Course Pricing

Course pricing controls whether a course is free or paid, what learners are charged, and in which currency. It is managed on the Pricing tab of the Course Edit page (and on the Pricing step of the create-a-course wizard). You can make a course free or paid, define prices in up to nine currencies, add an optional compare-at amount for discounts, auto-fill every currency from live exchange rates, and cap how many learners can enroll.

Who can set pricing

The Pricing tab is admin-only. Instructors do not see it — the tab renders only when the signed-in user is an administrator. Instructors can build and manage curriculum, but a course's price and enrollment cap are reserved for admins.

Opening the Pricing tab

1. Navigate to Courses in the sidebar.
2. Click the course title to open the detail page.
3. Click Edit (top-right), then select the Pricing tab.

When you create a new course through the wizard, the same controls appear as the dedicated Pricing step before you reach Settings.

Free vs. Paid

The first control is a Pricing radio group. Choose one:

While you are editing, toggling Paid → Free keeps the price rows visible on screen so you can switch back without re-entering them. However, if you save the course while it is set to Free, the stored prices are cleared on the backend — a free course is persisted with no active prices.

Multi-Currency Pricing

When the course is set to Paid, a Multi-Currency Pricing section appears. Add one row per currency. The currency dropdown offers these nine options:

Each currency can be used only once per course — once a currency is added, it is disabled in the other rows' dropdowns. Because there are nine currencies, a course can hold at most nine price rows; the Add Currency Price button is disabled once all nine are in use.

Price row fields

Each row has the following fields:

Rows also have a delete (trash) button. You cannot delete the last remaining row — the button is disabled when only one row exists, so a paid course always keeps at least one price on the form.

Original Price and discounts

The optional Original Price field maps to the compare_at_price field on the backend CoursePrice model. When set, it represents the pre-discount amount. The model derives a discount_percentage from the difference between compare_at_price and the active price, which the management API surfaces for admin views.

Auto-Convert

Instead of typing each currency by hand, use Auto-Convert to fill every row from a single base price:

1. Click Auto-Convert (the swap icon) next to the Multi-Currency Pricing heading to open the panel.
2. Choose the base currency and enter the base price.
3. Click Get Rates & Fill (or press Enter).
4. Arythmatic fetches live rates from open.er-api.com and rebuilds every currency row from the base amount.
5. Review and adjust individual rows, then save.

Amounts are rounded for psychological pricing:

The date of the exchange rates is shown under the input for reference.

Max Enrollments

Below the pricing rows is a Max Enrollments field:

• Leave it at 0 (the default) for unlimited enrollments.
• Enter a positive number to cap enrollments. Enforcement is server-side: once the count of learners with an enrolled status reaches the cap, the enrollment permission check fails and further enrollments are blocked until a seat frees up.

The cap applies alongside any enrollment start/end dates — a course must be within its enrollment window and under its cap for a new learner to enroll.

How pricing ties to enrollment and checkout

• Free courses enroll the learner immediately when they click enroll (subject to self-enrollment settings and the enrollment window).
• Paid courses require a completed purchase before enrollment. At checkout the amount is charged in the currency selected for that learner, converted to the payment gateway's smallest unit (for example, cents for USD).
• Inactive price rows never participate in checkout — only active rows are offered and charged.

How prices appear to learners

Learners never see the full multi-currency table. The catalog returns a single, geo-localized price per course, chosen from your active rows based on the learner's detected country.

Country detection reads request headers in order — an explicit X-User-Country header, then CDN headers (Cloudflare, Google, AWS CloudFront, and others) — and falls back to IP-based geolocation. The detected country maps to a currency:

If a course has no active row in the learner's currency, the system falls back gracefully:

1. If the course has only one price, that price is shown regardless of currency.
2. Otherwise, if the learner's currency exists, it is used.
3. If not, it falls back to USD.
4. If USD is also missing, the first active price on the course is shown.

The learner-facing price payload carries the localized currency and a formatted amount. The compare-at/original price and discount percentage are management-side fields; do not rely on the learner catalog to render a strikethrough automatically.

Saving pricing changes

Click Save (or Update Course) at the bottom of the Pricing tab. Saving replaces the course's stored prices with the current set of rows, so the table you see is the table that goes live. Pricing changes take effect immediately — learners who attempt to purchase after the change see the new price.

Pricing and the Path Builder

When a paid course is added to a Learning Path, the Path Builder shows a pricing warning if the learning path itself has no path-level price configured. Learners will be able to enroll in the path for free even though individual courses are paid — until you set a path-level price.

See Learning Path Pricing for how to configure path-level prices.

Related

• Create a Course — initial setup including the Pricing step
• Learning Path Pricing — bundle pricing for learning paths
• Preview and Publish — publishing a paid course