Video lessons behind a paywall with progress tracking is a real but bounded combination — the same buildable core as Teachable. Video hosting is the one piece worth not building yourself.
Borderline
Effort: a weekendRunning cost: $8–$16/mo
Why CanICodeThis says Borderline
Modules containing lessons, gated behind a Stripe purchase, is a well-understood access-control pattern
Marking lessons complete and showing a progress bar is straightforward CRUD
A course landing page with a curriculum outline is standard content rendering
The parts that'll cause problems
Video hosting and delivery at reasonable quality shares real infrastructure concerns with every video app on this register — host through an existing service rather than building your own
Drip content (release lesson 2 a week after purchase) is a real additional feature, not a default
Quizzes with grading add real scope beyond passive video lessons
How I'd build this
frontend
Next.js
database
Supabase
auth
Supabase Auth
payments
Stripe
hosting
Vercel / Cloudflare Pages
MVP scope
Modules containing video lessons, gated behind a one-time Stripe purchase
Progress tracking (mark lessons complete)
A course landing page with the curriculum outline
Video hosted through an existing video service, not self-built
Postpone to v2
Drip content released on a schedule
Quizzes with grading
Discussion or Q&A per lesson
Certificates of completion
What it actually costs to build
AI agent — with a subscription (Claude Pro/Max, Cursor, etc.)
$0 marginal
AI agent — pay-per-use API, no subscription
$43–$86 one-time
Hosting, once it's running
$8–$16/mo
Domain name, if you want your own
~$12/yr
Existing tools solving a similar problem typically run $39–$89/mo — see how they compare below.
The build prompt
Build me a course platform, genuinely achievable in a weekend:
1. Modules containing video lessons, gated behind a one-time Stripe purchase.
2. A progress checklist per student — mark lessons complete, ordinary CRUD.
3. A course landing page showing the curriculum outline.
4. Host video through an existing video service (not a custom transcoding pipeline).
That's a real, complete course platform for content you create and own. Out of scope: drip content released on a schedule, real, separate scheduling logic, and quizzes with grading, which need a genuinely separate feature beyond video and progress tracking.