How to Write Terms and Conditions for an Online Course or Membership Site

A generic terms and conditions template assumes you're selling a product or a straightforward subscription. A course or membership site is selling neither, exactly. You're licensing access to content that lives on someone else's platform, for a period that might be forever or might be a single cohort's runtime, to people who are often paying you specifically because they expect a result: a certification, a skill, a following, a transformation you can't actually promise. None of that is covered by swapping a company name into a boilerplate agreement. Below is what a course or membership ToS needs to say instead, and where those clauses actually differ depending on whether you're selling a one-time course or a recurring membership.

This is a separate document from your privacy policy, which covers what data you collect and why (see our guides on a privacy policy for an online course and a privacy policy for a membership website if you haven't written that piece yet). Terms and conditions cover a different question: what you and the student or member are actually agreeing to when money changes hands.

What you're really selling: a license, not a copy

The single most consequential clause in a course or membership ToS is the one that states, in plain terms, that a student is buying a limited, non-transferable license to access the content, not a copy of it and not ownership of it. This matters because without that line, a disgruntled student who downloaded your videos before you locked them behind DRM has a much stronger argument that they bought something they're entitled to keep and redistribute, rather than something they were only ever licensed to view.

State it directly: enrollment grants a personal, non-transferable, non-exclusive license to access the course or membership content for personal use, not for resale, public performance, or redistribution in any form, including re-uploading to another platform, sharing login credentials, or reselling access to a third party. That last part, credential sharing, is worth naming explicitly rather than assuming "non-transferable" covers it by implication, since it's the single most common way course and membership access actually leaks out from under a paying customer's account.

Access windows: the clause a generic template skips entirely

This is where course and membership terms diverge from almost every other SaaS or ecommerce ToS template, because "how long do you get access" isn't a fixed answer the way it is for most digital products. A course might be sold as lifetime access, a fixed enrollment window tied to a cohort, or a drip schedule that releases modules over weeks. A membership is ongoing by definition, tied to active billing, and access typically ends the moment a subscription lapses rather than continuing through some notice period.

Whichever model you're running, the ToS needs to state it as a specific, checkable fact, not a vague assurance. "Lifetime access" should be qualified with what happens if you shut the course down, retire the platform, or stop supporting the format your content is hosted in, since "lifetime" reasonably read by a court or a refund-seeking customer means the lifetime of the product, not a guarantee that outlives your business. A common, defensible pattern is to promise access for the lifetime of the course as offered, with a stated minimum period (a year, for instance) and the right to modify or discontinue specific modules with reasonable notice.

Content licensing: what a student can and can't do with the material

Beyond the basic non-transferable license, a course or membership ToS should spell out scope of use for the specific formats you actually distribute: video lessons, downloadable worksheets or templates, community posts, live session recordings. A student who paid for a course reasonably expects to keep any workbook or template file they downloaded as part of the purchase, but that doesn't mean they're licensed to repost that template publicly or sell it as their own product. State the boundary explicitly rather than leaving "can I use this file for my own client work" to a support email you'll get asked eventually.

For membership sites specifically, this section also needs to cover community-generated content, if your membership includes a discussion forum, a Discord or Circle community, or peer feedback threads. Clarify who owns what a member posts (typically the member retains ownership, while granting you a license to display and moderate it within the community) and what your moderation and removal rights are for posts that violate your conduct rules. A community without stated conduct rules and enforcement rights in the ToS leaves you without contractual footing the first time you need to remove a member for harassment or spam rather than just a vague "we reserve the right" sentence with nothing under it.

No guarantee of results

This is the clause that protects you from the exact promise your marketing page is implicitly making. A course sold as "learn to code in 12 weeks" or a membership sold as "grow your audience with our framework" creates an expectation of outcome, and a no-guarantee-of-results clause in the ToS is what separates "we provide the instruction and materials" from "we promise you'll get the result." It needs to say, specifically, that individual results vary based on the student's effort, prior experience, and external factors outside your control, and that completion of the course or participation in the membership does not guarantee any particular outcome, certification recognition, income, or professional result.

Vague versions of this clause tend to get written defensively and end up saying almost nothing usable. A specific version names the actual variables at play, which is also what makes it credible rather than boilerplate.

Cancellation and refund rights, matched to the access model

This is the second place a course ToS and a membership ToS should genuinely differ, not just reuse the same paragraph with the word swapped. A one-time course purchase typically needs a refund window, commonly somewhere between 7 and 30 days, tied to a completion or access threshold (many platforms tie eligibility to how much of the course content the student has actually viewed, to discourage buying, downloading everything, then requesting a refund). A membership, being a recurring charge, needs cancellation terms instead: how to cancel, when the cancellation takes effect relative to the current billing period, and whether access continues through the period already paid for or ends immediately.

If your membership auto-renews, which nearly all of them do, state the renewal terms clearly: the billing frequency, that it renews automatically until canceled, and how a member cancels. A growing number of US states require clear and conspicuous auto-renewal disclosure before checkout, so this isn't just good practice, it's a compliance requirement in several jurisdictions regardless of where your business is based, if you're selling to residents there.

Where a course and a membership do share ground is that both need to name the actual refund policy rather than reference one that doesn't exist. If your business already has a standalone refund policy, link it from the ToS instead of duplicating the terms in two places that can drift out of sync with each other.

Platform dependency: the risk unique to this business model

Nearly every course or membership business runs on someone else's infrastructure, Teachable, Kajabi, Thinkific, Patreon, Memberful, Circle, or a self-hosted setup that still depends on a payment processor and a video host. Your ToS should acknowledge this dependency rather than write as if you control every layer a student interacts with: state that access is subject to the uptime and functionality of the underlying platform, that a platform outage or policy change outside your control may temporarily affect access, and that you'll make reasonable efforts to restore or migrate access if the platform you rely on changes materially. This isn't a loophole clause, it's an accurate description of the actual dependency your business has, and stating it plainly is more defensible than pretending the risk doesn't exist.

Putting it together

None of these clauses replace the standard terms every ToS needs, governing law, limitation of liability, dispute resolution, account termination for violating conduct rules. They sit alongside those standard sections as the parts that are specific to selling access-based content rather than a physical product or a straightforward SaaS seat. Our Terms and Conditions Generator builds the standard sections and lets you specify your access model, whether you're running a one-time course, a cohort, or a recurring membership, so the license, access-window, and cancellation language it produces actually matches what you're selling rather than reading like a template that was written for something else and pointed at your course.

The information in this article is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice on any matter, and does not create a lawyer-client relationship.