Teachable's $39-a-month plan costs more than its $89-a-month plan once you sell about $670 of courses a month.
The cheaper plan takes 7.5% of every sale. The dearer one takes nothing. The gap between the two fees is $50 a month, and 7.5% of sales passes $50 at about $667. Above that, the "starter" plan is the expensive one, and nothing on the pricing page tells you so.
That is the whole reason I started publishing decision pages. A pricing page shows you a fee. It rarely shows you what you will pay.
What the page does
It takes one question — which platform should I use to sell an online course, and what does it really cost — and answers it with arithmetic you can check. Seven plans, five platforms. You move a slider to your monthly course revenue and they re-rank by what they cost you over a year, the cut of each sale included.
Three things stood out when the numbers were in:
- Systeme.io is the cheapest at every level on the slider: $0 to $17 a month and no cut of sales.
- Its free plan is now unusual. Thinkific and Podia both dropped theirs in 2025–26.
- Kajabi charges $179 a month and has a large business anyway — which tells you price is not how most people choose. The page says so.
How it was made
I did not do the reading myself, and I have not used these platforms. Software agents read each vendor's own pricing page with monthly billing selected — several default to the cheaper annual rate — and code checked every figure against the page it came from before it could be published. Every row links to its source, and the page shows the date it was last checked.
Payment processing is left out of all seven, because every platform passes on roughly the same card fees. One exception is written up on the page: Kajabi's 0% only holds if you use Kajabi's own payments.
The one link that earns
The page has one affiliate link, to Systeme.io, labelled as an ad beside it. It pays only if someone signs up and later upgrades. The ranking would be the same without it: Systeme.io is cheapest on the published prices, and the page lists the cases where you should not pick it.
If a comparison earns money from the answer, the arithmetic has to be checkable. Otherwise it is an advert with a table in it.
The page this is about: What does it really cost to sell an online course? — every figure sourced to the vendor's own page, with the date it was checked.