31.7% of Course Creators Say the Course Isn't the Product. It's the Bait.

Nearly a third of course creators aren't really in the course business.

A Mirasee survey of 1,128 creators found that 31.7% use online courses for lead generation and don't charge for them at all. The course isn't the revenue. It's the doorway to the revenue.

Then comes the number that should make everyone else uncomfortable. A majority of respondents — 85.8% — charge less than $100 per student, and 82.5% have had fewer than 300 students. Of all 1,128 people surveyed, only ten charged at least $300 for their course and enrolled at least 50 students.

Ten.

The wrong first question

Ruzuku, which published the framework alongside the survey data, opens with a deliberately annoying line: what business model should you use for your course? "That's actually the wrong first question."

The right one, per the piece, is what role the course plays in your business — and Danny Iny of Mirasee identifies four: lead generation, core product, client support, and community.

That reframe matters because pricing follows role. A lead generation course priced at $47 isn't underpriced. It's doing its job. A core-product course priced at $47 is a business that will never work no matter how good the sales page gets.

Ruzuku's own reading of the 85.8% figure is blunt: it suggests most creators haven't aligned their pricing with their business model.

What the platform numbers show

The gap between those two roles is visible in hard transaction data. Across 11,691 paid standalone courses on Ruzuku, the interquartile range runs $49 to $357. Across 408 group coaching programs on the same platform, it runs $399 to $4,999.

Same expertise. Same person. Roughly a tenfold difference in what the market will pay, depending on the wrapper.

The figures come from 178,463 price options across 32,000+ courses representing $81M in volume and 921,000 student records, cross-referenced with the Mirasee survey. And the free tier isn't a fringe behaviour: 37.6% of all published course price options on Ruzuku are free.

Who's telling you this

Worth flagging. Ruzuku is a course platform publishing data about course platforms, and it sells one-time courses, recurring memberships, live cohorts and custom payment plans — every model it describes. Its co-founder also wrote The Business of Courses, published in 2021 by Mirasee Press, the publishing arm of the company whose survey is being cited. Not disqualifying. Just not disinterested.

The test a creator can run this afternoon takes about a minute. Write down what your course costs. Then write down what someone who finishes it buys next. If there's nothing in the second column, the price in the first column is the whole business — and the data says that business is very hard to make work.