Custom LMS, cohort management, enterprise training, and certification platforms on subscription. Senior engineer, $4,999/mo, 2 to 4-day delivery cycles.
- Scope
- Ship
- Iterate
monthly subscription
Who this is for
Edtech founder, online-school operator, or corporate L&D lead whose off-the-shelf LMS — Teachable, Thinkific, Canvas, or Moodle — has started blocking growth rather than enabling it.
The pain today
- LMS cannot handle the cohort structure your program actually needs
- Enterprise customers want SSO, custom branding, and reporting the platform refuses to provide
- No SCORM or xAPI support, so corporate training customers walk
- Student data is locked in the vendor with no clean export path
- Gamification and completion features are generic, not tuned to your audience
The outcome you get
- Custom edtech web app on subscription at $4,999/mo
- Cohort, certification, or enterprise features shipped in 8 to 14 weeks
- SAML/OAuth SSO and custom branding ready for enterprise deals
- SCORM and xAPI support for corporate training compliance requirements
- Clean data model with full export paths — CSV, API, or warehouse streaming
When your LMS stops scaling with your program
Three signals. One: your program has cohort structure — weekly live sessions, peer feedback, fixed start dates — and the LMS forces everything into on-demand patterns. Two: enterprise customers are asking for SSO, custom branding, and audit-ready reporting the platform simply cannot deliver. Three: you are hitting API rate limits or paying for feature bundles you will never use.
Custom edtech web app development becomes the right call when LMS costs are climbing and the platform is actively blocking a deal or a product decision. Below that threshold — usually under $500k in annual revenue — staying on the platform and configuring hard is still the better answer. I will tell you which side of that line you are on in the first call.
Custom edtech web app on subscription at $4,999/mo
SCORM, xAPI, and corporate training compliance
Off-the-shelf platforms handle SCORM inconsistently. For corporate L&D teams selling to enterprise customers, that is a deal-stopper: procurement checklists at most mid-market and enterprise companies require SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, or xAPI (Tin Can) compliance before signing.
I build the SCORM and xAPI runtime directly into the platform, not as a bolt-on. That means course packages load correctly, completion signals fire reliably, and xAPI statements land in your Learning Record Store (LRS) with the right verb-object structure. For regulated industries — financial services, healthcare, manufacturing — this is table-stakes. Getting it wrong costs the enterprise deal. Getting it right is roughly 3 to 4 weeks of subscription work.
3 weeks: From kickoff to investor demo.
Typical features I build
Cohort management: fixed start dates, peer cohorts, live session scheduling, attendance tracking. Progress tracking: module completion, assessment scores, certificate generation. SSO and enterprise auth: SAML 2.0, OAuth, Azure AD, Google Workspace. Custom branding: white-label for enterprise accounts. Gamification: points, leaderboards, badges where data suggests they move completion rates. Billing: Stripe subscriptions, invoice-based for enterprise, coupon logic. Reporting: student progress, cohort outcomes, enterprise dashboards. Video: Mux or Cloudflare Stream for hosted delivery. SCORM and xAPI runtime for corporate training requirements.
Each feature cluster is 2 to 6 weeks of subscription work. Priorities are set in a weekly planning call, then delivered in 2 to 4-day cycles.
Integrations and data privacy
Stripe for subscription and invoice billing. Zoom or Daily.co for live sessions with attendance tracking. Calendly for instructor office-hours scheduling. Slack or Circle for community. Mux or Cloudflare Stream for video hosting.
On the privacy side: education platforms touch student data, which puts FERPA (US), GDPR (EU), and LGPD (Brazil) into scope depending on your market. I build the data model with field-level access controls, consent records, and a clear data-residency choice from day one — not retrofitted after a compliance audit. For enterprise deals above $50k ACV, privacy architecture is often reviewed by the customer's legal team. Having a documented data map ready shortens that review from weeks to days.
Pricing and engagement model
Standard tier: $4,999/mo. Pro tier: $5,499/mo, for faster delivery cycles during an initial build phase. 14-day money-back guarantee. Cancel anytime. 100% code ownership under Work Made for Hire — once you pay, the codebase is yours.
