Teachable charges $39 or more a month and still takes a transaction fee on your sales — $468 to $1,428 a year, forever. Lessonforge takes neither. It’s $49 once, runs on your $5 VPS or your desktop, and paid enrollments go through your own Stripe account at Stripe’s standard rates with zero platform cut.

• Courses, modules, lessons — Video via YouTube/Vimeo embed or self-hosted upload up to 500MB, rich-text lessons, downloadable attachments, reorder everything.
• Three enrollment paths — Add a student manually, let them self-serve with a per-course access code, or take paid enrollment via your own Stripe Checkout.
• Progress and certificates — Mark-complete per lesson with a live completion percentage, and a PDF certificate generated the moment a student hits 100%.
• Quizzes per module — Multiple-choice and true/false with a configurable pass threshold and unlimited retakes; correct answers are never sent to the browser.
• Instructor dashboard — Enrollment counts, average completion, completion rate and revenue per course.
• Two separate auth realms — Instructor password from env plus student email/password accounts with scrypt-hashed passwords and fully separate sessions.

Runs as a Windows desktop app or on any $5 VPS (Docker included).

What’s included:

• Full source code (MIT): https://github.com/bensblueprints/course-builder-lms
• Lifetime v1 updates
• Setup guide (README quick start)