How to Make Money with Teachable and Kajabi in 2026

Amy Porterfield built a $10M+ online course business. Pat Flynn's Smart Passive Income courses have generated millions. These are the stories you see when you search how to make money with Teachable or how to make money with Kajabi — and they're real. Course creators have collectively earned billions through these platforms.

Here's the honest context: most course creators make less than $1,000 before quitting. Not because the platforms are broken, but because building a profitable online course business requires more than picking the right software. This guide breaks down how Teachable and Kajabi actually work, what realistic online course platform income looks like, what the platforms cost, and a comparison that might change how you approach this entirely.

What Are Teachable and Kajabi?

Both platforms let you host and sell online courses. The meaningful difference is scope — and cost.

Teachable is a focused course platform. You can build a course, set a price, and start selling. It handles hosting, video delivery, checkout, and student management. The interface is clean, the learning curve is low, and the Free plan lets you launch without spending a dollar upfront (with transaction fees). Teachable for beginners is the right frame — it's purpose-built to get you from idea to live course fast.

Kajabi is an all-in-one business platform. On top of courses, it includes email marketing, landing page builder, community features, membership sites, and podcast hosting — all in one dashboard. The trade-off: it starts at $149/month with no free tier. A Kajabi review 2026 would call it the premium platform for creators who want to consolidate tools and are already generating income.

Both host courses. Kajabi adds the entire business stack around them.

How Much Can You Actually Make?

Teachable reports $500M+ paid out to creators. Kajabi reports 60,000+ active businesses on the platform. The numbers are real — so is the income concentration.

Here's an honest breakdown of online course platform income tiers:

Beginner ($0–$500/month): Most course creators land here, and most stay here. One course, limited audience, limited marketing. This is where the majority stop. It's not failure — it's the reality of starting from zero.

Growing ($500–$3,000/month): You've validated the topic, have consistent traffic (usually from email, social, or SEO), and are improving the course based on student feedback. Reaching this tier takes 6–18 months for most creators.

Established ($3,000–$15,000/month): A flagship course plus a back-end offer (a higher-ticket coaching program or second course). Active email list. Some paid traffic. This is a real business with real operations.

Top creators ($15,000–$100,000+/month): Amy Porterfield territory. These creators have large, engaged audiences built over years, a full suite of products, and often a team. They exist — they're just not the typical starting point.

The pattern at every tier: income follows audience. The platform is the delivery mechanism. Your audience is the business.

Teachable Pricing — What You Actually Keep

Free plan: Teachable charges $1 + 10% per transaction. On a $100 course, you net roughly $90 after their cut — plus Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30 processing fee, so closer to $86. Functional for validating an idea. Expensive at volume.

Basic — $59/month: Transaction fee drops to 5%. At a $100 course, you keep ~$95 before payment processing. Breaks even versus the Free plan at around 12 sales/month.

Pro — $159/month: 0% transaction fees. Full access to features including course completion certificates, advanced reporting, and priority support. The Pro plan pays for itself at roughly 3 sales/month at $100 — and every sale beyond that is pure gain versus lower tiers.

The math: if you're selling a $200 course and closing 10 sales/month ($2,000 gross), the Pro plan saves you $160 in transaction fees versus the Free plan — the plan essentially pays for itself.

Kajabi Pricing — What You Actually Keep

Basic — $149/month: Up to 3 products, 1,000 active members, included email marketing, landing pages, and basic automations. No transaction fees on any plan.

Growth — $199/month: Up to 15 products, 10,000 active members, affiliate program, advanced automations. Most mid-tier creators run here.

Pro — $399/month: Up to 100 products, 20,000 active members, white-labeling, custom code.

The Kajabi advantage: zero transaction fees at every plan level. The Kajabi trade-off: you're paying $149+/month before making your first sale. At $149/month, you need roughly $200/month in course revenue just to break even on the platform fee before counting your time.

Bottom line: Kajabi makes financial sense for creators already earning $1,000+/month who want to consolidate email marketing, course hosting, and community into one subscription. It's not the right starting point for a creator still validating their topic.

What Sells Well on These Platforms

The strongest-performing Teachable for beginners courses and Kajabi products share a common trait: they deliver a clear, measurable outcome.

Business and marketing skills — how to start a freelance business, how to run Facebook ads, how to grow a Substack. High willingness to pay because the ROI is direct.

Tech skills — coding, design, AI tools, no-code automation. Buyers invest because the skill is immediately monetizable.

