Course Platform Costs at $500, $2,000 and $5,000 a Month

A pricing page tells you what a plan costs. It does not tell you what a platform costs, because the second number depends on how much you sell, and the two move in opposite directions often enough that the cheapest option at one trading level is among the dearest at another.

Below are twelve-month totals for six platforms at three realistic revenue levels, built entirely from figures read off vendor pricing pages on 21 September 2026. Annual billing is assumed throughout, since that is the cheaper cycle everywhere it exists. Card processing is excluded because it is the same everywhere and cancels out of any comparison.

How these were calculated

Twelve months of the annual-billing rate, plus the platform's cut applied to the year's sales. Nothing else.

Thinkific Basic is $40 a month annually, so $480, with no cut. Teachable Starter is $29 a month, so $348, plus 7.5% of the year's sales. Teachable Builder is $69, so $828, with no cut. Podia Mover is $504 for the year plus 5%; Shaker is $1,008 with no cut. Kajabi Basic is $143 a month, so $1,716, with no cut through Kajabi Payments. Sensei Pro is a flat $179 licence with no cut at all.

Gumroad has no subscription, so its figure is purely 10% of sales plus 50 cents per transaction, assuming an average $100 sale price. Change that assumption and the per-transaction component moves; the 10% does not.

Two caveats stated plainly. Thinkific advertises an annual saving that implies its Basic yearly total is a few dollars below twelve times $40, so treat $480 as a ceiling. And Sensei's $179 excludes hosting, a domain and your own maintenance time, which is not a small exclusion.

At $500 a month, almost nothing separates them

Six thousand dollars of annual sales, and the spread between the cheapest hosted platform and the dearest is $480 against $1,716.

At this level the percentage fees are small in absolute terms — 7.5% of $6,000 is $450 — so the subscription dominates. Teachable Starter and Podia Mover both land around $800, which is more than Thinkific Basic despite both having lower or comparable subscriptions, because the cut has already overtaken the saving.

Kajabi is an outlier here and it is worth being blunt: at $6,000 of annual sales, Kajabi Basic consumes 29% of your revenue in subscription alone. There is no feature set that justifies that ratio for a business this size.

The genuinely interesting figure is Gumroad's $630 — cheaper than Teachable Starter or Podia Mover at this volume, despite the largest percentage in the comparison, because it charges nothing in the months you sell nothing.

At $2,000 a month, the fee-bearing plans break

Twenty-four thousand of annual sales, and the ordering has changed completely.

Teachable Starter has climbed to $2,148 — above Kajabi Basic, which has not moved at all. Podia Mover is at $1,704. Both are now more expensive than the fee-free tier directly above them: Teachable Builder at $828 and Podia Shaker at $1,008 are the correct plans at this volume, and staying on the cheaper tier costs you $1,320 and $696 respectively across the year.

This is the crossing point the whole category turns on, and nothing in either product notifies you that you have passed it. The fee comes out at the moment of sale; there is no statement line reading "you are on the wrong plan".

Gumroad at $2,520 is now the single most expensive row on the table, and the point at which it has stopped being a clever way to start and become an expensive way to continue.

At $5,000 a month, the percentage is the business

Sixty thousand of annual sales, and the numbers stop being close.

Teachable Starter reaches $4,848 for the year — more than ten times Thinkific Basic, for a platform of broadly comparable capability. Podia Mover reaches $3,504. Gumroad reaches $6,300, which is more than a year of Kajabi Pro at $4,788.

Meanwhile Thinkific Basic is still $480, Teachable Builder is still $828, Kajabi Basic is still $1,716 and Sensei Pro is still $179. Every fee-free option has held flat while every fee-bearing one has multiplied.

At this level, Kajabi's $1,716 stops being the outlier and starts looking reasonable: it is cheaper than three of the eight rows on the table, and it is buying a genuinely broader product than any of them. This is the volume Kajabi's pricing is designed for, and the volume at which its all-in-one argument finally pays.

What the table actually shows

Three things, in order of how often they are missed.

Fee-free plans do not get more expensive. That is their entire value and it compounds. Every fee-bearing plan on this table quadruples or worse between the first column and the third; every fee-free one is identical across all three.

The cheapest plan is only cheapest in a narrow band. Teachable Starter wins nowhere on this table, at any of the three levels, against Thinkific Basic. Its $29 sticker beats Thinkific's $40, and its total never does.

Subscription price and total cost are almost unrelated. Ranked by sticker price, Teachable Starter is the cheapest plan in the comparison and Kajabi Basic the dearest. Ranked by twelve-month total at $5,000 a month, Teachable Starter is the second most expensive row on the table and Kajabi Basic sits comfortably in the middle. The sticker told you nothing.

Working out your own number

Take your realistic monthly sales, multiply by twelve, multiply by the platform's fee rate, and add twelve months of the annual plan price. That is the whole method and it takes a minute per platform.

Do it before you sign up rather than after, because the fee you are about to agree to is invisible from the moment you agree to it. The plan-by-plan fees and the crossover points are in how course-platform transaction fees really work, the limits that force upgrades for non-financial reasons are in what each plan actually gates, and the full ranking with both applied is on the best online course platforms shortlist.