| Kajabi fees (Basic plan) rose to $179 a month in its January 2026 restructure, and Teachable dropped its free plan in June 2025 while its Starter tier charges 7.5% on every sale. But the creators leaving aren’t chasing a cheaper tool. They worked out that the fee is only the cost you can see, and that the bigger cost is not owning your audience, your student data, and your pricing. Here’s the real math, and the decision behind the move. |
If you run a high scaling course business, have you witnessed this? dcfdcThe platform you built on keeps getting more expensive, and you had no say in it.
Case in point: Kajabi raised its prices for the first time in nearly a decade. And Teachable removed the free plan a lot of creators started on.
Neither change is the end of the world on its own.
But together they’ve pushed a meaningful number of creators to ask a bigger question, and the ones acting on it early have figured out something worth understanding.
This piece does two things.
First, the honest math: what Kajabi and Teachable actually cost in 2026, fees and caps included. Then the part that matters more: what those costs reveal, and the decision the leavers are making that most people haven’t caught up to yet.
What Kajabi and Teachable actually cost in 2026
Let’s start with the numbers, because they’re the reason most people arrive at this question.
Kajabi pricing developments
Kajabi restructured its pricing in January 2026, its first major change in close to ten years.
As per Kajabi’s pricing page, the plans now run $179 a month for Basic, $249 for Growth, and $499 for Pro on monthly billing, with roughly 20% off for annual billing.
There’s no free plan, and the old $89 Kickstarter tier is gone, so the entry point is now among the highest in the category.
The fees sit on top of that. Kajabi’s own payment processing runs about 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction on Basic. And if you’d rather use your own Stripe account, Kajabi adds a surcharge of roughly 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth, and 0.5% on Pro.
A creator on Basic doing $10,000 a month can end up near $4,000 a year once subscription and processing are combined.
Teachable pricing developments
Teachable went a different route in June 2025
It removed its free plan and restructured into four new tiers. The cheapest option now is Starter at $29 a month billed annually, which carries a 7.5% transaction fee on every sale plus a cap of 100 students.
That fee is the thing to watch. At around $2,000 a month in revenue, the 7.5% cut alone runs about $150 a month, several times the plan’s sticker price.
The headline price is not the real cost but the fee is. Moving up to the Builder plan at $69 a month annually removes the transaction fee, which is why most serious sellers end up there.
Now here’s the pattern worth noticing!
On both platforms, the advertised price is a small number. The real cost shows up in transaction fees, surcharges, student caps, and the tier you’re pushed into as you grow.
| A quick note on scope: This piece is about what these platforms cost and what that cost reveals. If what you want is a feature-by-feature look at how they stack up against an owned setup, our LearnDash vs Teachable vs Thinkific comparison covers that ground, so this one doesn’t have to. |
| Founder takeaway: If you’re scaling an eLearning business, run your own numbers at your real monthly revenue, not the sticker price. A 7.5% fee or a 2% surcharge is trivial at $2k/month and a serious line item at $50k/month. The platform cost you should plan around is the one at the scale you’re heading toward, not the one you pay today. |
The fee is the part you can see
It’s tempting to treat this as a shopping problem – Compare the fees, pick the cheaper platform, move on. That’s the wrong frame, and it’s the frame most content on this topic keeps you stuck in.
A transaction fee is annoying, but it’s honest. You can see it, calculate it, and plan around it. The costs that actually shape your business are the ones that don’t appear on the pricing page.
This includes things like – what happens to your student list if you leave, whether you set your own prices and payment terms, whether a feature you rely on moves to a higher tier, and whether a pricing change you didn’t choose lands on your margin next January.
Kajabi’s restructure is a good example. The creators most upset by it weren’t upset about $30 a month. They were upset that a business they’d spent years building could be repriced overnight, and there was nothing they could do about it.
That’s the real cost of renting: the lack of control, more than the fee itself.
What you’re actually renting: audience, data, pricing power
Now it goes without saying that when you build on a hosted platform, three things belong to the platform rather than to you.
The first is your audience relationship. Your students live in the platform’s system, under the platform’s rules. You can usually export a list, but the day-to-day relationship, the login, the emails, the community, runs on infrastructure you don’t own.
The second is your data. How much you can do with your own student and revenue data depends on what your plan allows. And that access can be narrowed, as Kajabi’s contact-limit cut showed.
The third is your pricing power. On a hosted platform, your costs are set by someone else’s business model, and that model can change to suit their margins, not yours.
None of this makes hosted platforms bad but it makes them landlords.
There’s a point in a business’s growth where paying rent on the thing that generates all your revenue starts to feel less like convenience and more like exposure. That’s the point the leavers reached.
| Founder takeaway: For an ambitious course business, your student list and your pricing freedom are the two assets that compound as you grow. Before you commit further to any platform, ask a blunt question: if this platform tripled its fees or halved a limit tomorrow, how much of my business could I actually take with me? Your answer is your real risk exposure. |
What did the founders move to?
Some of the businesses leaving simply swap one hosted platform for another. That can lower the bill, but it changes the landlord rather than the arrangement. The next repricing is still someone else’s decision.
