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Miles Corran · 
Most people commissioning an education app have a view on whether it should be free, paid or somewhere in between. Fewer have thought about what the boundary looks like on screen. Which lessons are free? What does a learner see when they reach one that isn’t? And what happens if you launch free and add a subscription a year later?
Those decisions affect how the app is built, not just how it’s sold. We’ve made them for our own products, and here’s how we think about them.
Three models
Free. Everything is open. Finance Brain, our financial literacy course site, is a free, courses-first product. Free is the simplest to build and the easiest to share, and it suits content whose job is to reach as many people as possible.
Premium. Everything sits behind a payment or a subscription. It suits training that’s already paid for, such as a course sold to an employer, but it makes it hard for a new learner to judge what they’re buying.
Freemium. Some content is free and the rest is paid. This is the most common choice for exam prep and online courses, and it’s where the design questions are.
Locked doesn’t mean hidden
On most of our platform, a feature that’s switched off for a site disappears completely, as if it was never built. For premium content on CertBrain, our exam prep app, we did the opposite on purpose.
Every course, lesson title and description is visible to everyone. Only the lesson itself and its practice are locked. In the course list, premium lessons are marked, so a learner can see the whole shape of the course, what they’ve finished and what’s still ahead.
The reason is simple: people need to see what they’d be getting. A course that shows three free lessons and nothing else looks like a three-lesson course. One that shows every lesson in every domain, with some marked premium, tells the learner how much is there and where it’s going.
A free sample in every topic
The free part matters as much as the locked part. On CertBrain, each exam domain has a free sample, so nobody is locked out of a whole topic. A learner can try the material on every part of the exam, not just the first chapter.
There’s a second free way in: a readiness diagnostic that needs no account. It shows which domains you’re strong in and which need work, scored in the browser, with nothing about the attempt saved. A learner can find out where they stand before giving an email address, let alone a card number.
When you plan your own free tier, think about it per topic rather than per course. “The first module free” sounds generous, but it only shows people the easiest part.
One check, on the server
Behind the scenes, CertBrain’s gate is a single check: is this lesson marked premium, and if so, does this person have premium? Content is unlocked unless it’s marked, so the other sites on the platform, which have no premium content, weren’t affected at all.
That check has to live on the server, not just in the interface. Hiding a button doesn’t stop anyone calling the server directly. Our AI assistant connector, for example, goes through the same visibility and premium checks as the website, so it can never show a deck you can’t open. When we added a way for CertBrain and Finance Brain learners to save cards to their own collection, the same idea applied: you can only save cards you can already open, so a locked deck stays locked.
The more ways people can reach your content, through a website, an app or an AI assistant, the more it matters that the rule lives in one place.
Adding subscriptions later
Many education products launch before they’re ready to take payments. That’s fine, as long as the content is ready for the day billing arrives.
CertBrain launched that way. Its premium content was written, marked and in place, but nobody could open it yet, because payments were coming later. Nobody has premium until billing exists, so the paywall behaved correctly from the first day. When billing goes live, there’s nothing to flip by hand.
Braineos, our flashcard platform, already takes payments: it has Stripe subscriptions and self-service account deletion, and its AI features are part of the paid plan. So subscriptions aren’t new ground for the platform.
If you’re not ready to charge yet, it’s still worth deciding:
- which content will be premium, and marking it now;
- what a free learner sees when they reach a locked lesson;
- which free sample each topic gets;
- where the check lives, so every app and website asks the same question.
Getting those right at the start costs little. Retrofitting them across a finished course costs a lot more.
The short version
Show the whole course. Give every topic a free sample. Put the check on the server, in one place. And mark premium content from the first day, even if nobody can buy it yet.
If you’re deciding how your own course or training product should be priced and gated, our education apps page sets out how we can help, or tell us about your plans.
