Rent or own
Three years of rent, or once and for all.
The others rent you a system, I build you yours. You are probably already comparing several solutions. So here they all are, named, with their real prices, what they do well, where they get stuck, and what they have that you can have too.
If you get stuck, you write to me and I answer. This is not a support address, it is mine.Stéphanie
The heart of the matter
What you will have paid after three years.
The monthly price tells you nothing. What counts is the total after three years, and what you are left with on that day.
| Solution | Price | Over three years |
|---|---|---|
| Systeme.io | Limited free tier, then 27 to 97 € / month | 970 to 3,500 € |
| Podia | 35 to 90 € / month | 1,260 to 3,240 € |
| Teachable | 35 to 180 € / month | 1,260 to 6,480 € |
| Learnybox | 30 to 150 € / month | 1,080 to 5,400 € |
| SchoolMaker | 80 to 300 € / month depending on the plan | 2,880 to 10,800 € |
| Wolfeo | 30 to 100 € / month | 1,080 to 3,600 € |
| Kajabi | 60 to 200 € / month | 2,160 to 7,200 € |
| ClickFunnels | 140 to 280 € / month | 5,040 to 10,080 € |
| GoHighLevel | 90 to 460 € / month | 3,240 to 16,560 € |
| WordPress and its plugins | 15 to 40 € / month, plus 200 to 800 € / year of plugins | 1,140 to 3,840 € |
| Freelance developer | 11,000 € and up, then 100 to 150 € / hour | 11,000 € and up |
| Imperium | 1,497 €, one single time | 1,497 € |
Public prices observed in summer 2026, converted and rounded. They change often and depend on the plan chosen: check with the vendor before deciding. These amounts include neither add-ons nor the commissions on sales that some platforms take.
One by one
Depending on your situation, I am not necessarily the one you need.
None of them is bad. They simply answer priorities other than yours, and some will be a better choice depending on your situation.
Systeme.io
What it does well: A free tier to start with, everything in one place, a French-speaking community and support in French.
- The editor becomes exhausting as soon as you step outside the templates
- The result is recognisable at a glance
- Everything stops the day you stop paying
This is the platform most of the people who come to me are leaving: months spent in the editor before settling for roughly-good-enough.
Kajabi
What it does well: Very complete, solid, beautiful templates and real course features.
- The highest price of the conventional all-in-ones
- Interface and support in English only
- No way out: content, pages and automations stay with them
An excellent tool, provided you accept renting one for life and working in English.
Podia and Teachable
What it does well: Easy to get to grips with, designed for selling courses, with a clean student area.
- Little room for manoeuvre on the sales page and the funnel
- Commissions taken on your sales depending on the plan
- Your site lives on their domain, not really on yours
Perfect for testing a first course. Too narrow as soon as your business has other needs.
ClickFunnels
What it does well: The long-standing benchmark for sales funnels, with a very rich ecosystem of templates.
- A price that climbs fast and never comes back down
- An aggressive marketing logic that does not suit every profession
- English-speaking, and designed for high volumes
Oversized and expensive for one self-employed person, whatever their trade.
GoHighLevel
What it does well: An enormous number of features: SMS, calls, automations, lead management.
- The AI there writes text; it does not build your system
- The price can pass 450 € a month depending on the add-ons
- Designed for agencies, not for one self-employed person
What it charges for every month, Aria builds once at your place, and after that you only pay the real usage of the services.
Learnybox and Wolfeo
What it does well: In French, French-speaking support, gentler prices than the American ones.
- The same model: you rent, you do not own
- Functional limits that appear as you grow
- Total dependence on a single vendor
More affordable, but the underlying question remains: after three years you still own nothing.
SchoolMaker
What it does well: Designed for guidance: community linked to the programmes, student tracking, video FAQ.
- One of the highest prices on the French-speaking market
- Focused on courses: the rest of your business lives elsewhere
- Always the same model: you rent
Very good if your business is an online school. Expensive and narrow if you also sell sessions, products or one-to-one work.
