Kajabi Review (2026): Graded on What It Costs Before You Earn

Kajabi is the most expensive way to sell an online course that anyone would call mainstream, and the case for it is not that it is cheap but that it might be cheaper than the four products it replaces. Whether that holds depends entirely on whether you would actually have bought those four.

The pricing page on 21 September 2026 opens at $179 a month billed monthly, or $143 a month if you pay for the year. There is nothing below it. That is the fact everything else in this review has to be measured against.

What $143 a month actually buys

The list is long and, unusually for this category, not padded. Courses and digital products. An email tool with broadcasts and automation. Sales funnels and landing pages. A website builder. Communities. Coaching. A checkout with order bumps and payment plans. Analytics that tie revenue back to the email that produced it.

The point of Kajabi is that these things know about each other. A purchase can tag a contact, which can trigger a sequence, which can offer an upsell, without a Zapier step or a webhook in between. On a stitched-together stack, each of those joins is a place where something silently stops working at two in the morning.

That integration is real and it is the whole product. If you do not need it — if you sell one course to an audience you reach some other way — you are paying for plumbing you will never turn on.

The limits on Basic are tighter than the price suggests

Here is where the grade takes its first hit. Kajabi Basic includes five products, 2,500 contacts and two admin users.

Five products is not many for a platform positioning itself as the home of a creator business; a course, a workshop recording, a template pack and a coaching offer gets you to four. Growth at $199 a month annually lifts this to 50 products, 25,000 contacts and 11 admins. Pro at $399 goes unlimited on products with 100,000 contacts.

Compare that to Thinkific, which allows unlimited courses on a $40-a-month plan. You are not paying Kajabi's premium for headroom. You are paying it for the marketing suite, and the headroom costs extra on top.

The transaction fee story, told properly

Kajabi charges 0% platform transaction fee when you take payment through Kajabi Payments or PayPal. That is a genuine and meaningful advantage over Teachable's Starter tier, which takes 7.5%.

But "0% transaction fees" is a claim about Kajabi's own checkout, not about Kajabi. Two details sit underneath it.

First, Kajabi Payments has its own processing rate, and the rate is tiered: 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic, 2.8% plus 30 cents on Growth, 2.7% plus 30 cents on Pro. Every platform charges you something like this — it is the card network's money, not the platform's — but it is worth noticing that Kajabi treats the processing rate itself as a feature you can buy down by upgrading.

Second, if you want to keep your own Stripe account rather than use Kajabi Payments, Kajabi adds a surcharge: 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth, 0.5% on Pro. PayPal is exempt. So the zero-percent promise is conditional on using Kajabi's rails, and the price of independence is stated plainly on the pricing page. Kajabi deserves credit for printing it; plenty of platforms would not.

On a $500 sale through Kajabi Payments on Basic, the platform takes nothing and the processor takes $14.80, so $485.20 reaches you. That is as good as this category gets.

The tier that used to be there

A large number of comparisons still in circulation quote a Kajabi entry price of $89 a month, on a plan called Kickstarter. It is not on the pricing page we read on 21 September 2026, and the lowest plan listed is Basic at $143 annually.

We are not going to narrate a history we did not witness. What matters practically is this: if an article is quoting you an $89 Kajabi plan, it is describing a page that no longer looks like that, and you should distrust its other figures too. The same applies to any Basic price below $179 monthly.

Where Kajabi actually wins

Run the arithmetic at $5,000 a month in sales and the picture changes. Kajabi costs $1,716 for the year and takes nothing per sale. Teachable Starter costs $348 for the year but takes 7.5% — which at $5,000 a month is $4,500 across the year, for a total of $4,848. Suddenly the expensive platform is the cheap one by a wide margin.

That crossover is the honest case for Kajabi, and it is not the case its marketing leads with. It is not "all-in-one convenience". It is: above a certain revenue, percentage fees are the most expensive thing in your business, and a fixed subscription that takes none of your sales is worth paying a lot for.

Below roughly $2,000 a month, though, the sum runs the other way and keeps running that way. Kajabi's $1,716 annual floor is simply more than a small operation should be committing to a software subscription.

The deduction that is easy to miss

No free plan, and a trial instead — the pricing page offers a month. That is more generous than Teachable's seven days. But a trial is not a place to leave an unfinished course for six months while you decide whether you are really doing this, and a great many courses need exactly that.

If you are at the "I think I might build a course" stage rather than the "I have buyers waiting" stage, Kajabi's pricing structure is actively hostile to you, and no amount of feature quality fixes that.

Verdict

7.2, a B−. The product is not the problem; the product is excellent and does what it says. The grade reflects a pricing floor that assumes a business already exists, combined with entry-tier limits tight enough that the plan you can afford is not quite the plan you want.

If you are consolidating four subscriptions and trading well, Kajabi is a defensible and possibly cheaper answer. If you are starting, it is the wrong shape. The full comparison against every alternative, with the crossover arithmetic worked out, is on the best online course platforms shortlist, and the closest structural rival at a quarter of the price is covered in the Thinkific review.