Estate planning as a Udemy account holder

Udemy is an online learning marketplace with two sides. Instructors publish courses and earn a revenue share that Udemy pays out monthly through PayPal, Payoneer, Tipalti, or U.S. direct deposit. Students buy individual courses and receive a personal, non-transferable license to view them. The estate-relevant asset is an instructor's unpaid Udemy revenue, which is money owed to the account and therefore recoverable by the estate. A student's purchased courses are a non-transferable license that ends with the account.

After a Udemy account holder dies, Udemy, Inc. may transfer revenue to a designated recipient, but this is handled case by case. The outcome depends on the documentation provided and is entirely at Udemy, Inc.'s discretion.

What happens at death

Udemy does not publish a dedicated process for a deceased instructor's account, courses, or unpaid revenue, so the estate side is handled case-by-case through Udemy Support. The instructor revenue itself is a real, recoverable asset: Udemy pays instructors a revenue share monthly, and its own closure rules state that an account cannot be closed until the last scheduled payout is sent, which confirms unpaid revenue is money owed to the account rather than something forfeited. Because Udemy publishes no estate-claims workflow, an executor must contact Udemy Support directly to ask how the outstanding balance can be paid out and how the published courses and account are handled. Udemy accounts are not transferable; on account deletion, personal data is deleted or anonymized while payment-transaction records are retained for legal reasons. The student side is different: a student's purchased courses are granted under a "limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable license" in the Terms of Use, and content cannot be transferred or resold, so purchased courses are forfeited at death and cannot pass to an heir.