How to Evaluate an Online Course Before Buying

A five-minute checklist that's saved me thousands of dollars and dozens of weekends. Use it the next time a launch email lands in your inbox.

Most course sales pages are designed to bypass evaluation entirely. Big promises, scarcity timers, a wall of curated testimonials, a video of the founder pacing in front of a whiteboard. By the time you've scrolled to the bottom of the page, you're not deciding — you're being decided to.

This is a guide for getting your decision back. After ten years of buying and reviewing courses, I run every program over $200 through the same checklist. It takes about five minutes. It's saved me a conservative four figures in wasted money and uncountable weekends of half-finished modules.

The Five Questions Worth Answering

Open the sales page. Take a breath. Then answer these in writing — actually typing them out matters, because it forces you to notice when the page can't give you a clean answer.

1. Who is this for, in one sentence?

If the page can't tell you in a sentence — "This is for B2B sales reps with 1–3 years of experience who want to break into enterprise accounts" — the curriculum probably can't either. Courses that try to be for everyone are usually for no one. The vagueness on the sales page becomes vagueness in the lessons.

Watch out especially for "This is for anyone who wants to ___". That's marketing-speak for "we never figured out who this is actually for, so we're hoping you'll self-select."

2. What's the one specific outcome at the end?

Not "a transformation." Not "a new mindset." A thing you can point at. "You'll launch a paid newsletter with 100+ subscribers." "You'll ship a working portfolio site." "You'll close your first $10K consulting client."

The specificity matters because it's the only honest way to know later whether the course worked. Vague outcomes are unfalsifiable — which means you can't fail, but you also can't tell whether you succeeded.

3. Is there a sample lesson? Watch it.

If they offer a sample, the sample is their best ten minutes. It's the ceiling of the production quality, not the floor. If the sample bores you, the paid content will bore you twice as much.

If there's no sample at all, that's data too. Either they're confident enough in their brand that they don't need to prove anything (rare and usually known names), or they don't have ten minutes of content they're proud enough to show. Most of the time, it's the second one.

4. What does support look like in week three?

Week one of any course is exciting and you don't need support. Week three is when your motivation drops, the work gets harder, and you have a real question that the videos didn't quite answer. That's the moment that determines whether you finish.

Ask: are there real human coaches, or just a chatbot? Is the Slack/Discord active in the last 48 hours? Are office hours real, or theoretical? If the support page is mostly screenshots of testimonials about the support, the support probably isn't great.

5. Is the refund policy one you'd actually use?

Read it twice. Look for: how many days, what you have to prove, and whether there's a "completion requirement" (must have done X modules before refund). The strongest signal of a creator's confidence in their own course is a refund policy that's generous and unconditional.

A 30-day no-questions-asked refund is a creator saying "I bet you'll find this valuable." A 7-day refund that requires you to submit homework is a creator saying "I bet you won't bother."

The Three-Out-of-Five Rule

Here's how I use the checklist. If at least three of the five questions have clean, confident answers, the course is probably worth its price. If three or more have squishy answers — vague, evasive, or impossible to find — the course isn't ready for you, or you aren't ready for it.

Either way, walking away costs you nothing. Almost every course you'll be tempted to buy will run again, often within 90 days. Scarcity is mostly manufactured. The course that's worth your money will still be there.

The Bonus Question Nobody Asks

There's one more question I've added to my list in the last year. It's the one that's saved me the most money: "What will be different about my week in 30 days if I actually finish this?"

If I can't picture the concrete difference — a specific new habit, a project shipped, a number that moved — I'm not buying a course. I'm buying the feeling of having bought a course. Those two purchases cost the same amount of money, but only one of them is worth making.

Takeaway

Treat course-buying like hiring. You wouldn't hire someone after reading their landing page and watching their highlight reel. Ask for the specific outcome. Ask what week three looks like. Ask to see the work. The five-minute checklist isn't elegant, and it definitely won't get you on the affiliate leaderboard for any of these programs — but it'll quietly save you the price of a course or two every year, and that compounds fast.