Frequently asked questions
Updated: August 26, 2026
Contents
- Getting started, plans and payment
- Students, groups and access
- Courses, lessons and schedules
- Tests and homework
- Sales, payments and subscriptions
- Marketing, emails and automations
- Analytics and reports
- Platform features
- Technical questions
1. Getting started, plans and payment
Is there a limit on the number of students?
No. Students, courses and lessons are unlimited on every plan. Your school grows, your platform bill doesn’t grow with it.
There is one technical limit when you add people in bulk: a single import session takes up to 500 students. You can run as many sessions as you need.
How long is the trial, and do I need a card?
30 days. No card — we don’t ask for payment details when you sign up.
The Max plan applies during the trial. Once you pay, the set of features and limits depends on the plan you choose. You can compare plans at softbook.app/pricing.
Do you take a commission on the school’s sales?
No. You pay for the platform plan, and we take no percentage of your sales.
The fee for processing a payment is charged by the payment provider you connect, on its own terms.
What exchange rate applies when I’m charged for a plan?
Plan prices are in US dollars. If your card is in another currency, the amount is converted at the rate current at the moment of payment. The exact rate is set by your bank or payment provider, so that’s where to check it.
You can pay from your Softbook balance or with a linked card. The card is linked automatically after the first successful payment.
I’ve paid for a plan. How do I cancel the subscription so I stop being charged?
You manage your subscription in your account, under Subscriptions: that’s also where you extend access and change plans.
Note that canceling a subscription and removing a linked card are two different actions. While a subscription is active, the system makes three charge attempts: the first on the day the paid period ends, the next two every 24 hours after that.
How long are courses and materials kept?
If you don’t renew your plan within 12 months after the paid period ends, your online school and its files are deleted.
How many schools can I create on one account?
The number of schools on an account isn’t limited. You create and delete them under My schools.
One thing to keep in mind: each school is paid for separately, on its own plan.
What languages does the platform work in?
The interface is available in 8 languages: Ukrainian, English, Russian, French, German, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish.
Can I see examples of online schools built on the platform?
Sign up: 30 days free, no card required. That way you see the platform from the inside rather than from a distance.
Do you have video guides for working with the platform?
Step-by-step instructions are collected in this Help center.
If you’d rather have someone walk you through it, book a demo: a member of our team will show you around the platform and answer your questions. Customer Care can set it up.
Which browser should I use?
We recommend the latest version of Google Chrome. On a phone or a tablet the school also runs in the browser, so there is nothing to install.
Does Softbook work on mobile devices?
Yes. The school runs on phones and tablets through the browser. Nothing needs to be installed, by you or by your students.
2. Students, groups and access
How do I change a student’s personal details?
Students change their own first name, last name and phone number in their account: my.softbook.app/personal. The school owner can’t change them, because those details are shared across every school the student studies in.
You can change a student’s email from their record only if they have never signed in to their account. After their first sign-in, the email can no longer be changed.
If a student’s details have changed, resend the access email from their record. An email that has already gone out can’t be edited.
Why can’t I add a student or a new team member?
In one school the same person can’t be a student and a team member at the same time. Adding a student: check under My team that the person isn’t a teacher or an administrator. Adding a team member: check whether a student already uses the same email address.
The other possible reason is that you’ve used up the team member limit on your plan. Plan terms are at softbook.app/pricing.
How do I check whether the student received the access email?
If the student you added shows up under Students, the email with the login and password has been sent.
If the student can’t find it, suggest searching every folder, spam included, for the sender noreply@softbook.email. If you’re sure the address is correct and there’s still no email, message Customer Care and include the student’s address.
Can students be added automatically if no payment provider is connected?
Yes, in several ways.
Product. Create a product, and student accounts are then created automatically, with courses opening on their own.
Manual order. If you take payment outside the platform, go to Orders, create an order and mark it as paid. The customer’s details go into the student list and into the right group, and access to the course opens automatically.
Import. Upload a list as a CSV or TXT file: up to 500 students per session.
Students are also added through forms, automations and the API.
Do I need an email service integration to send students a login and password?
