Kajabi is Expensive. Let’s talk about a bill you might not have looked at properly in a while.
If you’re running a course, a membership, or a digital product on a platform like Kajabi, you’re paying a set amount every single month — whether you sell one course or a hundred.
That’s the deal you signed up for, and for a long time, it made sense: one login, one bill, everything under one roof.
Kajabi is Expensive
But here’s what’s changed.
At the start of this year, Kajabi quietly restructured its pricing. Basic, Growth, and Pro all went up —
- Basic from $149 to $179 a month,
- Growth from $199 to $249,
- Pro from $399 to $499.
- Kickstarter is the one plan that held steady at $89 (though it’s now nowhere to be found on their main pricing page)
And if you were already a paying customer on one of the plans that rose, you weren’t protected from it — the higher price just became your new price.
Someone who’s been on the platform for years, loyally paying every month, got the same increase as someone who signed up yesterday.
https://www.kajabi.com/updates/2025-pricing-updates
Kajabi Additional Costs
On top of the monthly fee, there’s a second cost that’s easy to miss: every time someone pays you — especially if they’re on a payment plan, or they’re buying from outside the UK — Kajabi takes an extra slice on top of the card processing fee.
Most people think they’re paying roughly 3% per sale. In practice, once you add it all up, it’s often closer to 4%.
That’s not a scandal, exactly. It’s just not what most people think they signed up for, because nobody sits them down and explains it in one place.
Here’s the bit that actually worries me on your behalf — and it comes down to one setting most people never think to check.
Kajabi Payment Options
Inside Kajabi, you can take payments two different ways: through your own Stripe or PayPal account, or through Kajabi’s own built-in processor, called Kajabi Payments.
On the surface they look almost identical. But there’s one reason most people ended up choosing Kajabi Payments without a second thought — it’s the only option that lets your customers pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay at checkout.
A direct Stripe or PayPal connection inside Kajabi doesn’t offer either. So if you wanted to stop losing sales to people who can’t be bothered to type in a card number, Kajabi Payments was the obvious, sensible choice. Nobody was being careless.
The Kajabi Catch
Here’s the catch nobody explains at the time, and it’s genuinely important: Kajabi Payments doesn’t let an active subscription move house. There’s no way to export a customer’s card-on-file to a new platform — so if you cancel your Kajabi account and simply walk away, your subscribers keep being charged, because cancelling your account does not automatically cancel their individual subscriptions. That part is entirely on you to do manually.
So if you’re ever leaving Kajabi, do this in the right order:
- Cancel every active subscription yourself, inside Kajabi, before you go. Kajabi will not do this for you. Skip this step and people keep being billed for a product they can no longer access — which is the sort of thing that gets messy fast, both for your reputation and potentially with their bank.
- Then contact every customer individually and ask them to resubscribe on wherever you’ve moved to.
That second step is where the real loss happens — not because anyone’s trapped or being charged unfairly, but because re-entering card details is friction, and friction is where people quietly don’t bother. Some will follow you. Some won’t. There’s no way to make that number zero; you can only make it as small as possible by asking clearly, early, and more than once.
Check your Kajabi Payment Processor
How to check which processor you’re actually on, in under a minute:
- log into Kajabi, go to Settings, then Payment Integrations.
- If “Kajabi Payments” shows as connected and switched on for your Offers, that’s the one your subscribers are sitting inside — and the manual-cancellation step above applies to you.
- If it’s Stripe or PayPal showing as active instead, you’re already safe: that relationship was always yours, and you can cancel Kajabi tomorrow without losing a single subscriber.
Sit with that for a second either way. You built the business. You did the marketing, the teaching, the years of showing up. Whether the ongoing income from your own customers is truly yours, or on loan from the platform you’re renting space from, depends entirely on which box got ticked when you first set up payments — often years before you’d have thought to ask.
Kajabi is Expensive – What’s the Alternative
— and is it actually better, or just different?
There’s a simpler way some platforms are doing this, and Payhip is a good example — I made the switch myself a while back, after a year of paying monthly for a course I hadn’t even finished building.
Instead of charging you a flat monthly fee whether you sell anything or not, Payhip lets you choose:
- Pay nothing monthly, and they take 5% of each sale.
- Pay about £22 a month, and that drops to 2% per sale.
- Pay about £74 a month, and they take nothing at all — you keep everything, minus the standard card processing fee, which no platform can avoid. *(Converted from USD based on today’s exchange rates)*.
The honest maths: if you’re making under roughly £725 a month in sales, staying on the free tier costs you less than any subscription would.
Once you’re consistently earning more than about £2,625 a month, the flat £74 plan becomes the cheapest option, because you stop losing a percentage on larger and larger amounts.
Compare that to a platform charging you £134 to £374 a month regardless of how your month actually went.
If sales are slow, quiet, or seasonal — genuinely normal for most small course creators — you’re still paying full price for a quiet month. With a pay-as-you-earn model, a quiet month costs you next to nothing, because the platform only gets paid when you do.
None of this means you should panic and switch everything tomorrow.
Migrating a course business is real work, and the right platform depends on your numbers, not just the headline price.
But it’s worth actually knowing what you’re paying, what happens to your customers if you ever want to leave, and whether the platform’s incentives are lined up with yours — or whether they quietly benefit more the less you understand your own bill.
If you’ve never actually sat down and worked out what you’re paying versus what you’re getting, that’s not a silly gap in your knowledge. It’s a completely normal one — and it’s an easy one to close, once someone actually walks you through it in plain English.
If Kajabi is Expensive, contact me if you need a set-up-for-you Payhip Course Migration Service
Featured Image for Kajabi is Expensive vs Pay Nothing ‘Til You Sell Something created using Gemini/Nano Banana 🍌🍌
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