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Teachable's third pricing restructure in five years, effective June 2025, raised costs between 50% and 212% depending on tier. The new Starter plan charges $39/month plus a 7.5% transaction fee, capped at 100 students and 5 published products. The Builder plan runs $89/month. Advanced runs $399/month. The free plan is gone. Customers received 30 days notice.
Wire builds course sites from markdown and deploys to static hosting for $0 in platform fees at any revenue level. The trade-off is explicit: no built-in video hosting, no payment processing, no student accounts. The payoff is content you own, quality you can enforce, and no vendor who can restructure your pricing.
Why Creators Are Leaving
The Teachable 2025 restructure is not an isolated event. It follows two earlier restructures and fits a documented pattern: acquire a captive user base, then raise prices once migration costs are high. One long-term customer, quoted by erikafriday.com, put it directly: "Been using them a long, long time and now I can host half the classes for $20 more per month. Time to figure out how to host classes at my own site."
The math is specific. At $667/month in course revenue, roughly three to four sales of a $200 course, the 7.5% Starter fee equals the monthly cost of upgrading to Builder, according to breakeven analysis published by Ruzuku. At $5,000/month, Starter users pay $375/month in platform fees alone, $325/month more than Builder. International card processing adds a further 1% premium on top of that.
Tom Lorimer, via freshlearn.com: "The student limits and product limits are simply awful. This approach feels like a step backward for those of us trying to scale our businesses without being penalized."
The SaaS alternatives solve the immediate Teachable problem but replicate the underlying dependency. Kajabi runs $179/month. Circle runs $199/month on annual billing only. Thinkific Basic is $49/month with unlimited courses and zero transaction fees, which is structurally better than Teachable Starter, but it is still a recurring fee on rented infrastructure. Every platform on the market retains the ability to restructure pricing unilaterally. They are earlier in the same cycle.
How Wire Fits the Course Model
Wire's discovery reading system was built for sequential learning. The :::steps component creates guided reading paths where Lesson 1 leads to Lesson 2 leads to Lesson 3, with visual progress indicators. Wire's own workshop section is a working online course: 11 lessons, each building on the previous one. The pattern is proven on Wire's own site before you use it on yours.
The news intelligence pipeline keeps lessons current. When a tool you teach about releases a new version, Wire finds the announcement and updates the relevant lesson. You do not re-record a video. You edit a markdown file and run build.
Build gates catch problems before they reach learners. Missing descriptions, broken links between lessons, thin content pages: all refused before publish. Your course either works completely or does not deploy. The content quality system enforces consistent voice across all lessons, so the lesson you wrote at 2am reads the same as the one you wrote fresh.
Wire is not the only Markdown-first course approach. LiaScript renders interactive courses entirely client-side from plain Markdown files, with no build step and no server, supporting quizzes, executable code blocks, and text-to-speech. LearnHouse is an open-source LMS deployable via Docker with code playgrounds, AI assistants, and 0% platform fees on Standard+ plans at 2.9% plus $0.30 Stripe direct. Both are working examples of the no-platform-dependency model. Wire's advantage over both is the quality enforcement layer: build gates, citation requirements, and automated content updates that neither LiaScript nor LearnHouse provide.
Setting Up Your Course
The structure mirrors Wire's own workshop. In wire.yml, define your lesson sequence explicitly:
nav:
- index.md
- Course Name:
- Overview: course/index.md
- Lesson 1: course/lesson-1/index.md
- Lesson 2: course/lesson-2/index.md
- Lesson 3: course/lesson-3/index.md
Write a _styleguide.md that defines your teaching voice. Wire's workshop styleguide uses three rules: address the learner directly ("You will build X in this lesson"), explain what something is before using the term, and end each lesson with what the learner now has and where to go next. One concept per lesson. Copy that pattern and adapt it to your subject.
For components: use :::steps for the learning path, :::tabs for multi-platform instructions, :::alert for common mistakes, :::faq for lesson Q&A, and :::cards for module overviews. Wire also generates a reading progress bar, table of contents, full-text search across all lessons, RSS for course updates, and llms.txt so AI tools can reference your course material directly.
What Wire Does Not Handle
Wire does not provide video hosting (use YouTube embeds with !yt[VIDEO_ID]), payment processing (use Gumroad or Stripe), student accounts, completion certificates, or quizzes. For gated content, deploy behind a paywall service like Memberful or Patreon. Wire is the course content layer, the same role it plays for a knowledge base or a niche blog. Monetization and tracking are separate, and deliberately so: you choose those tools independently, and no platform restructure can take them away.
The breakeven point is low. At $667/month in course revenue, Teachable's Starter fee alone covers a basic VPS. At $5,000/month, the platform fee savings exceed $300/month, enough to fund significant custom development on your own infrastructure.
Quick Start
## Preview your course locally
python -m wire.build --serve
Plan your lesson sequence first. Wire's workshop uses 11 lessons as a reference point for depth. Create each lesson as a markdown page with :::steps for the learning path. Write the _styleguide.md for your teaching voice. Preview with --serve, then deploy to any static host. Total monthly platform cost: $0.