No. The access email is sent automatically, and there’s nothing extra to integrate.
System emails — course access, login and password, password recovery — don’t count against your email campaign quota and go out regardless of it.
How do I change the language of the emails students receive?
The language of system emails is decided like this: course-related emails follow the course settings, everything else follows the school language, which you set under Settings → Email.
From there a fallback applies. First your own template in the required language; if there isn’t one, the standard Softbook template in that language; and English as a last resort.
My students keep getting logged out of their accounts. Why?
Most likely the school’s General settings have “Allow only one active session for students” turned on, in the Other block. It means a student can be in the school on one device at a time: signing in on a second device closes the session on the first.
How do I open lesson access to all students at once?
That’s what the Access manager is for: Learning → Access. There you open or close access to a course or to individual lessons, for a chosen group or for everyone at once with the All groups option.
How do I move content between two schools on Softbook?
Inside one school, content copies and moves freely, whole courses included.
Between different schools, transfer isn’t supported. Even if the schools are on the same account, the materials have to be built again in the new school.
3. Courses, lessons and schedules
How do I make lessons open on specific days?
You do that with a schedule: Learning → Schedules. There are two types.
Fixed dates. You set the exact days lessons open. Good for cohorts that start together.
Dynamic dates. A lesson opens a set interval after the previous one starts or is completed. Good when students join at different times.
A schedule is tied to a group, so students have to be enrolled in the course and be in the group the schedule is set up for. Keep in mind that if sequential progress is on in the course settings, the student still has to finish the previous lesson to open the next one.
How do I make the next module open as soon as homework is submitted?
Turn on “Enforce sequential progress in lessons” in the course settings.
If you want lessons to open on a timeline rather than on submission, use a schedule with dynamic dates. It handles that more precisely.
Why do lessons still open gradually when sequential progress is off?
The option was probably on earlier, and its settings stayed with your students. Open lesson access through the Access manager: Learning → Access, the All groups option.
Check as well whether “Manual control of lesson access” is on. With that setting, access is opened for each student by hand.
Can a lesson show the test first and the homework after it?
Yes. In the lesson editor you reorder blocks by dragging them, and the order is saved for every student.
Can I build a course with AI?
Yes. Under Learning there’s course creation with AI, and it noticeably speeds up building the structure and filling it in. The number of generations per month depends on your plan: softbook.app/pricing.
AI helps with reviewing work too: a teacher’s comment on homework can be rephrased in one of eight tones — neutral, friendly, motivating, encouraging, strict, inspiring, ironic or business-like.
An image won’t upload when I create a course
Try a different image: the one you picked may be too large or in a format the platform doesn’t take.
If other images won’t upload either, message Customer Care and we’ll look into it.
Why won’t a video load for a student?
Usually it’s the browser, and we recommend Google Chrome. If switching browsers doesn’t help:
- clear the cache and cookies;
- turn off the VPN, if one is on;
- contact the internet provider, as the signal may be weak or the traffic blocked.
If none of that helps, message Customer Care and include the link to the video and the student’s email address.
If I add a video from Cloud to another course, does it take up storage twice?
No. A video added with Insert from Cloud takes no extra space, which is handy when the same materials are used in several courses.
Can a lesson comment be edited or deleted?
All of the school’s comments are collected under Learning → Comments, with filters by status, course and lesson and search by the student’s email. In the actions column you can approve or delete a comment. With moderation on, new comments get the Pending moderation status.
Only the author can edit a comment. The student isn’t notified when a comment is deleted.
How do I see which students have completed a course?
Open Courses, click the gear on the course card and choose Course statistics. There you’ll find the Total completed counter and a status filter: all, completed the course, in progress, certificate issued, by group.
Any filtered selection can be exported to CSV.
4. Tests and homework
How do I see test results?
Open Learning → Courses, find the lesson, click the three dots next to it and choose Test statistics.
It shows what percentage of students chose each answer option, which tells you which questions are worded badly. Answers can be exported: one CSV file per question, with every student’s answer.
How can a student retake a test?
The test settings have two separate toggles. “Allow retake on failure” lets the student take the test again until they pass. “Allow retake on success” is for those who want to improve their score.
