How do I sell a video course on my own domain without a marketplace?

Five pieces. A free sample so people can hear you before they pay. A checkout that hands back a reference code. A way to switch access on per student. Video behind signed URLs so a lesson cannot be shared by link. And email from your own domain that actually lands. On a serverless stack this runs for almost nothing a month and can be live in under three weeks.

Why own it

A marketplace takes a cut of every sale, owns the student's email address, decides how your page looks, and can change the rules next semester. On your own domain you keep every rupee and every relationship, the record of who has access lives in your database, and there is no platform fee. The trade is that someone has to build it. That is smaller than it sounds.

The five pieces, in order

1. Try before you pay. Two or three minutes of you teaching, free, no sign-up. This is the single most persuasive thing on the page and it costs nothing to add.
2. A checkout with a reference code. The student picks a course, pays by bank transfer or a payment link, and puts a short code in the reference. You match the payment to the request. It can be automated with a gateway later; matching by hand is fine at the start and lets you see every student's name.
3. Access, one student at a time. A request list on your side: paid or unpaid, one click to grant. A daily reminder to anyone who requested and did not pay. The student gets an email, signs in, and everything is there.
4. Video that cannot be shared. Host on a streaming service with signed URLs. Your server issues a short-lived link per signed-in student, so the address in their browser is useless to anyone else. Let students manage their own devices instead of charging per seat.
5. Email that lands. From hello@ on your domain with a real Reply-To, so a student who replies reaches you. This is where most self-built platforms quietly fail.

What it looked like for one teacher

Med With Aarham: a dental student at the University of Debrecen who scored five out of five in all three histology orals and had been teaching the year below him live for three years. His three courses now sit on his own domain with a free sample, a reference-code checkout and per-student access. First commit to live domain in under three weeks, on React Router, Cloudflare Workers and Neon, at a running cost close to zero.

What it costs

A storefront for a course with a free sample and a payment link starts at ₹35,000. A full platform with logins, payments and access control is scoped on a twenty-minute call and given a fixed price before anything is built; the app foundation tier that covers logins, roles, billing and admin starts at ₹2,75,000, and you own the code outright.