Small Business & Freelance · Web
FinishRate: online course completion analytics, lesson by lesson
See which lesson loses your students, not just that the course lost them.
FinishRate is online course completion analytics for independent creators who sell their own courses. It reads completions lesson by lesson, shows the drop between consecutive lessons, and names the one place where the most students stop.
Waitlist Not built yet Updated 5 September 2026
What problem does FinishRate solve?
You built the course over months. The sales page works, refunds are rare, and the dashboard on your platform shows a completion figure that has not moved since the second week. Somewhere around module three, students stop. You know that much because a handful of them emailed to apologize, and because the video with the longest runtime has the shortest watch time. What you cannot see is the shape of the loss. Whether the students who bought during a sale leave earlier than the ones who paid full price. Whether the lesson that empties the room is the long one, the one with the homework, or the one right after the free preview ends. When you sit down to fix it, you are choosing between rewriting a lesson, adding a check-in email, and splitting a module, with nothing but a hunch about which to pick. So you rewrite the sales page instead, because that is the part you can measure.
Drop-off calculator
Enrolment and per-module completions in; drop-off per module and the biggest cliff out. Your numbers only.
Free to use. No account. Nothing you type here is stored.
What would FinishRate do?
FinishRate would take one number per step of the course, the count of students who finished it, and draw the picture your platform will not. Every step gets its share of enrolment and, more usefully, the drop from the step before it. The largest single drop is named at the top, because that is the lesson to work on first. Cohorts sit side by side, so a January intake and a September intake can be compared without exporting anything twice. You would tag a lesson after you change it and watch the drop at that point move, or fail to move, in the next cohort. No figure from anyone else's course appears anywhere. There is no bar to clear and no color-coded verdict, only your own counts and the arithmetic between them.
How would it work?
- 1Export the per-lesson completion counts your platform already keeps, or type them in by hand.
- 2Read the drop between consecutive lessons instead of the single completion figure at the end.
- 3Rework the lesson with the largest drop and tag the date you changed it.
- 4Compare the next cohort against the one before to see whether the change held.
Who is it for?
- Solo creators selling one or two courses who have never seen a per-lesson number.
- Cohort teachers running the same syllabus twice a year who want to compare intakes.
- Small teaching teams whose platform reports enrolment and revenue but not where people stopped.
How do you get course drop off analytics out of the platform you already use?
Start with the export your platform already offers. Course hosts usually keep a progress or lesson-completion report under students, reports, or analytics, as a CSV with one row per student and a column per lesson. If yours only shows a per-student progress bar, open five or six students and note where each one stopped. Even a handful tells you whether the stopping is scattered or clustered. Put the export in a spreadsheet and build a small table beside it. Column A: the lesson name, in teaching order. Column B: how many students completed that lesson. Column C: column B divided by your enrolment. Column D, the one that matters: this lesson's share minus the previous lesson's share. Column D is the drop, measured in points, and it is the only column that points at a lesson. Read column D and ignore the rest for a minute. The overall completion figure gives you nothing to act on. One large number in column D tells you exactly which lesson to open. A long, even trickle down the column means something different: the course is not losing people at a cliff, it is losing them to time, and the fix is pacing or a shorter path to the first useful result. Do this per cohort rather than for everyone at once. Give each intake its own sheet with the same four columns. Students who bought in a launch week behave differently from students who drifted in from a blog post, and pooling them hides both. Then change one lesson and write the date in the sheet. When the next cohort reaches that point, compare its column D with the old one. One change, one measurement. That method works on paper and costs nothing.
What do people use today?
| Option | Good at | The gap |
|---|---|---|
| The completion report built into your course platform | Free, already connected, and accurate about who finished what, with no export or setup. | Reports the level a student reached, not the drop between one lesson and the next, and rarely splits intakes apart. |
| A spreadsheet built from a CSV export | Free, private, and flexible; the drop column is one formula and you own every step of it. | Rebuilt by hand after every export, so it goes stale, and each new cohort means another sheet to maintain. |
| General product analytics tools | Strong funnels, cohorts, and retention charts once events are wired into every lesson page. | Priced and shaped for software teams, and somebody has to instrument the course before any chart appears. |
| Engagement reports in your email platform | Shows who opened and clicked the lesson reminders you send, which is a rough proxy for attention. | Measures your emails rather than your lessons, so a quiet student who watches every video looks like a leaver. |
What would it cost?
Free
$0
- One course and up to three cohorts
- Drop per lesson with the largest drop named
Creator
$29/mo
- Unlimited courses and cohorts
- Cohorts side by side
- Change tags so you can test one lesson at a time
- CSV import and platform connections
Studio
$79/mo
- Everything in Creator
- Five seats for a teaching team
- Per-course reports you can hand to a client
Prices are proposed. Founding members lock in the lowest price if we build FinishRate.
Questions people ask
What is online course completion analytics?
Online course completion analytics measures where students stop inside a course rather than only how many reach the end. The useful unit is the drop between two consecutive lessons, because a drop names a lesson you can open, watch back, and change.
Is there a course completion rate benchmark I should compare myself against?
FinishRate will not print one. Published figures come from courses of different lengths, prices, audiences, and definitions of finished, and a number with no source behind it is worse than no number. Your own drop from your first lesson to your second is the comparison that means something.
Why do students drop out of online courses?
Reasons differ by course, and FinishRate does not guess at yours. The counts show which lesson to examine: the one with the largest drop. Watch it back, read its comments, and compare its length with the lessons on either side. The cause is often visible once the lesson is named.
Does the drop-off calculator work by module or by lesson?
Whichever you can export. The calculator takes one completion count per line, in the order you teach. A line can be a whole module or a single video. Finer lines find the exact lesson that empties the room; coarser lines are quicker to gather.
Is FinishRate a Teachable analytics alternative?
FinishRate would sit beside your host rather than replace it. Your course stays on Teachable, Kajabi, Podia, or your own site, and FinishRate reads completion counts by export or connection. Hosting, checkout, and video delivery are not part of it.
What if my platform only gives a progress figure per student?
FinishRate would take that too. A column holding each student's furthest lesson converts into per-lesson counts in one pass. The result is the same table: how many reached each lesson, and how many the course lost between one lesson and the next.
Do student names or email addresses go into FinishRate?
No. FinishRate works from counts per lesson per cohort, so a name column is never needed. Anything that looks like a personal detail can be stripped on import, and messaging students stays in the email tool you already use.
When will FinishRate launch?
No date is set. FinishRate gets built only if enough course creators join this waitlist and say they would pay for it. Joining costs nothing, and the calculator above works whether or not the product is ever made.
Where does this stand?
FinishRate is a proposal, not a product. This page collects demand from search and answer engines. Askwright builds it only if enough people join the waitlist and say they would pay. Read how this works.