VantalogicsDiscuss your productUpdated
The short answer
An education platform of your own is your academy with your brand, your students and your data, with no commission per sale and without the limits of Hotmart, Tiendup or a generic LMS. We build it for each stage: from an academy that is just starting out to an institution with thousands of students. Today we have four in production with more than 24,000 students.
Many academies reach out to us from Hotmart, Tiendup, a WordPress site with WooCommerce or a Moodle that someone on the team set up, and that platform is holding back something specific. It takes a percentage that grows with revenue, does not accept the payment methods their students use, does not allow the learning path the course needs, or lets five people use the same account. Others are just starting out and do not want to build their business on someone else’s platform that they will later have to leave.
A platform of your own removes those limits. Here we share what we learned building four that are in production today: what they include, how they compare with the alternatives, and which technical decisions make them reliable.
There is no fixed package. Each platform is built with the modules the business needs, and these are the ones we already have running with real students:
| Module | What it solves | Where it is in production |
|---|---|---|
| Catalog and learning paths | Every student finds their course when the offering spans institutions, subjects and levels | Apoyo Escolar RV: 5 universities and 9 fields of study |
| Payments | Local payment methods, transfers credited automatically, coupons, plans with an expiry date | Mercado Pago, PayPal and Talo at Apoyo Escolar RV; automatic transfers at Lu Apuntes |
| Video and progress | Streamed lessons, resume where you left off, progress per lesson and per course | Academia Dr. La Rosa: 154 lessons in the main course |
| Assessments | Self-assessments, quizzes and assignments with teacher feedback | 14 self-assessments at Academia Dr. La Rosa; graded assignments at Apoyo Escolar RV |
| Certificates | Certification on completing a program, with the details the institution needs | Academia SIED: continuing medical education |
| Reading material | Personal library and a custom viewer designed for studying on a phone | Lu Apuntes: 1,147 pages of study guides |
| Support | Questions to the teacher, WhatsApp groups per course, an AI assistant over the material | Apoyo Escolar RV |
| Multi-device access | Phone, computer and TV with the same account and the same progress | Academia Dr. La Rosa |
These are the options almost every academy that contacts us is coming from, and what each one ends up limiting:
| Option | How it charges | Where it falls short |
|---|---|---|
| Hotmart | 9.9% + USD 0.50 per sale over USD 15 | The commission grows with every sale, the student lives in someone else’s members area and the experience is the same as any other course |
| Tiendup | Monthly fee in Argentine pesos; the plan sets the course cap (3, 10 or 30) | Going over the cap forces a plan change, and learning paths, graded assignments, teachers or integrations cannot be added |
| Course SaaS (Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi) | Monthly fee; some add a commission on lower plans | They work for video plus a quiz; when what sets you apart is how people learn, there is nowhere to build it |
| Moodle | Free license; you pay for the server, setup and plugin maintenance | Designed for formal academics: selling to the general public and studying on a phone come second |
| Your own platform with Vantalogics | No commission per sale; the scope is shaped to the academy’s stage | Your brand, your students and your data, growing module by module as the business needs it |
Fees checked in September 2026 in the Hotmart help center and on the Tiendup plans page.
The price of a build, on its own, says nothing. It has to be compared against what staying put costs today.
With Hotmart it is a multiplication. An academy that sells 100 courses at USD 100 a month leaves the platform USD 1,040 a month (9.9% plus USD 0.50 per sale): USD 12,480 a year, and the number grows with every sale. With Tiendup the cost is not the commission but the ceiling: going over the course cap forces a plan change, and what no plan does cannot be added.
Add to that the hours that go today into tasks the platform does not handle: checking transfer receipts, granting access by hand, answering “my course never arrived”, chasing whoever is sharing an account. That cost does not show up on any invoice, but it gets paid every month all the same.
A platform of your own does not mean a huge project. The scope is shaped around where the academy is today:
In every case the platform grows in modules: what is not needed today is added when the business asks for it, without redoing what came before.
These are the hardest to change later and the ones almost no proposal mentions.
A student can have access because they bought, because they came from the previous platform, because it was a gift or because they have a plan that expires in March. If access is calculated from payment orders, each of those situations gets solved by inventing a fake order. At Lu Apuntes, access is always resolved against a permissions table, and payment is just one of the ways to grant them.
The page the student lands on after paying proves nothing. Access is granted when the payment processor’s notification arrives, and even then the payment is checked again against its API and the amount and currency are verified against the order. Each notification is recorded only once: a transfer can go through “incomplete payment” and then “credited”, and discarding the second notification as a duplicate leaves a student who paid without their course.
Account sharing is the most common source of loss for an academy. At Lu Apuntes each user has a single active session: if they sign in from another device, the previous one finds out within about 30 seconds and goes back to the login screen. It has a cost, because it bothers whoever studies on a computer and a phone at the same time, so it is a business decision before it is a technical one.
No platform can prevent a screen recording. What works is something else: no permanent links to PDFs or videos, video served by streaming with expiring links, and every PDF stamped with the buyer’s details. In one audit we found that the resale of material did not come from recordings but from an API route that handed out links to people who had not bought. At Apoyo Escolar RV the personal watermark stayed on the PDFs; on video we tried it and removed it, because a stamp over the player is easy to crop and covers the lesson.
Every change goes first through a test environment with its own data. Database changes are made in steps compatible with the previous version and run before the new one receives traffic: if they fail, the old version keeps serving. That is how Apoyo Escolar RV ships changes to production several times a week without interrupting lessons during exam season.
It is the most common case and the most daunting one. No course platform offers an automatic move out: Hotmart exports sales reports, Tiendup exports enrollees per course and WooCommerce exports orders, each with its own format and its own errors. We lay out the full process in how to migrate an academy from Hotmart, Tiendup or WordPress, with what we did in a real case.
With the content on a platform of your own, you can build on top of it: search across lessons that cites the exact minute, an AI tutor scoped to the course or rubric-based assisted grading. Before building any of those features it is worth knowing how much an AI tutor costs per student, because in education the margin per student is thin.
22,000+ studentsApoyo Escolar RVA learning platform that brings courses, progress and academic support into one place.
Lu Apuntes600+ studentsLu ApuntesA digital library that automates the sale and delivery of university study notes.
Academia Dr. La Rosa600+ studentsDr. La Rosa AcademyA digital academy that turns health expertise into a structured learning experience.
850+ studentsSIED AcademyContinuing medical education for endoscopists across Latin America on a single platform.What you can export from Hotmart, Tiendup and WooCommerce, how students and purchases move without losing access, and the process we used with a real academy.
How AI is integrated into a learning platform: cited search over your own content, a tutor scoped to the course and assisted grading, with the grade signed by a teacher.