The hidden costs of e-learning. What nobody calculates when creating training

When L&D teams calculate the training budget, they usually think about platform licences, instructor fees and, at best, instructional design time. What almost nobody adds up is the real cost of producing the content itself: the hours spent structuring, the review cycles, the coordination with subject matter experts, the tools that don’t talk to each other. Those are the hidden costs of eLearning. And their impact on training ROI is greater than any budget line captures.

Why is the training budget always falling short?

Most organisations calculate the cost of training by adding three visible items: the cost of the platform or LMS, the fees of external instructors or vendors, and the learners’ time during training sessions. It is an understandable calculation, but an incomplete one.

What that budget doesn’t capture is everything that happens before a course is available to employees:

• Structuring content from scratch.
• Writing the learning texts.
• Designing activities and assessments.
• Coordinating the subject matter experts who must validate what is taught.
• Reviewing, correcting, reviewing again.
• Publishing, updating, maintaining.

Each of those phases has a cost in real working hours. And those hours belong to profiles with a non-trivial hourly rate: instructional designers, content managers, reviewers, coordinators. None of that appears on any invoice, but it is real cost.

The cost layers nobody adds up

To understand the real cost of eLearning, you need to break it down into layers. Some are visible and appear on any invoice. Others are invisible but just as real.

Visible costs

• Authoring tool licences (authoring tools, video editors, image libraries)
• LMS platform cost
• External vendor fees (production agencies, freelance designers)
• Team training on new tools

Hidden costs

• Content structuring time: organising information, defining learning objectives, deciding the course flow. This step alone typically consumes between 20% and 30% of total production time.
• SME (Subject Matter Expert) time: the experts who validate content have a high hourly rate, and their review time is rarely counted as a production cost.
• Review cycles: each round of corrections between the L&D team, SMEs and management adds hours. A course that goes through four revision rounds can take twice as long as originally estimated.
• External coordination: the follow-up and correction work with designers, agencies or freelancers doesn’t appear on any invoice, but it is real work.
• Maintenance and updates: when content becomes outdated, it needs updating. This recurring cost is almost never planned for.
• Tool friction: if the team uses three different tools that don’t integrate, the time spent exporting, converting and re-importing content also has a cost.

The data that confirms the problem

These hidden costs are not a hypothesis. They are a reality that industry data confirms clearly. The study AI Use in HR and Training, produced by isEazy together with Microsoft with more than 300 professionals surveyed, provides a precise picture of the problem:

• 61% of L&D teams take more than two weeks to produce a single course.
• 29% need between two and four weeks.
• 18% need between one and two months.

But that’s not all. The three most time-consuming tasks within course creation are: structuring content from scratch (59%), designing activities and assessments (41%) and writing the learning texts (40%). What makes these figures significant is that they describe the situation in 2025, with artificial intelligence already available and widely adopted. AI is helping, but the structural problem — the process — remains largely unresolved.

Why has AI still not solved this?

If artificial intelligence has been promising to transform training content production for years, why do 61% of teams still take more than two weeks to create a course? The answer lies in a distinction the industry has yet to fully internalise: using AI for specific tasks is different from redesigning the entire process with AI.

What happens in most L&D teams is that AI has entered as an accelerator for individual steps: drafting text faster, adjusting the tone of a paragraph, finding images more easily. But the full production workflow — from the initial content analysis to final publishing — remains just as heavy, just as fragmented, just as dependent on manual coordination between profiles.

The result is that time is saved at some points in the process, but the real bottlenecks — structuring from scratch, SME coordination, review cycles — remain exactly where they always were. The efficiency gains of AI-assisted steps are absorbed by the structural inefficiency of the process as a whole.

How to calculate the real cost of creating a course in your organisation

Putting a number on the production cost of eLearning courses does not require a complex accounting system. It requires measuring the right variables. Here is the five-step framework:

1. Identify all the profiles involved in production

Not just the instructional designer. Also the content manager who organises the materials, the SME who reviews and validates, the designer who lays out the course, the coordinator who manages the project, and the approver. Each has an hourly cost.

2. Measure the real time per phase and per profile

Break down production into phases: analysis, structuring, writing, activity design, production, internal review, SME review, corrections, publishing. Estimate how many hours each profile dedicates to each phase in a typical course.

3. Multiply by the hourly cost of each profile

Use the total gross cost of the employee (salary + employer contributions + pro-rated benefits). For external profiles, use the actual invoiced amount per hour or project.

4. Add the external coordination cost

Every interaction with a vendor, agency or freelancer has an internal cost: briefing them, reviewing deliverables, requesting corrections, managing approvals. Estimate the hours your team spends on external coordination per course.

5. Calculate the cost per course and multiply by annual volume

With all these figures, you can calculate what it actually costs to produce one course. Multiply by the number of courses produced per year to obtain the annual production cost — the metric that makes any improvement decision meaningful.

What it really means to improve production ROI in eLearning

Once you have the number — how much it really costs to produce training in your organisation — the strategic question changes. It is no longer “can we afford a new tool?”. It is “how much does it cost us not to change anything?”.

Improving production ROI in eLearning does not necessarily mean buying cheaper tools. It means reducing the time the process consumes without losing quality in the result. There are three main levers:

• Reducing production time per course. If the average time drops from three weeks to a week and a half, the production cost is halved. For a team producing 10 courses a year, that can represent between €40,000 and €60,000 in annual savings.
• Eliminating external dependencies. Every time an internal team can produce what it previously needed to outsource, the saving is direct and process control increases.
• Standardising the process. A team that follows a consistent, documented workflow produces more predictably, reduces errors and requires fewer correction rounds. Standardisation is invisible but quantifiable in hours saved per course.

All three levers can be activated independently, but their combined effect is multiplied when a tool supports them simultaneously — reducing individual task time, enabling internal production and providing structure to the process.

Common mistakes when measuring the cost of eLearning

Even when L&D teams set out to measure, there are recurring errors that distort the result and lead to flawed strategic decisions.

Mistake 1: Confusing the platform cost with the total cost

The LMS or authoring tool is only a fraction of the real cost. Reducing the licence from €10,000 to €8,000 a year may have less impact on ROI than reducing production time per course by three days.

Mistake 2: Not counting SME time as a production cost

The subject matter experts who validate content have a high hourly rate and participate in multiple review cycles. Their time is production cost, even if it doesn’t appear on any training invoice.

Mistake 3: Ignoring review cycles

A course that goes through four rounds of corrections between the L&D team, SMEs and management can double its production time compared to the initial estimate. This is the bottleneck that most tools don’t address directly.

Mistake 4: Measuring only licences, not process time

Many teams calculate training ROI by comparing the cost of the platform against the number of completions or hours of training delivered. This metric omits the entire production side — which is often the most significant cost driver in the entire training equation. For a more complete picture, consult resources on [LINK:L&D metrics] that consider both the production and delivery dimensions.

Optimise content creation costs and improve your corporate training ROI

As we have seen, the hidden costs of eLearning can have a significant impact on training ROI, and without precise measurement, improvement is difficult. Recognising these costs is the first step towards optimising the process and achieving more efficient, profitable results.

By understanding the true cost of creating training content, organisations can make informed decisions about where to invest and how to improve their processes. It is not just about cheaper tools — it is about improving efficiency and reducing production time without sacrificing quality.

Discover how isEazy Author can help you reduce these costs and accelerate eLearning content creation, optimising your resources and improving your training ROI. Request a demo and start transforming your training process today.