Build buy or rent: elearning on a budget

Happy Wednesday!

Someone asked me a question recently about how I make L&D budget decisions specifically around elearning. Platforms is a whole other conversation. High level, you have a choice to build in house, buy custom or off the shelf or rent by using content from a content library or SaaS learning company.

Build vs Buy: Custom eLearning vs Off-the-Shelf Libraries in 2026

This article is great because it gives you some real numbers to work with which match my lived experience. This is useful for a particular kind of stakeholder conversation. They may have seen a fully gameified dynamic custom elearning solution and now they want it for their Intro to Trivial Business Task Course. Providing them with a $70K / $25K / $15K price break will help them reevaluate their mental math. Sticker shock aside, you as a learning professional should help guide them to the right options. There have been a few times in my career where a $200K+ price point was needed and the business signed off on it. This was when the learning need, scale and modality all lined up. The math is much different for one million learners than 150 which is this articles baseline. Deciding to rent content vs buy is pretty straightforward. First, the content has to solve the problem in the context of the learner. If your stakeholder says they need an intro to software development course but your company has a tech stack that is highly custom that LinkedIn Learning or Coursera course is just going to confuse people.

Take that $70K custom gamification course above. Let’s say your audience is 100K employees. If licenses for a similar course work out to $10 per user that’s a million dollars a year. $70K is a steal! If you have 150 learners the cost is $1500 and $70K seems foolish. The tricky part is that your stakeholders will tend to anchor on whatever the last solution was regardless of this price breakdown so, it’s important to do the basic math each time.

How do I prioritise learning requests when everyone thinks their project is urgent?

Here is where I disagree with the industry at large. Most teams will go about making an ironclad intake process. In my experience having one encourages order taking behavior. It’s much better to work directly with your main stakeholders to diagnose problems together and then create a roadmap with them. For political or expedience reasons you might need to have one anyway. Your stakeholders could expect you to have one! Fine, if you have to make one this article is a great guide. If you position the team as a course publishing house people will use it like one. It’s better to indicate what your team is all about in the intake. I also find it’s great to be honest about time and money up front. This article suggests gold silver bronze service tiers. That’s not my style but the important thing is to be able to differentiate the big bets from self help and having the intake form itself lead people towards the right answer is a better outcome than maximizing the use of the form.

How to Design Effective E-Learning Experiences on a Shoestring Budget

I’ve lost some of the audience by this point. Many learning teams never get any budget ever. I’ve been on those teams so I’m not going to preach to you that all you need to do is present the most compelling business case to management. Sometimes you just have to be scrappy. Cathy Moore has always had some of the best advice on this. Her tool recommendations are old but the thought process is the same for if you’re going to use an AI tool or a free Canva plan. You can build a more effective learning experience than a $100K VR gameified experience by going to the basics of learning design. Get really really crisp about learning goals and learning objectives. Don’t outsource this to AI. This needs to stem from conversations. You can use AI to polish them or whatever but having all parties have a clear agreement that leads to a real business goal is more important that choosing the right verbs.

Bonus!

Speaking of scrappy this kitten is named Gelato and I think that’s perfect.

Affiliate link: Action Mapping

Cathy Moore’s book Map It shows you a practical step by step process that fits with the realities you’ll face in business. I highly recommend this to anyone in L&D at any experience level.