A decent chunk of Indian course creators discover their international audience by accident, someone in Dubai or Toronto or Singapore stumbles onto a YouTube video, follows the creator for months, and then hits a wall trying to actually pay, because the checkout only knows how to take rupees through UPI or an Indian card, and an NRI credit card or a foreign-issued card often just fails or gets flagged. It's a strange kind of leak in the business, since the interest and the intent to buy are both already there, and the only thing standing between you and the sale is a checkout page that wasn't built to take international money in the first place.
Why one gateway isn't enough for two audiences
Razorpay is genuinely the right choice for your Indian buyers, for all the reasons covered elsewhere on this site, UPI support, local trust, fast settlement, but it isn't built primarily for a buyer sitting in the US paying in dollars with a US-issued card, and trying to force international payments through an India-first gateway tends to produce exactly the failed-transaction problem described above. This is why Clienteles supports Stripe alongside Razorpay on the same school, so you're not choosing one audience over the other or running two separate platforms to serve them. You connect Razorpay for your Indian students and Stripe for everyone else, and the checkout automatically routes each buyer to the gateway suited to them, an Indian student pays in rupees through UPI or a local card, and an NRI or international student pays in dollars through Stripe's card and wallet options, all from the same course, the same storefront, and the same backend you're managing.
Pricing the same course in two currencies
One question this immediately raises is what to actually charge international students, since a flat rupee-to-dollar conversion often either undercharges relative to what the international market would bear, or, more commonly for creators moving upmarket, ends up feeling arbitrary if you just picked a round number without thinking about it. A useful starting point is to research what comparable English-language courses in your niche sell for in the US, UK or Gulf markets specifically, since audiences there are often used to higher price points than the Indian market and pricing too low can actually read as lower quality rather than as a bargain. Many creators end up running a genuinely separate price for the international version of a course, not just a converted one, precisely because the willingness to pay and the reference prices buyers are comparing against are different in a different market, and there's no rule that says your ₹1,999 course has to be exactly $24 for an American buyer rather than $39 or $49.
Where GST and tax questions come back in
Selling internationally adds a layer that's genuinely worth getting professional advice on rather than guessing about, because the rules around how export of services, foreign currency receipts and GST interact are more involved than a purely domestic sale, and they depend on specifics like how the payment is received, whether it qualifies as an export of service, and what documentation you need to keep. Clienteles has a dedicated guide to GST on online courses that walks through the concepts at a general level, which is a good starting point for understanding the shape of the topic, but it's not a substitute for sitting down with a CA who can look at your actual international revenue and confirm what applies to your specific situation, especially once dollar-denominated income starts showing up alongside your rupee income in the same financial year.
Keeping it simple operationally
Despite the tax and pricing nuance, the day-to-day mechanics stay simple on your end, since you're not running two separate schools or duplicating your course content, you're running one school with two checkout paths behind the scenes, and both Indian and international students land in the same course, see the same content, and get the same certificate on completion. The main things worth setting up deliberately are your Stripe account itself, which you'll need to create separately from Razorpay, and a clear sense of your international price point before you start actively promoting to that audience, rather than figuring it out reactively the first time someone from outside India tries to buy and can't.
International demand for Indian-made courses is real and growing, particularly in categories like tech skills, spirituality, Indian classical arts and business education where creators here have a natural credibility advantage, and the technical part of capturing that demand, accepting the payment itself, is largely solved once Stripe is connected. The parts worth spending real thought on are pricing the course appropriately for a different market and getting the tax side handled correctly from the start, both of which are far easier to get right early than to untangle after a year of informal dollar payments have already piled up.
It also helps to watch where your international interest is actually coming from before you build anything elaborate around it. A creator who notices a handful of Gulf-based or Southeast Asian followers asking about payment in the comments has a very different situation from one who's already getting organic search traffic from the US, and the first case might just need Stripe quietly switched on as an option, while the second case might justify a dedicated landing page, a separate testimonial set from international students, and pricing pegged more deliberately to that market's expectations rather than treated as an afterthought bolted onto the Indian version of the course.