If you’re comparing platforms to sell a course or digital downloads, Buy Me a Coffee and Podia are almost always at the top of the list. Both have built a reputation of being simple, with intuitive setups that are extremely beginner friendly. However, there are a few differences worth noting, ranging from pricing to how much room you have to grow.
The fee that doesn’t go away
The first difference you’ll notice is the pricing model. And, there’s two sides to it.
For one, you don’t stay free for long. Podia offers a trial, but once that’s over, you need to commit to a payment plan to keep using the platform. If you’re experimenting and uncertain of what course would sell, this is a slippery slope, and you may end up learning your lesson the hard way. By the time you do narrow down on what sells, you would’ve already burned a hole in your pocket.
On the other side is the actual cost to start. The cheapest Podia plan costs $42 monthly and goes up to $150 depending on what’s included. The plans aren’t all-inclusive, so the features and limits you get depend on which one you’re paying for.
Buy Me a Coffee doesn’t follow a subscription based model. You only pay a cut when you’re making money. In the duration that you’re experimenting, there’s no cost you run into.
There’s a cap on everything
As I hinted before, when you pay for a plan, you don’t get access to everything at any scale, even at their most expensive plan. There’s a cap on products, email subscribers, videos, spaces and more. They can be increasingly relevant as your business starts growing.
Emails
If you’re selling a course, your email list is probably going to become one of your most useful assets. It’s where you announce your launch, send course updates, share new products, and stay connected with people who have already shown interest in your work.
Podia includes email marketing, but there’s a limit to how many subscribers are included with your plan. As your list grows, you’ll need to account for additional costs or move to a plan that accommodates it.
Every plan caps how many subscribers you can email. 100 on Mover, 500 on Shaker, 1,000 on Earthquaker. Anything above that, and it’s a paid add-on, priced the same regardless of which plan you’re on.
That might be plenty when you’re starting out. But email lists have a habit of growing, especially once you start promoting a course.
With Buy Me a Coffee, you don’t have to upgrade your plan because your audience has grown. You can collect your supporters’ email addresses and export your list without having to pay a monthly subscription for the privilege of having more people on it.
Products
The same thing applies to the products you sell. Podia puts a limit on how many products you can have depending on your plan. That might not be a problem if you’re only planning to sell one course. You’ll need to keep an eye on how many products your plan allows. There’s another catch here. Unlike emails, product, video, and community-space caps can’t be raised with an add-on at any price. You’ll need a full plan upgrade. Say you have a 51st product on Mover’s 50-product cap, you can’t just bump up the cap. You move to Shaker at roughly double the price.
Buy Me a Coffee doesn’t put a limit on the number of products you can add. Everything on the platform is yours to use, for free, at any scale.
So how do you actually sell a course on Buy Me a Coffee
Unlike Podia, there’s no dedicated course builder on Buy Me a Coffee. Instead, you can use Posts, Memberships and the Shop to put the course together. Your lessons can go up as Posts, with videos, text, images, links or attachments. If you want the lessons to be paid, you can put them behind a Membership tier and make it exclusive to members of that tier. The Shop can then take care of the downloadable stuff that comes with the course: Workbooks, PDFs, templates, resource packs, you name it.
Other ways to earn
And what if your course already lives on YouTube or somewhere else?
You can still use Buy Me a Coffee to monetise it. Just add your Buy Me a Coffee link wherever you share your course, and people can send you one-time support if they found your work useful. They don’t need to sign up for anything or go through another setup. They can just send a one-time payment. You can also use your page to sell digital downloads, offer memberships, share Posts and give people other ways to support your work.
So, Buy Me a Coffee or Podia
None of this is to say Podia is the wrong choice for everyone. If you already know your course works, you’ve got consistent revenue, and you want a traditional learning experience, Podia is built for that in a way Buy Me a Coffee isn’t trying to compete with.
If you’re still in the experimenting phase, still figuring out whether a course or a set of downloads is even going to sell, Podia asks you to commit to a plan, a cap, and in some cases a full year, before you have that answer. Buy Me a Coffee just lets you find out first, using the pieces above instead of a formal course builder, and you can always move to something more structured once you know it’s worth the commitment.
