# Attendance and certificates for live cohort courses

Attendance and certificates for live cohort courses is a SaaS idea for coaches and creators who teach live online cohorts or workshops, priced to test at $39 a month per creator, any number of cohorts. Attendance comes from video call reports and assignments arrive by email or chat. With it, course creators running live cohorts track who attended and handed in work, nudge students who fall behind, and issue completion certificates.

_Published 19 Oct 2026. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build._

## What problem does it solve?

Attendance comes from video call reports and assignments arrive by email or chat. Instructors notice a student fell behind only when the student asks for a refund, and certificates are made by hand.

**Why now:** More creators teach live cohorts instead of recorded courses, and students want a certificate they can share.

## What do they use today?

Most creators keep a spreadsheet of names and ticks, and ask students to send work by email or in the group chat. Certificates are made one at a time in a design tool and sent as files.

## How does it work?

After each live session the instructor uploads the video call’s attendance report, or students use a check-in link. Students hand in assignments and get feedback from the instructor, and a student who has missed a couple of sessions gets a nudge by email. When the cohort ends, each student who finished gets a completion certificate with a link anyone can use to verify it.

## What goes in the first version?

- Cohorts with sessions, students and assignments
- Attendance from a call report upload or a check-in link
- Assignment hand-in with instructor feedback
- Emails to students who miss two sessions
- Completion certificates with a link anyone can verify

## Who pays, and how much?

- **Who pays:** Coaches and creators who teach live online cohorts or workshops
- **Price to test:** $39 a month per creator, any number of cohorts

The price is per creator because one person runs the courses, however many cohorts they teach at once. A new cohort never changes the bill, which suits a creator who runs a fresh group each season.

## How to test it in 7 days

1. Ask ten cohort course creators how they track attendance and spot students falling behind.
2. Track one live cohort’s attendance and hand-ins for a week, sending the nudges yourself.
3. Ask five recent cohort students whether a verifiable certificate would make the course worth more to them.

## Where to find the first customers

- Course creator groups on LinkedIn and Facebook
- Online course and coaching subreddits
- Freelance assistants who run cohort operations for creators

## What are the risks?

- Course platforms keep adding cohort features; stay focused on attendance and certificates.
- Video call reports differ by provider, so attendance imports need care.

## How to build it on shipanysaas

5 of the parts it needs are already in the kit. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.

**Already in the kit:** Sign-in, Teams and roles, Billing, Emails, In-app notifications

**You build:**

- Cohorts, sessions and attendance import
- Assignment hand-ins with feedback
- Verifiable completion certificates

[Get the kit](https://www.shipanysaas.com/pricing)

### The starting prompt

```text
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase. Help me build the first version of Attendance and certificates for live cohort courses.

Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it.

## The product
- What it does: Course creators running live cohorts track who attended and handed in work, nudge students who fall behind, and issue completion certificates.
- Who pays: Coaches and creators who teach live online cohorts or workshops
- Their problem: Attendance comes from video call reports and assignments arrive by email or chat. Instructors notice a student fell behind only when the student asks for a refund, and certificates are made by hand.
- Price to test: $39 a month per creator, any number of cohorts (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts)

## Build only this first version
1. Cohorts with sessions, students and assignments
2. Attendance from a call report upload or a check-in link
3. Assignment hand-in with instructor feedback
4. Emails to students who miss two sessions
5. Completion certificates with a link anyone can verify

## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it
- Sign-in: email and password or Google, plus magic links and passkeys you can switch on
- Teams and roles: team accounts with members, roles and invitations
- Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments
- Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer
- In-app notifications: a notifications bell in the web app

## New code it needs
- Cohorts, sessions and attendance import
- Assignment hand-ins with feedback
- Verifiable completion certificates

## How to work
1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK.
2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files.
3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next.

## Rules
- Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel.
- Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are.

Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
```

### Guides for the parts it uses

- [How to add Resend email to a Next.js + Supabase app](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/nextjs-supabase-resend-email)
- [How to add Google sign-in to a Next.js + Supabase app](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/nextjs-supabase-google-sign-in)
- [How to add Stripe embedded checkout to a Next.js + Supabase app](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/nextjs-supabase-stripe-embedded-checkout)

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