A student submitted homework by mistake. Can I take it out of review?
Reject the submitted work so the student can send the right one. Rejecting requires a reason in the comment, and the student sees it.
If the mistake was yours — you approved when you meant to reject, or the other way round — the decision is changed with the arrow next to the assignment status, with no resubmission from the student.
My course has several groups. Can I turn off homework review for one of them?
Yes. Create a separate course plan and set its access activation items: which lessons, homework and tests it covers. Then assign the plan to a student from their record, or to a whole group: Student groups → three dots → Add plan.
More on this in the "Plans" article.
Can I leave feedback on homework that is accepted automatically?
The platform has no automatic review of homework. What it has is automatic acceptance: the student gets a confirmation that the work is accepted after a delay you set.
Until that delay runs out, you can open the work and handle it yourself: leave a comment, record a voice message, attach a file, give a grade. After auto-acceptance the work counts as accepted.
5. Sales, payments and subscriptions
How do I set up recurring payments?
Go to Sales → Products, click Add product and choose the Subscription type.
The subscription settings cover:
- Initial payment amount and Recurring payment amount. They can differ. For example, $10 first and $20 for every cycle after that.
- Free period. Access at the start without payment.
- Subscription period. How long until the next charge.
- Allow subscription renewal before expiry. If the student renews early, the remaining days are added to the new period.
- Send the student an email about the end of the term. The email goes out on the day the subscription ends.
On the first payment a payment token is created for the student, and every later charge runs on that token. The subscription record shows the status of the payment card, and the warnings block explains why a charge won’t go through, for instance if no payment method has been saved.
Students cancel a subscription themselves, under My subscriptions in their account. They can renew early if “Allow subscription renewal before expiry” is on; otherwise on the end date or after it.
Subscriptions aren’t deleted: canceled and finished ones stay as history. Every manual change is written to the log, with the time and the administrator’s name.
Important. If you have active subscriptions, don’t change the integration keys of your payment provider. Payment tokens created earlier stop working, and automatic charges on subscriptions people have already taken out stop going through.
Can students pay for a course by subscription?
Yes. Create a product of the Subscription type, and the student gets access to one or several courses on a recurring payment rather than a single one. The first payment can differ from the ones that follow, and you can give a free period at the start.
Students can cancel on their own. They can renew early if you’ve turned that on in the product settings.
For more detail, see the answer above on setting up recurring payments.
How do I email a customer who created an order but didn’t pay?
The platform has no separate abandoned cart trigger, but the workflow can be put together under Automations:
- Trigger: New order, product or course.
- A rule with a timer: how long we wait for payment.
- A condition on the field: cutting out orders that have already been paid.
- Action: Email with your own template, or Telegram, either to the student if they’ve linked Telegram or to an administrator.
Automations give you variables from the event, such as {student name} and {course title}, Yes / No branching, and logs filtered by the student’s email, so you can see who was sent what. There’s a safeguard against loops.
Webhooks work separately: the payload carries the order ID, the trigger name, the buyer’s contact details, the amount, the currency, the product ID, the order creation date, the school ID, the payment provider and the product type.
Keep in mind that emails from automations use the school’s email quota.
How do I get customers to enter a phone number on the order page?
Go to Sales → Sales settings, tick “Ask for a phone number on the order page” and save. An extra field appears on the order page.
Do I need a registered business to connect a payment provider to my school?
Requirements for who can receive payments are set by the payment provider itself, so ask the provider you’ve chosen. Some ask for company details and bank information, some work with individuals, and the terms differ from country to country.
If I delete a student from the school, does their paid order disappear?
No, the order stays under Orders. If you no longer need it, delete it separately.
6. Marketing, emails and automations
Can I send my own emails through Softbook?
Yes. Emails are written and sent inside the platform, in the same place as your courses.
What to do once before you start. Connect your own sender address under Settings → Email: the address can only be changed to a corporate one, confirmed with DNS records. Until the sender address is connected, campaigns aren’t available. The same screen is where you set up the tracking CNAME, and without it open and click statistics aren’t collected.
