help me with this.
After spending months building all of this, I realized how much work it was just to launch one course. But I was more than ever convinced that students want and need more than just video-based or code-along courses to learn new skills. The natural next step was to work on building a platform to make this much easier.
So, I built AlterClass, a modular and easy-to-use platform for creating and selling your programming courses online. AlterClass lets you build engaging and interactive programming courses using diverse blocks to compose your lessons without being restricted to a single format. You can choose between quizzes, code snippets, embedded coding environments, videos, rich-text articles, and more. Then, it provides support for getting paid for your course once it is ready. AlterClass instructors receive up to 100% of all the sales wherever they come from. Plus, I never alter your prices and never run any promotional campaigns on your courses. So you keep most of the revenue for yourself and the control over your courses.
You can also fund courses with pre-orders before they get released. Coming soon, you’ll be able to host them on your own domain.
About the tech stack, I’ve built the platform using React / Next.js, NextAuth.js, Tailwind CSS, FaunaDB, and Stripe. And everything is deployed on Vercel.
You can use AlterClass for 14 days for free (no cc required): https://alterclass.io.
My goal is to help developers create better and profitable online courses and save months of work in the process. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask! Any feedback is much appreciated as well!