Heights Platform Review: Create & Sell Online Courses

What Is Heights Platform?

Heights Platform is a learning management system that showed up on AppSumo as a lifetime deal priced at $79 — on the higher end of typical AppSumo offerings, which usually fall in the $39–$49 range. But the feature set here punches well above that price point, putting it in the same conversation as monthly subscription platforms like Teachable.

With a single code, you get two lesson authors and 100 active students. An "active student" is defined as anyone who logs in during a given month, so you could technically have thousands of enrolled users — only those who actually log in count against your limit. If you need more capacity, you can stack codes: two codes bumps you to 500 active students, and each additional code after that adds another 400. Stack all the way up to nine codes and you're looking at 3,300 active students for a one-time payment of $711.

Course Creation and Lesson Types

Creating a course on Heights is straightforward. You give it a title, description, cover image (with a built-in Unsplash integration), and set a difficulty level — beginner, intermediate, advanced, or no label at all. Once you're ready, you check the publish box and you're live.

Heights supports five different lesson types: text and content, video, assignment, download, and audio. The text editor is similar to what you'd find in WordPress or an email client like Mailchimp, and you can embed code from tools like Typeform or Airtable directly into your lessons. Image uploads pull from your device, Instagram, Google Drive, Dropbox, or Unsplash.

The video lesson type is where things get interesting. You can upload directly to Heights' own hosting, paste in a URL, or use an embed code from a third-party player. Heights gives you one free video upload to test their hosting, and after that it's $9 per month for unlimited video hosting — a reasonable fee compared to something like Vimeo Pro. During testing, VideoCipher and YouTube embeds worked flawlessly out of the box, while VooPlayer had some CSS alignment issues with the play bar sitting about a third of the way up the video frame.

Drip Content and Lesson Sequencing

Heights includes release settings that let you drip out content on a schedule. You can set a lesson to appear a specific number of days after a student enrolls — one lesson per day, one per week, or whatever cadence fits your course structure.

There's also a "requires lock" checkbox that forces students to complete a previous lesson before gaining access to the next one. This is useful for courses where the material builds on itself and you don't want students skipping ahead. Combined with the drip scheduling, you have solid control over how students progress through your material.

One notable gap: there's no way to group lessons into modules. If you're used to organizing courses into sections or chapters, you'll find this limiting. The workaround is to treat what would be a module as its own standalone course, but that approach can get awkward depending on how you market and sell your content.

Pricing, Payments, and Upsells

Heights integrates directly with Stripe and PayPal for payment processing — no middleman taking an extra cut. You have several pricing models to choose from: free enrollment, one-time payments, installment plans, or recurring subscriptions.

The installment plan option is particularly nice. You could offer a course at $997 as a one-time payment or split it into six payments of $197, charging a small premium for the convenience. Subscription pricing lets you run a membership model similar to what Lynda.com used to offer, where students pay a recurring fee for access to your entire course library.

By default, all courses are grouped into a subscription model, but you can toggle individual courses to be sold separately. There's a built-in upsell feature too — after someone purchases one course, you can present another at a discounted price. For example, your advanced course might normally sell for $100, but as an upsell after purchasing the beginner course, you could offer it at $50. These are the kinds of marketing features that would cost hundreds of dollars in WooCommerce add-ons.

Landing Pages and Branding

Heights includes a field-based landing page builder. Rather than giving you a drag-and-drop page builder like Elementor, you fill in structured fields — hero image, course description, author bio, testimonials, and Google Analytics tracking — and Heights generates the page for you.

The landing pages are functional but come with limitations. You can add testimonials, but there's no option to include a photo with each testimonial, which is a missed opportunity since photos add a lot of credibility. There's also a meta description field for SEO, which is a thoughtful inclusion.

Branding options are limited. You can add your own logo, set a custom domain (like courses.yourcompany.com via CNAME record), and choose from several preset color themes. However, you can't set custom brand colors — you're stuck with the vibrant palettes Heights provides. The themes are bold and colorful, which won't necessarily match every brand. If you could just pick a primary and accent color, this would be a non-issue.

Discussion Forums and Community Features

Heights includes built-in discussion forums where you can create message boards organized by topic. You can configure notification settings for new posts and enable private messaging between students — a great feature for building community and allowing direct mentor-to-student communication.

The forum supports standard message board functionality: create topics, post replies, and have threaded conversations. It's functional but, like much of the Heights UI, it could use some visual polish. The feature set is solid for basic community building, though it's not going to replace a dedicated community platform.

There's also a gamification layer with points and badges. Students earn points for completing lessons, and badges unlock when certain conditions are met — like earning 10 points or making 150 discussion posts. It's a nice touch for keeping students engaged, though the badge designs themselves are fairly basic.

Student Management and User Roles

The members section gives you a full admin view of everyone enrolled in your program. You can see login frequency, time spent online, course enrollment status, individual orders, and assignment submissions — all from one centralized dashboard.

User roles let you restrict course access based on a student's level. You might create roles like Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced, then gate certain courses behind those roles. You can also elevate students to mentor/author status or give them moderator permissions on the discussion forums.

The one downside is that user role progression is entirely manual. There's no automation to say "once a student completes Course A, automatically promote them to Intermediate." Everything requires manual approval, which could become a real headache as your student base grows. Heights also includes the ability to grant access to specific courses or digital products on a per-student basis, which is useful for comping access or handling special cases.

Projects Instead of Quizzes

Heights made an unconventional choice by including projects instead of quizzes. A project asks students to complete a real-world task — like building an app if you're teaching development — rather than answering multiple-choice questions.

It's a bold move, and while project-based learning has its merits, the lack of quizzes will be a dealbreaker for some course creators. Many students expect knowledge checks throughout a course, and quizzes are a proven way to reinforce learning. Having both options would have been ideal.

Heights also supports selling digital products like eBooks and audio files alongside your courses. These can be included in the membership, sold as standalone items, or offered as upsells — giving you flexibility in how you package and monetize your content.

Final Verdict: 7.7 Out of 10

Heights Platform packs a surprising number of features into a $79 lifetime deal. Built-in payments with Stripe and PayPal, discussion forums, landing pages, gamification, digital product sales, drip content, and upsell functionality — it's a lot of value for the price.

The platform's biggest weakness is its appearance. The student-facing UI isn't winning any design awards, and the limited branding options mean you can't fully make it your own. The lack of lesson modules, quizzes, and automated user role progression are functional gaps that matter for serious course creators.

If you're just getting started with online courses and want something affordable to test the waters, Heights is a solid pick. But if teaching online courses is your full-time business, you'll likely outgrow it and want more control — whether that's a platform like Teachable or a fully custom WordPress setup. Heights earns a 7.7 out of 10: feature-rich and well-thought-out, but in need of a visual facelift to truly compete.

Watch the Full Video

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