Médoucine, Resalib and the directories
What it does well: Well ranked, they bring you people who do not know you yet.
- You are one listing among hundreds
- The client relationship does not belong to you
- Impossible to sell a course or follow up with interested people
Keep them, they attract. But it is your own system that converts: the two complement each other, one does not replace the other.
WordPress and its plugins
What it does well: The site belongs to you, there is a plugin for almost everything, the ecosystem is enormous.
- It is up to you to make five or six plugins hold together
- Updates regularly break something
- You become responsible for security, backups and maintenance
Ownership, yes, but at the cost of permanent technical work, exactly what you are trying to avoid.
Freelance developer
What it does well: The code belongs to you and it is designed precisely for you.
- A budget out of reach for most self-employed people
- Every change is paid for again by the hour
- No built-in AI: you still depend on their availability
A freelance developer charges 11,000 € and up for a bespoke system, then 100 to 150 € an hour for each change. Imperium delivers an equivalent system already developed for 1,497 €, and the changes go through Aria instead of being billed again.
The scope, not the price
What each one does, and what it does not.
This is the comparison nobody makes, and yet it is the deciding one: most tools only cover part of the path. What is missing, you buy again elsewhere, and you connect it yourself.
| Solution | What it covers | What is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Systeme.io | Sales funnel, emails, courses, affiliate system, blog | Design constrained by the editor, basic members area, no personalisation outside the templates |
| Teachable | Courses and student area | No sales funnel, limited emailing, no advanced affiliate system, commission on your sales depending on the plan |
| Podia | Courses, digital products, emails, simple site | No real funnel builder, limited automations |
| SchoolMaker | Courses, community, progress tracking | No complete sales funnel, focused on courses alone |
| Kajabi | Almost everything: funnels, courses, emails, community | The price, the English, and the impossibility of leaving with your system |
| ClickFunnels | Sales funnels, emails, A/B testing | Basic course area, not designed for long-term guidance |
| GoHighLevel | Outreach, SMS, calls, automations, calendar | Basic courses, designed for agencies, the highest price |
| Learnybox, Wolfeo | Courses, funnels, webinars, in French | Functional limits as you grow, dependence on a single vendor |
| WordPress and plugins | Anything is possible, provided you assemble it | Nothing is connected out of the box: maintenance, security and compatibility are on you |
| Imperium | Funnel, payment, members area, emails, dashboard, affiliate system, invoices, blog, booking, all connected together | Nothing is locked: whatever is not delivered, Aria connects |
Scopes observed on the public offerings in summer 2026. They change, and some features depend on the plan you take: check with the vendor before deciding.
Their selling points
What they have and I do not.
Here are the features platforms put forward that are not delivered as such in Imperium. None of them is out of reach: Aria sets them up by connecting your system to the service that provides them.
| The feature | On the platforms | At your place, with Aria |
|---|---|---|
| Live webinars | Included with Systeme.io, Learnybox and Kajabi, with attendee limits depending on the plan. | Aria connects your system to Zoom or Google Meet: registration page, automatic reminder emails and replay page all stay at your place. |
| SMS and phone reminders | GoHighLevel's main selling point, from 90 € a month. | Aria connects Twilio or Brevo. You pay for the messages actually sent, a few cents each, with no platform surcharge. |
| WhatsApp Business | Reserved for the most expensive plans on marketing platforms. | Aria plugs the WhatsApp Business API into your system for your confirmations and your follow-ups. |
| Live chat on your site | Often a paid add-on on top of your subscription. | Aria installs Crisp or Tawk.to (their free tiers are enough), or an assistant that answers from your FAQ. |
| Appointment booking | A separate tool such as Calendly, on an extra subscription. | The booking page is already delivered; Aria syncs it with your Google Calendar, Cal.com or Calendly. |
| Community space | Circle, Skool or a Facebook group, to pay for or to put up with. | Aria creates a private space directly inside your site, or links it to a Discord if you prefer. |
| Mobile app | A selling point of Kajabi's premium plans. | Your site is already designed for phones; Aria can make it installable like an app, without going through the app stores. |
| A/B testing of your pages | ClickFunnels' flagship feature. | Aria creates two versions of your page and compares them using the statistics already built into your dashboard. |
| Advanced segmentation of your list | Charged by number of contacts on most platforms. | Campaigns and segments are already in your dashboard; Aria connects Brevo or Mailchimp if you want them. |
| Accounting and exports | Limited export, often reserved for higher plans. | Your data is yours: Aria produces the exports your accountant needs, in the format they ask for. |
To say it honestly: these connections require opening an account with the service concerned, and the most complex ones take more than a simple request. Aria tells you what the work involves before starting, and my support is there for 6 months.
