High Ticket vs Low Ticket Courses: Which Should You Sell?
Three million dollars of course sales took Eli Jones three years. Three million dollars of high ticket sales took him one. Same man, same expertise, same market. If you are choosing right now, sell the high ticket offer first. You get to real money on a handful of customers, and the course you build afterward is better because you already taught it live.
Short answer: High ticket means $1,000 and up, sold on a call, delivered with coaching. Low ticket means a course people buy from a page and complete alone. High ticket reaches any given revenue number on a fraction of the customers, which is why it moves faster early. It costs you a sales process and roughly 15 to 20% of revenue paid to whoever sells it. Start high, build the course out of what you teach, then add the automated offer. Start the 30-day trial here.
One person, both models, and the clock is the difference
Almost every argument you have read about this came from somebody who only ever ran one of the two. Eli Jones ran both. He has sold over $6 million in education products: about $3 million of low and mid ticket courses, about $3 million of high ticket coaching, and about $200,000 of memberships. In a 2024 interview he put real numbers on all three.
The timeline is the part that should stop you. He launched the course in late 2019 and sold it through 2022. Three years to $3 million. He tested a membership for two months in 2023, saw it would land him where he already was, and switched to high ticket. That side hit $3 million in about a year and was still accelerating when he laid the numbers out.
He did not get better at business in between. He got paid more per customer for solving the same problem.
What a high ticket business actually costs to run
Here is the part the guru with the rented Lamborghini leaves out. At $3 million a year in high ticket, Eli's team was 23 full-time people. Six on sales, seven coaches, then leadership, content, assistants and someone doing accounts receivable and payable.
The money splits like this. Closers take 10% of cash collected, setters get $250 per closed set, and all in the sales team runs about 15% of top line. He puts the normal range at 15 to 20%. Coaching delivery takes another 5 to 10%. What he keeps after all of it is 40 to 50%, depending on the month.
Then there is the number nobody warns you about: contracted is not collected. One of his months was $535,000 contracted and $331,000 actually in the bank, because most high ticket buyers are on payment plans or financing. A $10,000 program over 36 months is three or four hundred dollars a month to them, which is what makes it accessible, and it means your revenue arrives in pieces while payroll arrives on time.
None of that machinery is exotic. The application form, the scoring that sends a lead to a setter or straight to a closer, the calendar the call lands on, the pipeline that tracks contracted against collected, and the recurring invoice for the payment plan are five things you would normally buy separately. They are one account here, which is why high ticket coaches keep turning up in our support chat asking how to call and text their leads faster.
What a low ticket business actually costs to run
The low ticket side of his business was doing well over $100,000 a month at its peak on a fraction of that headcount. His words: you could run a $100,000 a month business basically by yourself. That is real, and it is the honest case for the model.
The cost moves instead of disappearing. He spent roughly $1.2 million on ads to build it, almost all on Facebook. The whole thing ran off a workshop, a registration page, an automatic email sequence and a checkout. A busy month there takes hundreds of sales. The high ticket business celebrated 50 new students as its second biggest month ever.
So the trade is not simple versus hard. It is payroll versus ad budget, and one of those you can turn off tonight. What punishes beginners here is that the ad budget comes before the revenue, and the funnel has to convert cold traffic without you in the room. That is why the workshop page, the replay emails and the checkout with an order bump are templates you clone on Premium instead of a six week build with a contractor.
The two businesses side by side
| Low ticket course | High ticket program | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical price | $100 to $1,000 | $2,000 to $25,000. Eli's average is around $12,000 |
| Customers needed for $300,000 a year | 600 at $500 | 25 at $12,000 |
| Who sells it | A workshop and an email sequence, running at 3am | You, then a setter and a closer |
| Team at $3 million a year | You plus contractors | Around 23 people |
| Where the money goes | Ad spend, up front, before any sales | 15 to 20% of revenue to the sales team, after the sale |
| When the cash arrives | Immediately, in full | In pieces. Contracted is not collected |
| Buyers who actually do the work | Roughly 1 in 5 | Roughly 4 in 5 |
| What has to exist on day one | A finished course and a funnel | An offer, a calendar and a promise you can keep |
| Time to your first $3 million | Three years, in his case | One year, in his case |
Do the volume math before you pick the price
Pick the number you want to hit each month and divide. Use $10,000, because it is the one most people say out loud. A $5,000 coaching program gets you there on two sales, one every fifteen days. A $1,000 course needs ten a month. A $100 a month membership needs a hundred paying members, and you replace the ones who leave.
The lower your price, the more volume you need, and volume is the hard part. Volume means traffic, and traffic means either money or years of content. Two conversations a month is something a person can do from a kitchen table. A hundred sales a month is a marketing operation. That division is the most useful five seconds in this decision, and it is why we point people toward starting expensive. For the full breakdown of the four price bands, we mapped them out here.