The email builder is at Marketing → Emails. Blocks: text, image, button, divider, spacer, social links, menu, HTML, timer. Variables: %recipient.first_name%, %recipient.email%, %recipient.course_title%, %recipient.lms_link%. There’s email generation with AI and a test send. The platform’s system emails can be replaced with your own: one replacement per system email per language.
Campaigns are at Marketing → Campaigns. The audience is student groups, and if a student falls into several of the selected groups, the email reaches them once. The channels are email and Telegram, and Telegram campaigns don’t use up the email quota. You can send right away or schedule it. Before launch the system shows how many emails will be deducted.
If you’re short on emails: with an immediate send the system won’t start and shows how many you’re missing; a scheduled or running campaign pauses and continues automatically once you top up.
Metrics: recipients, delivered, opened, clicked, bounces, unsubscribes, trends, top links, and the recipient list with statuses.
The email quota depends on your plan, and current limits and packages are at softbook.app/pricing.
The Mailchimp, GetResponse and SendPulse integrations remain: they pass contacts and students into your email service if that’s where you work.
How do I set up notifications about events in the school?
The platform has ready-made notifications: Settings → Notifications. The channels are Telegram and the bell in the LMS account. Email isn’t among the built-in channels.
What you can turn on:
- Learning: new homework · student enrolled in a course · student removed · students imported · bulk deletion of students.
- CRM: contact added or deleted · bulk deletion of contacts · deal added or deleted.
- Sales: new order · new paid order.
- Team: team member added.
- Support: new ticket · new message in a ticket.
The full list of settings is available to the school owner; administrators and teachers see a shorter one. Everyone in the school connects Telegram themselves, with the Connect Telegram button in their account.
If you specifically need an email, you build it under Automations: pick the event and the Email action with your own template. The learning events available are lesson started, lesson completed, test passed, homework submitted, approved or rejected, course completed, student enrolled in a course or removed from it, added to or removed from a group, students imported.
A “your homework has been reviewed” email, for example, is two steps: the Homework approved trigger → the Email action.
There’s no separate “lesson opened on schedule” event, so an email about exactly that can’t be set up. And keep in mind that emails from automations use the email quota, while Telegram and bell notifications don’t.
Can I build a landing page on Softbook?
Yes, the platform has a website builder: Marketing → Website. The page is published on a subdomain such as your-school.lms.softbook.app, or on your own domain if it’s connected in the settings. A published page goes live right away.
The blocks are grouped: Basic, Forms (collecting name, email and phone, with the data saved in the LMS), Hero, Benefits, Pricing, Reviews, FAQ, CTA, Logos, Team, Countdown, Gallery, Advanced (embedding your own HTML), Soft Block and Saved.
Soft Block is a block for placing elements freely, outside the standard grid. Inside it you have Text, Image, Shape, Button, Video, Form and Product. There’s parallax, where an element shifts with the cursor, animation on scroll, Glass mode for shapes, and a Popup mode: the block turns into a popup window and opens on the Open popup action.
The one that matters most for sales is the Product element. It takes payment right on the page, with no redirect to a separate checkout: there’s a promo code field, and after a successful payment the customer is enrolled in the course automatically and gets access to the materials. The form supports recurring charges as well, if they’re set up in the product itself.
UTM tags are collected automatically: saved in the order record, passed to the webhook, and filled into hidden fields in forms. Requests land in Marketing → Requests together with the source and the tags.
Worth knowing in advance: the builder doesn’t support your own CSS or JavaScript, page version history isn’t kept (inside Soft Block there’s a 50-step undo), each form belongs to its own page, and if you delete a product from the catalog, the payment form on the page stops working.
The website builder isn’t available on every plan, and current terms are at softbook.app/pricing.
Can I add the Telegram bot to a channel or a group?
Unfortunately not: the bot works in direct messages.
Telegram is used more widely in the platform, though. The school creates its own bot through @BotFather and gives it the school’s logo, so student notifications arrive from your school’s name. There are Telegram campaigns and a visual chatbot builder, with Wait for input, Delay and Condition blocks (does the person have access to the course, is the course completed, are they in the group). Email linking by code is worth a separate mention: the bot asks for an address, sends a code, and the subscriber is matched to the student record.
