We shouldn't be ashamed to admit it: we've all bought an online course that didn't live up to its promises. I've fallen for it more than four times — four courses, four big promises, four bouts of frustration.
If you haven't fallen for one yourself, you know someone who has. Your brother-in-law who bought the "financial freedom" course and is still as broke as ever. Your cousin who paid for a music production course and ended up using the stock plugins built into Ableton or FL Studio. Your coworker who paid for an "AI diploma," watched 4 videos, and got 5 PDFs.
I've been all four. Understanding the pattern is the first step to not falling for it again, and it's exactly why I'm building NoSnake.
Part 2 — I'll also confess that I've taken plenty of good online courses. That's what led me to put myself in the shoes of the creators behind the genuinely good ones and dig into their concerns. The goal: figure out whether there was room for a space where teachers can sell without feeling sleazy about it, and where future students can buy with the confidence that what they're paying for is real.
Here's where the story gets complicated. I've spent six months building NoSnake. I've talked to honest creators in different niches. I tested the four big platforms — Hotmart, Kajabi, Teachable and Thinkific — to find their weak spots and know exactly what I was walking into. I read their official terms of service. What I'm about to share isn't opinion. These are clauses anyone can verify.
Most platforms keep their creators on a leash. That's exactly what we want to avoid at NoSnake.
For example:
If you publish your course on Hotmart or Teachable, the official terms of use state that the creator grants Hotmart and Teachable a "license to use all intellectual property rights related to the Product," worldwide, for as long as you remain an active user.
In plain English: if you publish on Hotmart or Teachable, you can't sell that course anywhere else. And while you're their customer, they hold a worldwide license over the intellectual property of your work.
Your audience isn't yours
If you sell on Hotmart, you can't run your own email marketing to your students without going through their tools. Every relationship you build with a student stays in their database, not yours. The day you decide to leave (if you can), you take no one with you.
The honest creator who spent years building trust with an audience finds out too late that the audience, the data, and the payments all belong to the platform.
NoSnake works differently. You connect your own Mailchimp (or whatever ESP you prefer). Your students live in your database from day one. You export your contacts whenever you want, no permission needed. The content you upload stays yours — we don't ask for a worldwide license to your work.
Your money isn't yours either
And here's the worst part — the one almost no one talks about.
Teachable and Thinkific operate as Merchants of Record. That means when a student pays you, the money lands in their account first. They charge the end customer, and then, on their own schedule and at their own discretion, transfer your share to you.
In plain English: you don't control the money from your own sales. You live at the mercy of the platform's payout schedule and how much they decide to hold.
That's not how NoSnake works. We use Stripe Connect. When your student pays, the money goes straight to your Stripe account — not ours. We just deduct our fee on that transaction. We're not middlemen for the cash flow, we don't withhold at our discretion, we don't decide when to transfer your money. The payment is between you and your student; we stay out of the money flow.
When a platform collects everything and then pays you, they have power over you. When your student pays you directly and the platform only takes its fee, the dynamic flips: we work to help you sell, not to keep you locked in.
You share a storefront with the junk, and the junk sells better
Hotmart charges 9.9% + €0.50 per sale (official data from their pricing page). No monthly subscription, no quality filter, no editorial review. Their business model is volume — and the volume includes junk courses.
There are three consequences for the honest creator:
- Mixed reviews. The student who falls for the scammy course can't tell the difference. Their frustration spills onto the entire niche. A 1-star review on a junk "financial freedom" course chips away at the next buyer's trust in the serious trading course sitting on the same marketplace.
- SEO rewards the impossible promise. The "six-pack in 30 days, no effort" course ranks higher than the honest trainer who admits results take 12 weeks of real commitment. The impossible promise sells better in ads and ranks higher in search. The honest trainer is forced to compete with one hand tied behind their back — or to pump up their message until it stops being true, just to keep up with the trainer offering the same outcome but using anabolic steroids.
- The student arrives already burned. If you've fallen three times like me, you walk into the fourth course skeptical from the start. The honest creator gets that distrust by default, without having done a thing to deserve it.
This is Gresham's Law applied to online courses: bad content drives out good when they share the same shelf and no one filters. And no one filters because it doesn't suit them — their business model rewards volume, not quality.
Part 3 — Why NoSnake
NoSnake didn't start with a polished business plan. It started with one concrete question: why isn't anyone filtering this?
The big platforms aren't going to filter. Their model is volume and fee: the more courses they publish (junk included), the more revenue. Filtering means cutting inventory and cutting revenue, and that goes against their incentives.
The only person who'll actually filter is someone honest enough to care about filtering instead of billing. That's where NoSnake and I come in. A platform whose business model is to say NO to junk courses. We use AI plus human review to flag empty, unrealistic promises in landing pages and course descriptions (phrases like "financial freedom," "guaranteed results," "from zero to expert"). Those don't make the cut.
NoSnake doesn't want to be Hotmart, Skool, Kajabi, Teachable or Thinkific. We want to be the ethical option that breaks the chains keeping you locked into the other platforms.
The honest creator teaching real music production deserves not to share a shelf with the kid selling preset packs. The trainer who knows abs don't show up in 30 days deserves not to compete against the closet juicer.
If you're a creator who shares these values, NoSnake is your place.
Where we stand
We're in Phase 0. We're not afraid to admit it. We're not going to claim we have thousands of course businesses pulling in thousands of euros, or fake testimonials backing us up. So if you agree with what we stand for, feel free to reach out to NoSnake.
We want to start building a community where you feel backed by the NoSnake team and where you help us spot our blind spots. A community where you have a say and a vote in platform decisions, so we can keep getting better.
Welcome. You're on our side.
— Pascual at NoSnake.