What really changes
Renting means paying every month to carry on existing.
| What changes | Any subscription platform | Imperium |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay | 27 to 460 € a month depending on the platform, forever. | 1,497 € once. Then nothing more. |
| If you stop paying | You lose your pages, your funnel, often access to your content. | Nothing changes: the system is at your place, it carries on running. |
| To change something | You hunt through the menus, you watch a tutorial, you start again. | You ask Aria in your own words, she does it. |
| What you cannot do | Everything the vendor did not plan for. The wall comes up fast. | Almost nothing: the code is open, and whatever is not delivered, Aria connects. |
| The look | Recognisable a mile off, the same templates as everyone else. | Yours: your colours, your layout, your voice. |
| Your client data | Hosted with them, exportable according to their rules. | In your own database, in your name. |
Honesty before the sale
Where they remain better than me.
- You have nothing to install on your computer: it all happens in their browser. Be careful about what that does not cover, though, since on those platforms too you have to open a Stripe or PayPal account and connect it, buy a domain name and link it, configure the DNS records so your emails go out, then build your pages and connect your automations one by one. It is not less work: it is the same work, but on you, and with nobody beside you.
- They have a dedicated support desk, available at all times. Here it is me: I answer within 48 hours, and for 6 months.
- Subscription platforms offer dozens of ready-made templates to click on. With Imperium it is Aria who builds from what you describe to her, which is more personal, but you do have to tell her.
What the screenshots do not show
The time before your first sale, on both sides.
Creating an account takes five minutes. Taking a first payment takes far more, and that is the part nobody talks about: you have to open a Stripe account and connect it, collect the keys of the other services you use and plug them in one by one, buy and then link your domain name, build every page, link the pages together, and configure every automation by hand. None of that comes connected: the platform gives you the workshop, not the assembled furniture.
With Imperium, that part takes 25 minutes once you know it, 1 hour 30 at most the first time, and at the end everything is already connected: the pages are transformed and linked to each other, the payment creates the member account, the account opens access to the course, the sale triggers the invoice and starts the email sequence, already ready to go. All that is left for you is making it yours. Not because it is magic, but because that wiring was done and tested before it reached you. What you cannot shorten, here or anywhere else, is writing what you sell.
The clever question
Asking an AI to code the whole thing: what you actually get.
You can. Many try. What you buy here is not the AI's ability, it is what exists before it: months of development, the automations already connected and tested, the security audited, the legal compliance, and above all a working knowledge already installed that knows how this precise system behaves.
An AI starting from scratch will make you a pretty page. It will not make you, in an hour and a half, a funnel connected to a members area, to a client database, to invoices and to nine automations that hold together and were tested before you.
They compared, then they switched
None of them was more comfortable with the technical side than you.
They tell you it's easy, it's easy, it's easy.
In three hours, I knew how to build a site that looked like me.
I did it all alone, it took me weeks. Zero clients.
Tech always frightened me. I was wrong.
None of the four is a developer. None of them wrote a line of code. Hear them tell it
I do not hand you the system and leave you sitting there. The setup is guided step by step on video, and if you get stuck we book a call and do it together. I stay for six months.Stéphanie
The difference comes down to one word
Stop renting.
Build what will stay yours.
One single payment, the code belongs to you, and an AI that adapts it, including by connecting it to the services your business needs.