Hosting runs on Vercel or AWS, separate from the subscription — typically $100 to $800/month depending on traffic. Video costs (Mux, Cloudflare Stream) pass through at cost. For edtech founders raising or scaling fast, Pro during the first 3 to 6 months usually pays back through faster go-to-market.
Case: GigEasy — the 3-week MVP discipline applied to edtech
At GigEasy I delivered a Barclays and Bain Capital-backed MVP from scratch in 3 weeks, versus the typical 10-week development cycle. The discipline that made that possible — aggressive scope decisions, senior engineering, daily async updates — transfers directly to edtech MVP work.
For edtech founders building toward a demo or a fundraising round, the first usable cohort platform, progress tracker, and Stripe billing flow can ship in 3 to 6 weeks. Fancy video is not needed in V1. Working live sessions, clean cohort mechanics, and a certificate at the end cover 80% of the perceived value for early users.
When a white-label LMS is still the right answer
If your program structure fits Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi, or Circle, and you need only custom branding and basic Stripe integration, the right answer is a white-label plan on one of those platforms. $200 to $500/month, running in a week.
Custom LMS work pays back when the platform blocks you: cohort mechanics that don't map to the off-the-shelf model, enterprise SSO requirements the vendor won't build, SCORM compliance for corporate training, or data-ownership clauses your enterprise customers require. Most edtech founders stay on a platform longer than they should before building custom. I will tell you honestly which bracket you are in.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Built and shipped an investor-ready MVP from scratch
Built the entire technological base and delivered MVP in just 3 weeks, enabling a successful rapid launch and investor demo.
Read the case studyFrequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
A working MVP with cohort management, progress tracking, and Stripe billing ships in 3 to 6 weeks under the subscription model. A full-featured platform with SSO, SCORM runtime, enterprise reporting, and video hosting takes 12 to 20 weeks, depending on scope. The GigEasy MVP took 3 weeks from kickoff to investor demo — that discipline applies directly to edtech work where the pace is usually set by a launch date or a fundraising round.
Yes. SAML 2.0 and OIDC are both supported. I use WorkOS, Auth0, or Clerk for managed SSO, or build directly against Okta and Azure AD depending on the customer. Each enterprise customer gets a test-before-go-live SSO matrix that confirms their IdP configuration is correct. First SSO implementation: roughly 2 weeks. Additional enterprise SSO setups after that: 2 to 4 days each. This is table-stakes for enterprise deals above $20k ACV.
Yes. SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, and xAPI (Tin Can) are all buildable. I implement the runtime natively — not through a third-party player bolted on after the fact — so completion signals and xAPI statements land correctly in your LRS. For regulated-industry customers in financial services, healthcare, or manufacturing, SCORM compliance is a procurement requirement. Getting it right takes 3 to 4 weeks and removes a common objection from enterprise deals.
Mux for adaptive bitrate streaming at professional quality. Cloudflare Stream as a cost-efficient alternative. Both handle transcoding, adaptive delivery, and analytics. For live sessions, Zoom or Daily.co with SSO and attendance tracking. Video costs pass through at cost — budget $0.01 to $0.05 per video-minute delivered. For programs with high video load, a quick cost audit in the first month usually finds 20 to 40% savings.
Yes, and I build that in from day one. Every student interaction is exportable: progress, assessment scores, time-on-task, cohort participation. Export paths include CSV download, API access, or webhook streaming to a data warehouse like BigQuery or Snowflake. You own the data — no vendor lock-in. This matters for GDPR and FERPA compliance, for enterprise customers who require data portability clauses, and for your own product decisions based on cohort completion data.
Standard is $4,999/mo and works for most edtech engagements — steady feature delivery in 2 to 4-day cycles. Pro is $5,499/mo and adds faster turnaround and priority scheduling, which makes sense during an initial build sprint or when a hard launch date is approaching. Both tiers include a 14-day money-back guarantee, code ownership under Work Made for Hire, and no long-term contract.