Online piano courses compared: what you actually pay, and what you actually get

Written by Andressa Mariano Silva. Prices and claims verified on 9 September 2026. Every source is listed at the bottom of this page.

Four well known ways to learn piano at home. One charges you once. Three charge you every month. Two of them will not tell you the price at all until you have created an account and handed over an email address.

The short answer

What each one costs, verified

Three year totals are simple multiplication of the published rate. They assume no price rise and no promotional discount, neither of which is guaranteed.

The part nobody puts in a comparison table

We tried to verify the price of all four products the same way: by looking for it on the public website, without creating an account. Two of them made that impossible.

• flowkey. The homepage carries no link to a pricing page. The obvious addresses for one, /en/pricing and /en/subscribe, both return a "Page not found" error. There is no price anywhere on the public site.
• Simply Piano. The product page carries no price and no pricing link. The address /pricing returns a 404 page reading "You are lost".

We are not calling that dishonest. It is a normal way to run a subscription funnel, and it lets a company test different prices in different countries. But you should know what it means for you in practice: you cannot compare these two against anything until you have already given them an email address and started the signup. The price you are eventually shown may not be the price someone in another country is shown.

Skoove and Pianoforall both publish a price you can read in ten seconds without giving anything up. In a category where the main cost is recurring, we treat that as a genuine mark in their favour, and we weight it in our criteria.

Subscription against one payment: do the arithmetic first

This is the decision that actually moves money, and it is usually made by accident.

Pianoforall costs 49 US dollars once. Skoove on its monthly plan costs 29.99 US dollars a month. Two months of Skoove monthly already costs more than Pianoforall costs forever. Skoove on its cheapest yearly plan costs 149.99 US dollars for twelve months, which is a little over three times the whole price of Pianoforall.

That does not make Pianoforall better. It makes it cheaper, and those are different words. The subscriptions are buying you something real that Pianoforall does not have, which we come to next. The question is whether you will use it.

The honest test: a subscription is worth it if you will practise most weeks for the whole period you are paying. If you will practise hard for six weeks and then stop, which is the normal human pattern, a subscription turns into a recurring charge for a thing you are not doing. A one time purchase does not.

The real functional difference

Skoove, flowkey and Simply Piano listen to you. They use your device microphone or a cable to hear the notes you play, and they tell you in the moment whether you played the right one. Simply Piano describes exactly this on its product page, and it is the core of what all three sell.

Pianoforall does not do this and cannot do this. It is a set of ebooks, videos and audio lessons. Nothing is listening. If you play a wrong note, nothing will tell you.

That single difference decides the purchase for a lot of people, and it is the thing most affiliate pages leave out because it is inconvenient. So, plainly:

• If you have no musical background at all and no one to correct you, real time feedback is worth paying for. It stops you learning mistakes.
• If you have played any instrument before, or you can hear when something is wrong, feedback matters much less and you are paying monthly for a feature you do not need.

Pianoforall in detail

Pianoforall has been sold since 2006, which makes it one of the oldest products in this category still trading. It is built around chords rather than sheet music: the idea is that you play recognisable songs early using chord shapes, and learn to read music alongside that rather than before it.

The seller states that the package contains 10 ebooks, around 300 videos totalling more than 25 hours, and over 1,000 audio lessons, all downloadable and usable on any device, with lifetime access and free updates. The seller also states that more than 500,000 people have taken it. We have not independently audited the student count and we would not expect to be able to.

Who should not buy Pianoforall

• Children, and anyone who needs a game loop to keep going
• Anyone whose goal is classical repertoire read from sheet music. The chord first method is working against you there
• Anyone who has tried self directed learning three times and stopped three times. Buying a fourth PDF will not fix that. Pay a human teacher for four lessons instead
• Anyone who wants the software to catch their mistakes

Who it fits

• Adults teaching themselves, who want to play songs rather than pass grades
• People who resent subscriptions on principle and will cancel one out of irritation
• People who already read a little music, or played another instrument
• People who want to own the material rather than rent access to it

The other three, briefly and fairly

Six questions to answer before you buy any of them

• Do you have an instrument yet? None of these are any use without a keyboard in the room. If you do not have one, that is where the money goes first.
• How many days a week will you really sit down? Under three, a subscription will cost you more than it teaches you.
• Do you want to read music, or play songs? Different goals, different products. Chord first methods are faster to songs and slower to literacy.
• Do you need something listening to you? Be honest. If you cannot hear your own wrong notes, you do.
• Will you notice a recurring charge? If you have ever paid three months for a gym you stopped attending, price the subscription at what you will actually pay, not what you intend to pay.
• What is the refund window? Pianoforall states 60 days. Check the current terms of any subscription at the moment you sign up, because trial and refund rules change.

When the right answer is to buy nothing

We would rather say this than sell you something you will abandon.

Do not buy any of these this month if any of the following is true. Free material will take you just as far until the situation changes.

• You do not own or have reliable access to a keyboard
• You are between jobs, moving house, or in the middle of anything that will eat your evenings for the next six weeks
• You have bought a course in this category before and never opened it
• You are buying it as a gift for someone who has not asked to learn piano

There is an enormous amount of free piano teaching on YouTube. It is disorganised, which is the actual thing a paid course sells you: a running order. A running order is only worth money once you have decided to show up.

Sources

Everything factual on this page was read directly from the companies' own public pages on 9 September 2026. Where a company makes a claim about itself that we cannot independently check, such as student numbers, we have said so in the text.

• Pianoforall price, guarantee and contents: pianoforall.com/order and pianoforall.com/affiliate-program
• Skoove pricing tiers, song count, learner count, free trial: skoove.com/en/pricing
• flowkey song count and absence of a public price: flowkey.com/en, plus flowkey.com/en/pricing and flowkey.com/en/subscribe, both of which returned a "Page not found" error when checked
• Simply Piano feature description and absence of a public price: hellosimply.com/simply-piano, plus hellosimply.com/pricing, which returned a 404 page when checked

Prices change. If you find something on this page that is out of date or wrong, tell us at hello@evolureselect.com and we will correct it and date the correction.