Teachable Review (2026): The $29 Plan and Its 7.5% Hinge

Teachable is where most people's search for a course platform stops, because $29 a month is the friendliest number in the category and it sits at the top of the pricing page. This review is largely about the second number, which sits next to it and gets read far less often.

That number is 7.5%, and it is Teachable's cut of every sale you make on the Starter plan. It is the largest platform cut charged by any subscription product covered on this site.

The four plans, on both billing cycles

Read from the pricing page on 21 September 2026:

• Starter — $39 a month billed monthly, $29 billed annually. 7.5% transaction fee. 5 products, 1 admin seat.
• Builder — $89 monthly, $69 annually. 0% transaction fee. 10 products, 1 admin seat.
• Growth — $189 monthly, $139 annually. 0% transaction fee. 50 products, 5 admin seats.
• Custom — priced on application, 0% transaction fee, flexible limits.

Teachable prints its own annual savings next to each plan — $120, $240 and $600 respectively — which checks out against twelve months of each price and is a rare piece of pricing-page honesty worth acknowledging.

The crossover, which is the entire decision

Builder costs $40 a month more than Starter on annual billing. Builder removes a 7.5% fee. Divide one by the other and you get the sales figure where the two plans cost exactly the same: $533 a month.

Below $533 a month in sales, Starter plus the fee is cheaper. Above it, Builder is cheaper, and the gap widens every month you grow. This is not a marginal difference at scale. At $2,000 a month in sales, Starter's fee alone is $150 a month against a $29 plan — the fee is over five times the subscription. Across a year that is $1,800 in fees on top of $348 in subscription, against $828 for a year of Builder with no fee at all.

Nobody's pricing page shows you that calculation, so here it is in one line: $533 a month in sales is where Teachable's cheap plan stops being cheap.

What Starter gates besides the fee

Five products and one admin seat. The product limit matters less on Teachable than on Kajabi, because most people selling on Teachable are selling one or two things. The seat limit matters more than it looks: Builder also gives you only one, so the first co-instructor or VA who needs their own login pushes you to Growth at $139 a month annually, not to Builder.

That is worth planning for. The upgrade path here is not a smooth ramp; it is a small step to remove the fee and then a large step to add a person.

The product itself

Good. The course builder is clear, the student experience is clean and unfussy, and the checkout handles payment plans and subscriptions without drama. Quizzes, drip scheduling, completion certificates and compliance-oriented features are present at the tiers you would expect.

There is nothing here that a competent course seller will find missing, and nothing that makes it obviously better than Thinkific at the same job. The distinguishing features of this platform are commercial, not functional — which is precisely why the fee structure carries so much weight in the grade.

Who Starter is genuinely right for

There is a real customer here and it is worth naming, because the fee arithmetic above reads as a warning and it is not one.

If you are selling a single course to a small list, launching twice a year, and expecting a few hundred dollars a month rather than a few thousand, Starter is the cheapest credible way to be in business at all. $348 for a year, plus 7.5% of a modest number, is less than any competing subscription. The fee only becomes the enemy when the number it is a percentage of gets large — and if you are honest with yourself about whether that is likely within twelve months, the decision makes itself.

What Starter is not is a default. It is the right plan for a specific and fairly quiet trading pattern, and it is sold as though it were the right plan for everyone.

Payment processing is still on top

Teachable's pricing page states that its transaction fee applies to sales processed through its payment system and that standard processing charges — roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents on a US card — apply separately across all plans.

So on a $500 sale on Starter: Teachable takes $37.50, the processor takes $14.80, and $447.70 reaches you. On Builder the platform takes nothing and $485.20 reaches you. That $37.50 difference per sale is what the $40 a month is buying back.

No free plan, and a short trial

Teachable no longer offers a free tier. What you get is a seven-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee — the shortest trial in this comparison by a distance, against Thinkific's and Podia's thirty days and Kajabi's month.

Seven days is enough to evaluate an interface. It is not enough to build a course. If you want to construct something before you commit money, the trial lengths elsewhere are a genuine reason to look elsewhere first.

Verdict

7.6, a B. Teachable is a good platform with a pricing structure that rewards reading carefully and punishes reading quickly. The headline $29 is real, and so is the 7.5% that sits beside it.

The recommendation is unambiguous: if you expect to sell more than about $533 a month, start on Builder and ignore Starter entirely. If you expect less, Starter is genuinely the cheapest subscription route into this category. Teachable is worth a place on anyone's shortlist — just not the plan at the top of the page by default. The whole field, ranked with this arithmetic applied to every platform, is on the best online course platforms page; the fee mechanics get their own treatment in how course-platform transaction fees really work.