7. Analytics and reports
What analytics does the platform have?
There are three kinds: overall analytics, course analytics and lesson analytics. The overall one has four subsections.
Learning: active students · Dropout risk, showing who hasn’t logged in for 7+, 14+ or 30+ days · lesson completion across the course, with the most problematic lessons automatically on top · Course progress funnel · Activity by day and hour · Cohort retention · Overall completion rate.
Sales: revenue trend, multi-currency, with amounts kept separate for each currency · average order value · LTV by cohort · repeat buyers · discount performance · Top UTM sources by revenue.
CRM: revenue trend from won deals · deal conversion trend · deal velocity · pipeline and deal statistics.
Team actions: which team member did what.
Custom dashboards are put together for a role or for one specific person, from six widget categories: Sales, Learning, Activity, CRM, Gamification, Basic.
Analytics isn’t available on every plan, and current terms are at softbook.app/pricing.
What data can I export from the platform?
You can export to CSV:
- orders;
- homework, from any tab: new, approved, for resubmission, awaiting automatic approval, archive, all data;
- answers to each test question: a separate file per question, with every student’s answer;
- course and lesson progress, with any filters you’ve applied;
- the list of students who received a certificate;
- student activity by course and by group.
8. Platform features
Can I run webinars?
Yes, in two ways.
Through YouTube. You don’t need to connect a channel, as pasting the link to the stream is enough. You can stream from OBS, Streamyard, YouTube Studio, the YouTube mobile app and other services. There are Camera only and Camera + slides modes, with a choice of where the host’s window sits. A PDF presentation is split into slides automatically: the host moves through them and the view changes for everyone watching. There’s a chat with moderators, a viewer counter, a countdown to the broadcast, and a call-to-action button under the webinar with a “Show only on the host’s command” option. Access is public, by course or by group.
Through Zoom. A meeting where everyone is on camera, or a webinar where only the speakers talk. Access by course and group, and a redirect to the page you choose after the broadcast.
What to account for: presentations are supported in PDF only, and video and animation embedded in a PDF don’t play. A Zoom recording is moved into the course by hand, so you download it and upload it to the platform. Zoom needs an active Zoom account and the integration connected in the Softbook Store, and the webinar format needs the Zoom Webinars module connected and paid for on Zoom’s side.
Does the platform have gamification?
Yes, and it’s split into rewards and points.
Rewards are issued on seven events: lesson started, lesson completed, course completed, test passed, test failed, homework approved, homework rejected. Conditions combine with “and” logic and nested “or” subgroups. The Mode field takes a specific course or lesson, or simply a number of courses, lessons and tests. A reward can be limited to student groups, given an image of your own, and set to award points when it’s earned.
Points are awarded on nine events: the same seven, plus signing up to the school through your link and buying a particular product.
Students can be shown two leaderboards, one by points and one by rewards, with a choice of how many places to display.
What is “Student support” in the plan?
It’s a built-in ticket system, the Tickets section.
The student opens Support in their account and creates a ticket. It becomes a conversation right away: the whole exchange on that question stays in one window. Messages can carry images, you can reply to a specific message, add reactions and pin what matters. A ticket’s status is new or closed, and either you or the student can close it.
The module isn’t available on every plan, and current terms are at softbook.app/pricing.
What happens to students’ certificates if the school closes?
Students find all of their certificates in their account, under My certificates. The images are kept on the platform permanently and stay available to the student even if the online school stops working.
Can I stop a PDF from being downloaded?
No, there’s no such option.
Can I add timecodes to an uploaded video, or scrub through it?
No, there’s no such option.
9. Technical questions
What does “Files unavailable” mean?
Most likely the storage subscription has expired. You can manage storage in Softbook Cloud and renew the subscription in your account, under Subscriptions.
If you run into trouble activating it, message Customer Care.
What time zone do dates in the school run on?
Kyiv time is set by default. All events, access, schedules and settings follow the time zone you choose.
You can change it under Settings, in the Main LMS settings block.
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