How much does PowerPoint-to-SCORM conversion cost in 2026?

Most quotes for PowerPoint-to-SCORM conversion arrive without numbers attached — "we'll need to scope this first" — which is unhelpful when you're trying to compare four vendors and an authoring-tool subscription on the same spreadsheet. So here's the whole market in one post, with the prices we could verify in April 2026.

What does PowerPoint-to-SCORM conversion cost?

PowerPoint-to-SCORM conversion in 2026 costs anywhere from £0 (a free converter that probably won't render on mobile) to £5,000+ per deck (a bespoke agency rebuild). Most paid conversions land in the £150–£2,000 per deck range. The price is driven by slide count, narration, branching logic, accessibility requirements, and whether you need SCORM 2004 or 1.2.

The four price tiers, at a glance

The right choice is almost entirely a function of volume and complexity. The rest of this post breaks each tier down with concrete numbers.

Tier 1 — Free converters (£0)

iSpring publishes a free version of its converter. SCORM Cloud has a free tier. PowerPoint itself can technically export to a video that some LMSs will accept. None of these reliably produce a SCORM 1.2 package that works on mobile — for the technical reasons, see why free PPT-to-SCORM tools fail on mobile.

The headline price is zero. The total cost depends on what you do when the package doesn't track completion in your LMS and IT has to step in.

When free works:

• You're proofing a course internally.
• The audience is a single browser, single OS, single LMS that you've tested against.
• Nobody is being assessed on the result.

When it doesn't:

• The course needs to run on mobile.
• The deck has narration, branching, or embedded video.
• The completion data has to be reportable for compliance.

Tier 2 — Authoring-tool licences (£300–£1,500 / year)

This is the DIY route. You buy an authoring tool, your team learns it, you rebuild each deck inside it, and you publish to SCORM yourselves.

These look reasonable until you do the seat maths. A team of three on Articulate 360 Teams is over $5,200/year before they've published a single course. And the licence is just the entry fee — a PowerPoint deck does not author itself. Plan on 4–8 hours of designer time per slide for a polished rebuild in Storyline; less in Rise or iSpring, but rarely below 1–2 hours.

When DIY maths works:

• You publish at least three courses a year.
• You have (or will hire) someone with authoring-tool experience.
• Each course has a long shelf life, so the rebuild amortises.

When it doesn't:

• One-off compliance deck — the licence alone costs more than a one-off conversion service.
• Tight deadline — a new author will not move fast.
• The source is a 200-slide Word document, not a finished deck.

Tier 3 — Conversion services (£150–£2,000+ per deck)

This is what we do, and what most readers landing on this post are probably here for. You send us the .pptx, we send you a working SCORM package. No licence, no rebuild, no learning curve.

Other vendors operate in this band too — typical per-slide rates for straight conversions sit somewhere between £8 and £30 per slide, useful as a sanity check on any quote you receive.

Our published prices:

USD, EUR, CAD, AUD, and JPY equivalents are listed on our pricing section. For a Basic-fit deck the fastest path is the self-serve converter — upload, pay, the SCORM zip arrives by email in a few minutes. For Enhanced or Premium, request a quote and we'll price against the actual content.

Tier 4 — Bespoke agencies (£5,000+ per deck)

Specialist eLearning agencies start around £5,000 per finished deck and go up past £20,000 for a fully scripted, voice-recorded, animated rebuild with custom illustration. The pricing reflects what they do — discovery workshops, learning-design consultancy, scriptwriting, voice-over recording, motion graphics, accessibility audit, often a full SME interview pass.

When this is the right fit:

• Regulated content (FCA, GDPR, medical, aviation) where you need a learning-design pass, not just a conversion.
• The deck is the centrepiece of a multi-course programme with shared branding.
• You don't have a source PowerPoint — you have a Word document or a draft script that needs structuring into a course first.

When it's not:

• You already have a finished PowerPoint and just need it on the LMS. A conversion service is half the price and faster.

The hidden cost of "free"

The sticker price is one part of the story. The other part is what happens when a free or DIY route produces a package that fails in production.

Three things actually cost money:

1. Internal time diagnosing failures. A failed SCORM upload becomes an IT ticket. IT escalates to L&D. L&D escalates back to whoever ran the conversion. By the time the loop closes, you've burned a week on a deck you thought was ready.
2. Rebuilds. If a free converter produces a package that doesn't track completion on mobile, the deck has to be rebuilt — usually in an authoring tool or by a service like ours. You pay twice, and the second invoice is rarely smaller than the first.
3. Compliance slippage. Compliance training has a deadline. A broken conversion that misses the deadline is not a £150 problem; it's a regulator problem.

This is why the "obvious" cheap route often isn't.

What actually drives the price

If you're getting quotes from three vendors and the numbers are wildly different, it's usually because each one is scoping a different job. The drivers are predictable:

• Slide count. A 20-slide deck and a 200-slide deck are not the same job. Most services charge per slide above a threshold; ours scales with deck size, and longer or more complex decks land in Enhanced or Premium rather than Basic.
• Narration. Recorded voice-over multiplies cost. Synthetic narration is much cheaper but isn't appropriate everywhere — accents, pronunciation of jargon, emotional tone all matter for compliance and customer-facing training.
• Branching. Linear courses are cheap. Branching adds authoring time and often pushes you out of pure conversion into rebuild territory.
• Multilingual. Each language is effectively a new build. Translation memory helps; it doesn't make it free.
• SCORM version. SCORM 1.2 is the default and works almost everywhere. SCORM 2004 (3rd or 4th edition) costs more because the testing surface is larger. We cover the trade-off in SCORM 1.2 vs 2004 for PowerPoint.
• Accessibility. A WCAG 2.2 AA pass is its own piece of work — alt text, focus order, captions, keyboard navigation, screen-reader testing. Build it in from the start; retrofits are expensive.

What we'd recommend

If you have one finished PowerPoint deck and you need it on the LMS this week, a conversion service is the right answer. Upload it on /convert — Basic at £150 + tax fits a straightforward, linear deck and is returned by email in minutes.

If the deck has narration, branching, or needs to be mobile-responsive, request a quote and we'll price Enhanced or Premium against the actual content.

If you're publishing several courses a year with an in-house designer who already knows Storyline or iSpring, an authoring-tool licence will pay for itself by the third deck.

If you're commissioning a regulated multi-course programme from a blank Word document, a bespoke agency is the right tool. We are not that tool, and we'll tell you so.

TL;DR

• Free converters cost nothing up front and a lot when they break on mobile.
• Authoring tools (Articulate 360, iSpring, Captivate) cost roughly £300–£1,500 per author per year, plus the time to use them.
• Conversion services like ours run £150 for a straightforward deck up to £2,000+ for a full rebuild.
• Bespoke agencies start at £5,000 and are worth it when the job is "design a course", not "convert a deck".
• Pick the tier that matches the deck in front of you, not the one that matches your budget.