The business owners switching to alternatives did something different.
They moved to an owned setup, such as a course platform built on WordPress and LearnDash. This way they could control the stack end to end: the checkout, the student data, the pricing, the features, and the ability to change any of it without asking permission.
The trade is real. An owned platform means you, or a partner, take on the build and the upkeep that a hosted platform handles for you: more control and more responsibility at the same time.
What you get in return is that the layer carrying your revenue is yours, with no transaction fee skimming every sale, no contact caps, no surprise repricing, and no ceiling on what you can build.
For a business past a certain size, that ownership is worth more than the convenience it replaces. If that’s the direction you’re weighing, it’s worth talking through what an owned build actually involves before you commit.
When staying on a hosted platform is the right call
Leaving isn’t the right move for everyone, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
If you’re early, still testing whether your courses sell, or running a small operation where the fees are a minor line item, a hosted platform is the sensible choice.
The speed and simplicity are genuinely worth paying for when your priority is validating the business, rather than optimizing it.
Kajabi and Teachable exist because that convenience has real value, and for a lot of creators it will keep being the right answer for years.
The signals that you’ve outgrown it are specific:
- Transaction fees that now run into thousands a year
- Student or contact caps you keep bumping into
- Features you need locked behind expensive tiers
- The growing sense that your margin is at the mercy of someone else’s pricing decisions.
When several of those are true at once, the math and the risk both start pointing the other way. If you’re not sure where you land, it’s worth getting an honest read before you spend anything.
The principle: own the layer that compounds, rent the rest
Here’s the idea worth taking away, and it applies well beyond course platforms.
Every digital business runs on a stack of tools.
Some are commodities you should happily rent, like email delivery, video hosting, and analytics, because owning them buys you nothing. But there’s usually one layer that compounds: the layer that holds your customer relationship and carries your revenue.
That’s the layer worth owning, because every improvement to it accrues to you, and every dependency on someone else’s version of it is a risk you can’t control.
For a course business, that layer is the platform itself.
The ownership playbook works at CERN's scale and at yours.
See how one of the world's largest research organisations built its brand on a platform it controls, and what that principle looks like at your scale.
The business owners who decided to leave figured out that renting the commodity layers is smart. And renting the compounding layer is an expensive mistake that never shows up on a pricing page.
You don’t need to be big to apply this. You need to know which layer is which, and to stop renting the one that should be yours.
| Founder takeaway: Treat your course platform the way you’d treat a lease on your only storefront. Renting is fine while you’re finding product-market fit. Once the business is proven and growing, owning the layer your revenue runs through turns an ongoing, rising cost into an asset you control, and removes the single biggest lever someone else holds over your margin. |
Frequently asked questions
How much does Kajabi cost in 2026?
According to Kajabi’s pricing page, the 2026 plans are $179 a month for Basic, $249 for Growth, and $499 for Pro on monthly billing, with about 20% off for annual billing. There’s no free plan. On top of the subscription you’ll pay payment processing of around 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction through Kajabi Payments, or a surcharge of 0.5% to 2% if you connect your own Stripe account. At $10,000 a month in revenue, a Basic user’s true annual cost lands near $4,000 once fees are included.
What are Teachable’s transaction fees?
Teachable charges a 7.5% transaction fee on every sale, but only on its entry-level Starter plan ($29 a month billed annually), which also caps you at 100 students. The Builder, Growth, and Advanced plans have no platform transaction fee. Standard payment processing fees of about 2.9% plus 30 cents apply on every plan regardless. Teachable removed its free plan in June 2025.
What does Kajabi really cost at scale?
The sticker price is only the starting point. On the Basic plan at $179 a month, you’ll also pay payment processing of around 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction through Kajabi Payments, or a surcharge of 0.5% to 2% if you connect your own Stripe account. At $10,000 a month in revenue, the true annual cost lands near $4,000 once fees are included. The 2,500 contact limit on Basic also pushes growing businesses to the $249 Growth tier well before the features require it, so the cost curve steepens exactly as your list grows.
Should I move off Teachable or Kajabi?
Not necessarily. If you’re early or small, a hosted platform is usually the right call. The signals that you’ve outgrown it are transaction fees running into thousands a year, student or contact caps you keep hitting, needed features locked behind expensive tiers, and exposure to pricing changes you don’t control. When several are true at once, an owned platform starts to make financial and strategic sense. Our replatforming framework covers how to make that call in detail.
The bottom line
The fee increases at Kajabi and the removed free plan at Teachable are worth understanding on their own, but they’re not the real story. They’re a reminder that when your business runs entirely on a platform you don’t own, the terms can change without your say, and your only options are to absorb it or to move.
The creators leaving early aren’t reacting to a fee. They’re deciding to own the layer that carries their revenue, so the next repricing isn’t their problem.
If you’re weighing that decision for your own business, the honest answer depends on your size, your margins, and how much control you need.
We’re happy to help you think it through, talk it over with us and we’ll give you a straight read on whether owning your platform makes sense at your stage.
