How much does it cost to create an elearning course?

The classic question that never gets a straight answer: how much does it cost to create an elearning course? If you search online you will get a range of figures, some calculators, and, more frustratingly, gated content that asks for your email address before it tells you anything useful. That is a lead generation tactic and there is nothing wrong with it, but it does not help you right now.

So here is the honest answer. You could pay from around £500 and I have spoken to someone who paid over £250,000 for a single course. If you are trying to understand how much an elearning course costs to buy rather than build, that is a different question covered separately. That is not a helpful range, I know. But it is the reality, and understanding why will help you budget more accurately and get better quotes from suppliers.

Why you never get an immediate price

Most developers and agencies will not give you an instant quote, and there is a good reason for that. Unlike replacing an exhaust on a VW Polo, a job a mechanic has done hundreds of times on the same car, a custom elearning course is rarely a repeat job. The scope, complexity, content length, audience, and output format vary significantly from project to project. A supplier who quotes without understanding your project is guessing. You will pay for that guess one way or another.

The more information you provide upfront, the more accurate the quote. That is not just a supplier convenience. It directly affects the quality of what you get back and how comparable the quotes are when you put them side by side.

What drives the cost of creating a course

Building a custom elearning course requires a combination of skills. Depending on the scope and output you need, a project might involve all or most of the following:

That is at least six to seven skills on a typical project. Even at a conservative day rate of £500 per person, with each person spending just two days on the project, you are already looking at a cost of £6,000 to £7,000 before the project gets complex. Day rates vary. You can see rates of £600 to £1,200 per day on frameworks like G-Cloud, and the difference in price between suppliers often comes down to day rate and team structure, not the quality of the output.

Why your quotes are all over the place

I have experience of building and buying elearning on projects all over the world. If you are getting wildly different quotes from suppliers, there are usually two reasons.

First, your specification is poor. If your brief has gaps, suppliers fill them differently. One supplier assumes a ten-screen course with basic interactions. Another assumes twenty screens with animation and branching scenarios. You get completely different quotes for what appears to be the same project, because it is not the same project.

Second, you have approached suppliers who vary too much in scale, experience and cost base. A freelancer charging £400 a day and an agency charging £1,200 a day will quote very differently. Neither is necessarily wrong, but if you have not done basic due diligence on who you are asking, you will get a range that is impossible to compare.

The solution is simple: provide more detail upfront. Share your script word count, the number of screens, the interactions you need, the format, the LMS it needs to work on, and your ideal budget. Sharing your budget does not mean suppliers will just spend it. It saves time by filtering out suppliers whose costs are nowhere near your range.

What does off-the-shelf content actually cost to build?

This is worth understanding, particularly if you have seen off-the-shelf elearning courses priced at £9.99 or similar and wondered what goes into them.

At Real Projects, our team are experienced custom developers. We build award-winning content and we apply exactly the same process to our off-the-shelf library. The development cost is the same: the same skills, the same care, the same attention to quality. A course in our library goes through the same process as a custom project:

Script writing, instructional design, graphic design, voiceover, programming, animation, project management.

The difference is that a custom course is built once for one client. An off-the-shelf course is built once and made available to many organisations. That spread of cost is what makes off-the-shelf content significantly more cost-effective, not a reduction in the development standard.

So when you see a course priced at £9.99, that is not what it cost to build. It is what it costs you to access it as part of a library. The investment in quality went in at the development stage, not the retail price.

How to get a more accurate quote

If you want better quotes from suppliers, provide better information. I know that sounds obvious but I see posts constantly about impact, ROI and budgets from people who then put out a brief that is one paragraph long with no specification. You will get junk back.

Before you approach suppliers, work through this checklist. Tick off each item you can provide. The more you can cover, the more accurate and comparable your quotes will be.

And be fair with suppliers. If you have no intention of using them, do not use them to extract information and build your specification. Good suppliers will invest time in understanding your project. That time has a cost too.