It’s all there: the recordings, the handouts, the notes you teach from. What isn’t there is the structure, the sections in order, the lessons in order, a check at the end, and a site that sells it. That part takes the evenings you’d rather spend teaching, so the course stays a folder.
A course is something a student finishes, so its shape matters more than any other offer’s. What do they learn first? What can they do at the end that they couldn’t at the start? Where does the check go, so they know they’ve got it?
Building that by hand means lesson after lesson of copying, ordering and formatting, and general AI tools that promise to help tend to hand back a wall of text instead of something the course plugin will accept. Meanwhile the hosted course platforms are a click away, and they’re easy to start on.
MemberPress.ai builds the course and its offers on your own WordPress install, from a conversation. You approve the setup up front, in one step: the offers go live as they’re created, and the course (empty on Free, an outline with lesson briefs on paid) arrives as a draft you publish. What it sets up:
Teachable, Thinkific and Kajabi are built for exactly this, and they do a lot well. Teachable and Thinkific put quizzes, dripped lessons, communities and checkout in one place, with certificates on the higher plans. Kajabi is also the website, the email tool and the checkout, with communities included, so there’s one login for everything.
The trade-off is that the school lives on their platform, and the plans come with limits your school can outgrow: how many products or students you have, which features you get, and, on some plans and payment setups, an extra transaction fee. MemberPress.ai runs on a WordPress site you own, with your student list and your payment gateway staying yours, and it does the assembly work that usually keeps a course in a folder.
AI-generated illustrative persona, not a real customer
Founder · Rooted
Priya runs Rooted, an online yoga course membership. She has the PDFs and the videos, but nothing structured into an actual course, and between teaching and running the business she’s short on time. She’d been comparing Teachable’s and Kajabi’s fees against building it herself.
View the full profile→A MemberPress course in the shape the plugin needs: an outline with its sections in order, and lessons drafted into those sections. General AI tools tend to get those formats wrong; this is the part it gets right. Asking in the chat never writes a quiz; you add one in MemberPress Courses yourself. On the paid plan, an AI assistant you connect to your account can draft one into a course section, if your site has the MemberPress Quizzes add-on. Drafting the course is part of the paid plan; on free, setup creates an empty course for you to build out.
No. The course arrives as a draft. You read it, edit anything you like, and publish when it’s ready.
Yes. The starting setup creates a one-time purchase level and a separate cohort level for ongoing support. The course itself comes separately: on the paid plan it’s drafted for you, and on free setup creates an empty course for you to build out. What each one opens, including whether the cohort includes the course, is yours to set with MemberPress’s access rules.
It doesn’t import files, videos or recordings. On the paid plan, describe what the course covers and it drafts the structure on your own site; your material goes into the lessons from there. On free, you start from the empty course setup creates.
Connect your site. On the paid plan, tell it what the course covers and read the draft course when it’s ready; on free, build out the empty course setup creates. Then get back to teaching.
A course, its exam and a renewal that bills on time, on a site the program owns.
Reader tiers and renewals that keep running, on a site you own.