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Three architectures, priced separately. We recommend the leanest one and show you exactly what the other two buy you.
Your courses live as files in your own GitHub repository. Every change is checked automatically, reviewed on a test site, then promoted to production.
Video files up to 500 MB go straight from the build server to the content delivery network. They never pass through the platform itself.
The learner interface is fully available in German. We verified that phrase by phrase rather than assuming it.
One thing to settle before we build production: whether you would like sign-in through Microsoft Entra ID. It costs nothing if decided now.
The only open question
Prepared for Zeinab Khosravi, Xebia, following our call of 10 August 2026. This sets out three ways we can build and run a dedicated Open edX platform for your customer's portfolio-company training programme, what each costs, and what we would need from you to start.
Confirmed on our call. If anything here is wrong, tell us before we provision.
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Courses | ~10, each with multiple modules |
| Content | Video plus assessments: multiple choice, essay, file upload |
| Video | 20-30 GB in total, individual files up to 500 MB |
| Learners | Internal to the portfolio companies, by invitation |
| Data residency | Europe. Germany or Switzerland |
| Languages | English and German |
| Authoring | Driven from GitHub, with the course editor still available |
| Environments | A test environment for review, then promotion to production |
| Branding | Customer logo, platform name, customer domain |
| Certificates | The platform's built-in certificates are sufficient |
| Integrations | None required today |
| Sign-in | Microsoft Entra ID under discussion |
The platform is Open edX, the open-source learning platform originally built by MIT and Harvard, on its Verawood release from July 2026. We deploy it with Tutor, the official installer, which packages the platform as a set of Docker containers. Release notes and platform documentation live at docs.openedx.org.
All three run exactly the same Open edX release and the same publishing pipeline. What changes between them is how the containers are arranged, and therefore how much redundancy you get and what it costs.
This is the option we recommend. Two machines carry production, with a third, smaller machine as the test environment. Everything sits in Hetzner's Falkenstein region in Germany.
Adds a second application node, so the loss of one machine does not take the platform down, and updates can be rolled through one node at a time.
If your customer's platform standards call for Kubernetes, this is how we would build it. The containers are identical to the other two options; Kubernetes changes how they are scheduled, restarted and scaled. We run Open edX on Azure in production today.
Option 1: Lean | Option 2: Resilient | Option 3: Kubernetes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $1,260 | $1,850 | $2,200 plus infrastructure |
| Runs on | Hetzner, Germany | Hetzner, Germany | Azure, Germany West Central |
| Infrastructure | Included | Included | ~$1,750/mo, billed at cost |
| Effective total | $1,260 | $1,850 | ~$3,950 |
| Uptime target | 99.5% | 99.9% | 99.9% |
| If a machine fails | Restore from backup | Traffic moves to the other node | Kubernetes reschedules automatically |
| Updates | Brief restart | Rolled through one node at a time | Rolled through automatically |
We load-test rather than estimate. The chart below is from a real Open edX platform we operate, on a machine half the size of the one proposed here, driven to 1,000 simultaneous learners clicking through courses, playing video and posting in discussions.
Same hardware, same test. The difference is tuning.
| At 1,000 simultaneous learners | Before tuning | After tuning |
|---|---|---|
| Requests served | 80,609 | 124,844 |
| Failed requests | 8.23% | 0.44% |
| Typical page load | 3.2 s | 1.1 s |
| Slowest 5% of page loads | 65 s | 4.4 s |
| Throughput | 41.5 requests/sec | 81.7 requests/sec |
The platform stays healthy well beyond your expected load, and begins to degrade at around 2,000 simultaneous learners. We will re-run this test against your own courses on your own test environment before go-live, and hand you the full report as an acceptance gate.
Courses are stored in your own GitHub repository in Open Learning XML, the platform's native file format for course content (commonly shortened to OLX, and documented at docs.openedx.org). Because a course is just files, every change is reviewable, every version is recoverable, and publishing is a pipeline rather than a person remembering to click something.
Your team keeps full access to Studio, the Open edX course editor, and can author visually whenever that is easier. The pipeline is what carries a finished change from the test environment into production safely, not a restriction on how people work.
| Commitment | Option 1 | Options 2 and 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly uptime target | 99.5% | 99.9% |
| Response to an outage | 30 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Restoration target | 4 hours | 4 hours |
| Detection | Automatic, never dependent on you reporting it | Automatic |
| Written postmortem | Within 3 business days | Within 3 business days |
Applied as soon as a fix is published, without waiting for a change window. We patch first and tell you afterwards.
Open edX publishes two major releases a year. We take you through every one, rehearsed on the test environment first, so your platform never falls out of support.
Daily backups kept in the same German region, and a quarterly restore rehearsal that produces a timed report. We would rather prove a restore than quote a number we have not tested.
Automated checks on every change, automatic publishing to the test environment, approval-gated promotion to production, and rollback to any earlier version.
Uploaded straight to the content delivery network, never through the platform. Playback is signed, so videos cannot be shared outside your platform.
Customer logo, favicon, platform name, colours and domain across the learner interface, the course editor and system emails. English and German.
Your learners can use the platform entirely in German. We checked this properly rather than assuming it, by inspecting the actual German translation files that ship with the Verawood release.
Three small gaps exist, and we close all three as part of the work: the notification panel is not translated at all, fourteen German phrases are technically malformed and quietly fall back to English, and one label in account settings has no German. None of them are hard to fix and none of them are things you should have to discover after launch.
If your customer requires data to remain physically inside Switzerland rather than relying on the adequacy arrangement, tell us early: it changes the hosting provider and the price.
Open edX supports sign-in through Microsoft Entra ID natively, so connecting it to your customer's directory is configuration rather than custom development. Accounts then follow their directory, and someone who leaves loses access automatically.
Stated so there are no surprises later. Note that development and customisation before launch is included, not billed separately.
| Not included | Detail |
|---|---|
| Writing the course content | Your team produces the material. We provide everything that carries it to learners |
| Migration from another platform | Not applicable as discussed |
| New integrations after launch | Quoted in advance if you want them later |
| Support for individual learners | We support your team. Your team supports its learners |
Happy to walk your team through any of this
If it helps, we can stand up a branded test environment before you have finished evaluating, so the discussion is about something real rather than a document.