01
Someone paid and you opened their access by hand
It works at ten students and it fails at the first week you are away. A payment that does not open access on its own is not a sale, it is a task.
Course and membership platforms
Four delivered
You are not selling a thing. You are selling who can see it.
A shop decides once and ships. A course platform decides every time somebody opens a page: did they pay, has it run out, and what do they see if it has.
From 4,500 EUR, after a two-day audit at 600
You usually get here after one of these
03Access is being kept in somebody's head.
02
You cannot say today who still has access
Not roughly, exactly. If the answer involves opening a spreadsheet and cross-checking it against payment emails, that number is already wrong.
03
A refund went through and the course is still open
Money moves in one system and access lives in another, so the two agree only as long as somebody remembers to make them agree.
What the platform has to do
Four decisions, made without you.
01
Open access when the money arrives
Not when you see the email. The payment provider says it went through and the access is open in the same second, at three in the morning, with nobody awake.
02
Close it when it is supposed to close
Six months after purchase, at the end of a subscription, on a refund. Each of those is a different rule and each one has to be written down somewhere other than your memory.
03
Say what someone sees after it closes
A locked lesson list and a way to buy again, or nothing at all. The wrong answer here costs you the renewal, and it is a decision nobody makes until a student hits it.
04
Tell you who is where, without you asking
Who bought, who started, who stopped at lesson three, whose access ends this month. That is the difference between a product and a folder of videos.
The hard part
Expiry is not a field. It is a promise about the future.
Access that ends six months after purchase is the single most common thing a course platform gets wrong, and it goes wrong quietly.
- A job scheduled for a date six months out lives in the platform, not in your data. Nothing lists it, nothing exports it, and you cannot count what you cannot list.
- If one fails, nothing says so. Access simply never ends, and you find out when somebody who should have been locked out writes in to say thank you.
- Move platforms and the queue does not come with you. The dates are on the records, so it can be rebuilt, but only by someone who knows to look.
Built in code it is not a queue at all. The date sits on the purchase and the question is asked when the page loads, which means it can be listed, counted, corrected and moved. The whole class of defect stops existing.
The same problem, from the migration sidePaid
Ends
Six months of access
On a platform
Out of reachA job scheduled for that date, in a queue nothing lists and nothing exports. If it fails, nothing says so.
In code
On the recordA date on the purchase, asked at the moment the page loads. It can be listed, counted and corrected.
Delivered, and still running
All projectsFour of the five things in my portfolio are this.
01
jemshitmavlyanov.com
Expiring access, at scale, in nine languages
A video academy moved off Bubble in full: accounts, cart, payment, access that expires after six months, a certificate and an admin panel. Nine languages, with Russian audio and subtitles for each.
Visit the site02
elenaviscu.com
Three access rules under one account
Three products sold to the same person, each with its own access rule: a course with time-limited access, one-to-one sessions with booking, and a third kind of session again.
Visit the site03
easonline.academy
The first step out of the classroom
Hairdressing courses that had only ever been taught in a room. Video lessons, student accounts, payment, and access opened after payment.
Visit the site04
angelalaur.ro
A course and a shop in one basket
A course and a product catalogue sold to the same audience, previously in two places with the orders arriving by message. One site, one cart, student accounts for the course.
Visit the siteBefore you ask
Two noesTwo things I will not build you.
I cannot stop someone recording your screen
Nobody can. What is worth doing is making the account worth keeping: progress, certificates, the next course. What is not worth doing is spending your budget on a lock that a phone camera walks around.
I will not build you a Teachable
If a hosted platform fits what you sell, use it and keep the money. This is worth building when the access rules are yours, the languages are yours, or the fee on every sale has started to hurt.
The audit decides the rest.
What you sell, how many access rules that is, what happens on a refund, and whether any of it is worth building rather than renting. Out comes the plan by phase and the price. Platforms of this kind start at 4,500 EUR and the audit comes off that number.
If the honest answer is that a hosted platform fits you better, that is what the document says, and you keep it either way.
On the payment side this is the easy half: a course is one buyer and one charge, which almost any processor with documentation can do. Stripe unless you have a reason, a local one if your buyers pay in lei and ask for it.
Tell me what you sell and who is allowed to see it, and for how long.
Tell me what you sell
Answered the same working day, in writing. Three sentences are enough to start.