The Illusion of Control

If you migrated away from marketplaces to platforms like Teachable, Kajabi, or Thinkific, you likely did it for one reason: control.

You wanted:

your own branding
your own pricing
your own domain

You are now paying anywhere from $99 to $399 per month for this privilege.

But have you ever stopped to audit what you are actually paying for?

Strip away the slick marketing, the “Summit” invitations, and the affiliate bonuses.
Look at the technology stack itself.

What is it?

A video hosting server (a wrapper around Wistia or Vimeo)
A checkout page (a wrapper around Stripe)
A basic text editor (often worse than Google Docs)

That’s it.

You are paying premium SaaS prices for a static website builder that hosts MP4 files.

The "Website Builder" Distraction

These platforms market themselves as Education Technology (EdTech),
but in reality, they are Marketing Technology (MarTech).

Look at their feature releases over the past three years and a clear pattern emerges.

They invest the majority of their R&D budget in:

Funnel builders
Email marketing integrations
Landing page templates
Upsell / cross-sell widgets

They invest almost nothing in pedagogy — the actual science of teaching and learning.

The "Empty Shell" Architecture

Because these platforms focus on selling the course rather than delivering the transformation, the learning environment becomes an empty shell.

The model is archaic:

Watch Video → Read PDF → Take Multiple-Choice Quiz

This is a digitized version of a 1990s correspondence course.
It is passive.
It is unengaging.

Ask yourself:

Where are the AI-assisted grading tools?
(So you can assign essays without reading 500 papers.)
Where is pronunciation recognition?
(For language teachers.)
Where is the code execution environment?
(For development instructors.)
Where is the adaptive learning path?
(That changes based on student performance.)

They don’t exist.

To get these capabilities, you resort to Zapier duct tape:

a separate quiz tool
a separate community platform (like Circle)
a separate email service

Suddenly, your “all-in-one” platform is just a login page that links to five other tools.

The Burden of Labor

Because the platform provides no teaching support, the burden of teaching falls entirely on you.

A student asks a question at 2 AM.
It sits in a clunky comment thread.
You wake up, log in, and reply.

This is not scalable.

It forces you into an impossible choice:

Burn out trying to answer everyone
Ignore students, leading to poor reviews and low completion rates

The Future: Pedagogy-First Platforms

Creators are waking up.

We are seeing a migration toward Pedagogy-First platforms.

Tools like CleverPrep are built on a simple premise:

Teaching is the hard part — not hosting video.

Imagine:

an AI Tutor trained on your content, answering questions instantly
Open-response tasks graded by AI with detailed feedback
Adaptive storytelling that reshapes lessons based on student interest

Don’t pay $100 a month for a video player.
Pay for a teaching assistant.

The era of the Static LMS is over.
The era of the Active Learning Platform has begun.