Fitness and health coaching — weight loss programs, strength training, nutrition. Recurring community memberships work especially well here on Kajabi.

Creative skills — photography, music production, illustration, video editing. Strong Teachable performance when the instructor has a recognizable portfolio or audience.

The pattern: teach something with a clear before/after. "You'll be able to do X after this course" beats "you'll understand X." Buyers pay for transformation, not information.

Honest Challenges (What Most Guides Skip)

Here's what the success-story marketing doesn't lead with.

Course creation is a real time investment. A quality course takes 40–200 hours to build — scripting, recording, editing, uploading, structuring assessments. That's before a single sale. Many people underestimate this and either rush the content or never finish.

Neither platform brings you an audience. Teachable and Kajabi are delivery systems. Traffic is your problem entirely. No built-in marketplace, no organic discovery engine. If you don't have an email list, social following, or content SEO strategy, you're launching into silence.

Most courses fail from marketing, not content quality. A well-produced course with no distribution plan earns nothing. A scrappy course with an engaged audience of 2,000 email subscribers can clear $10,000 on launch day. Marketing is the job.

Refund requests are part of the model. Most platforms require you to offer at least a 30-day refund window. If your course doesn't deliver clear outcomes quickly, refunds climb. Budget for 5–15% refund rates, especially early.

Monthly fees are real overhead at zero sales. Kajabi at $149/month costs you $1,788/year whether or not you make a single sale. Teachable's Basic plan costs $708/year. These aren't passive costs — they're business overhead that requires active revenue to justify.

Teachable vs. Kajabi: Side-by-Side Comparison

| Factor | Teachable | Kajabi | |---|---|---| | Starting cost | $0 (Free plan) | $149/mo | | Transaction fees | 0–10% depending on plan | None | | Email marketing | No (use a separate tool) | Yes (built-in) | | Community features | Basic | Full community + membership | | Best for | First-time course creators | Established creators scaling | | Learning curve | Low | Medium | | All-in-one business tools | No | Yes |

If you're launching your first course and don't have an existing audience: start with Teachable. Lower barrier, lower cost, less complexity. If you're already generating $2k+/month and paying for Mailchimp, ConvertKit, and a landing page tool separately: Kajabi consolidates those into one subscription and often saves money.

The Faster Alternative: Digital Products

Here's a comparison most course platform guides won't show you.

| | Online Course | Ebook | |---|---|---| | Time to create | 40–200 hours | 10–30 hours | | Platform fee | $59–$399/month | $0 | | Marketing required | Yes — significant | Yes — same | | Refund rate | 5–15% common | Low | | Production complexity | High (video, editing, structure) | Low (writing, formatting) |

"If you have knowledge worth teaching, that knowledge is also worth packaging as an ebook — at a fraction of the time and overhead. Many creators start with ebooks to validate demand before building a full course."

An ebook at $27 on a platform with zero monthly fees earns the same per-sale as a $97 course after a month of Teachable's Basic plan costs. And you can write a focused, practical ebook in a weekend — not three months.

This isn't an argument against courses. It's an argument for sequencing. The creators who succeed with Teachable and Kajabi almost always started by validating their topic with a simpler product first — a guide, a workshop, an ebook. They knew people would pay before they invested 100 hours in a full course build.

For the broader strategy on building income from written expertise, how to make money with digital products covers every format — ebooks, templates, guides, and how they stack together.

If you want to understand the full course business model before committing to a platform, how to make money with an online course walks through the whole playbook.

How to Get Started This Week

If you're new to Teachable: Create a free account, outline a 5-module course on your strongest skill, and price it at $97. Launch to your existing network — email contacts, LinkedIn connections, social followers — before spending anything on ads. Validate the topic with 5 sales before building the rest.

If you're evaluating Kajabi: Try the 14-day free trial after you've made your first course sale somewhere else. Kajabi's power is consolidation — but you need enough moving parts (email list, multiple products, community) to justify the cost.

If you want a faster path to your first digital product income: Start with an ebook. The ReadyReads Complete Bundle is a model for what focused, practical digital products look like — the kind of content that validates demand before you invest in a full course build. Browse all products to see the format in action.

The Bottom Line

Teachable and Kajabi are legitimate platforms with real success stories behind them. The income is there — it just belongs to the creators who solved the audience problem first, not the platform problem.

The best course is the one people actually finish — and the best product is the one you actually launch. Pick the format that gets you to done fastest.