You are building the course either way
People hear high ticket and picture jumping on Zoom calls to figure it out live. That is not a business, that is you renting out your calendar. Eli's coaching program is built on the course he already had. His words: our course was the foundation of coaching. The curriculum got refilmed and put in order, then wrapped in a 26 week checklist, one-on-one calls, group calls and a private channel. Coaches scale because the material does not change.
Look at it from the delivery side. Without a course you say the same sentences to every new client on repeat, live, on the clock. With one you send the ten minute video where you nailed it, and the call becomes accountability instead of a lecture.
Saying courses are dead is like saying education is dead. Education has been around for thousands of years and only the delivery changes. The kind of course that survives is the one attached to a person and a result, which is the high ticket model wearing a different hat. Either road you take, you need somewhere to host the videos, a community, group calls and the checklist. On Premium and Elite that is one login instead of four subscriptions, and Elite includes bi-weekly coaching calls with us while you build it.
The refund fear runs backwards
Everybody assumes charging $12,000 with a money-back guarantee means a wave of refunds. The person doing it says the opposite. Eli's rule of thumb is that refunds should never be anywhere near 10%, and that higher prices produce fewer of them, because someone who saved up twelve grand shows up differently than someone who spent $47 on a Tuesday.
The completion numbers say it from the other end. His honest guess on the course was that 15 to 20% of buyers did anything with it at all. On the high ticket side, 15 to 20% are the ones who do not. When you pay ten grand, you take action.
His guarantee is specific: hit at least $4,000 in a month or get your money back, with clear conditions about doing the work and no fine print. You can only write a promise like that when the program is choreographed week by week, and that is worth the effort, because a guarantee that specific closes deals a testimonial page never will. If you have never asked a stranger for money on a call, that is the skill to build first, not the price. Every course creator has to be their own first sales rep. If it feels scary live, it does not get easier hiding behind an automated video.
The third option we moved to in January 2024
We got tired of the binary, so we built the middle. Instead of charging $10,000 for access to one person, and instead of a do-it-yourself course under $1,000, we put the two together: a $147 a month subscription with the course, group coaching calls, a real community, and the software with done-for-you templates on top. It pretty much doubled our revenue and our close rates, because the offer is worth ten times more combined than those pieces were separately.
The con is churn, and it is real. A subscription is a customer you earn again every month, and some months people leave. It is also why we would never go back, because six figures a month of recurring revenue means nobody here wakes up on the first with the counter at zero. No course launch ever gave us that.
The hybrid works for us because of the software. Templates are what let us include done-for-you elements at $147 instead of $10,000. If you can hand people a working asset instead of only teaching them to build one, this model is open to you too. Twenty minutes on a demo is the fastest way to see whether your offer stacks that way.
If you are deciding this week, do this
Write the high ticket version of your offer first. Name the result, name the timeframe, price it between $2,000 and $12,000, and have ten conversations about it before you record a single lesson. If three people buy, you have a business and a curriculum written for you by the questions they asked. If nobody buys, you learned that in two weeks instead of after a six month build.
There is one person we would send the other way: you sell to hobbyists whose ceiling on this topic is genuinely a couple hundred dollars, so a four-figure call has nothing to sell. Even then, run five of those calls first, because most people who assume their market is broke have never asked. And build somewhere the second offer already exists, so the day the course sells you are not shopping for a checkout, a community and an email tool. Take the 30-day trial, put the offer on a page this week, and go get the ten conversations.
Frequently asked questions
Should I start with a high ticket or a low ticket offer?
Start high ticket. You need a fraction of the customers to hit any revenue number, you can sell it before the product exists, and the buyers tell you what the course should contain. Add the automated low ticket version once you know what people pay for.
How much should I charge for a high ticket coaching program?
High ticket starts at $1,000 and has no ceiling. Eli's average sale is around $12,000 and his top package is $24,800, for a program that takes a real estate media business from a few thousand a month to a real one. Price against the result the buyer gets, not the hours you spend.
Do I need a sales team to sell high ticket?
Not at first. You are the closer until the calendar hurts, then you add a setter. Budget 15 to 20% of revenue for whoever sells it, roughly what you would have spent on ads to sell the same amount of low ticket product.
Are online courses dead?
No. Completion rates are genuinely low, and that argues for wrapping the course in accountability, not deleting it. Every serious coaching program we have seen is a course with coaching on top, because the curriculum is what lets you hire a second coach.
Will a higher price mean more refunds?
The opposite, in his experience and in ours. Higher prices attract buyers who are committed and who take action, so refunds go down while results go up. What creates refunds is a promise the program is not built to keep.
What do I actually need to run a high ticket program?
An application form, a calendar, a pipeline, a way to take a deposit and bill a payment plan, a course portal, a community, and email and SMS follow-up so leads do not go cold. That is one platform on Premium or Elite, with the onboarding call setting up your domain and email deliverability for you.
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About the author
Stockton Walbeck is the founder of Course Creator 360. He's been selling online courses since 2016, has sold or helped sell more than $25 million of them, and has coached more than 10,000 course creators. CC360 is the software he wished existed when he started.
