The new Podia: community in, free plan out

For a decade Podia was the cheap, simple answer to Kajabi. The 2026 relaunch keeps the simple part and reprices the cheap one. Community, once a separate add-on, is now part of every plan. The free plan is gone, and so are the free community plans some creators ran on it. Accounts that did not pick a new plan were moved over automatically in early August 2026, according to Podia's help centre.

What replaced the old lineup is three plans with joke names and limits that are not a joke: Mover, Shaker and Earthquaker. Every one includes online courses, digital downloads, coaching, live and in-person events, a website and blog on your own domain, landing pages, a community and a built-in checkout. Every one also includes a Podia MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT or any other MCP client can read and work with your store. The tiers differ on a transaction fee, a handful of sales features, and hard caps on products, videos and email subscribers.

Podia calls itself independent and profitable, says it has been running since 2014, and claims 15,000+ creators and $900M+ earned on the platform. The trial is 14 days with no card required. Some third-party reviews still quote 30 days; podia.com says 14.

Pricing and the $1,000 break-even

Prices below were checked on podia.com/pricing in October 2026.

Stripe or PayPal take their own 2.9% + 30¢ per sale on every plan (it varies by country). Podia's 5% on Mover comes off each sale before payout, on top of that.

That 5% is the number that picks your plan. Shaker costs $50 a month more than Mover on monthly billing, and 5% of $1,000 is $50. Sell more than $1,000 a month and Shaker is the cheaper plan; on annual billing the gap is $42, so the crossover drops to $840. A $2,500 month on Mover costs $49 plus $125 in Podia fees, $174 in total. That is $75 more than Shaker and $5 short of Earthquaker.

Mover also leaves out more than the fee suggests. No PayPal, so buyers who will not type a card number into Stripe are lost. No upsells, no affiliate programme, no Zapier and no assistant seat. Shaker adds all of those and one assistant; Earthquaker makes assistants unlimited.

One more thing to know before paying annually. Podia refunds its own subscription only if you ask within 72 hours of the latest payment, and annual plans get no partial refunds. Saving $7 a month on Mover means committing $504 up front.

Email: you pay for the list, not the send

Podia's built-in email covers broadcasts, automations with entrance and exit conditions, ready-made templates and a per-recipient report showing who opened, clicked, bought, bounced or unsubscribed. For a solo creator that replaces a separate email tool. The included lists are tiny, though: 100 subscribers on Mover, 500 on Shaker, 1,000 on Earthquaker.

Past that you buy an add-on sized to the whole contact list. The help centre is blunt about it: with 1,000 subscribers you need the 1,000 tier "even if you only want to email a small segment". Monthly add-on prices, checked in October 2026, run +$10 for 500, +$18 for 1,000, +$28 for 2,500, +$45 for 5,000, +$70 for 10,000 and +$135 for 25,000, with annual billing about 20% cheaper.

Do the sum for a creator with 5,000 subscribers on Mover: $49 + $45 = $94 a month, plus 5% of sales. That is Shaker money without Shaker's features, and Shaker itself still needs an add-on above 500 contacts. Kajabi Basic is $179 but includes 2,500 contacts.

Going over the limit does not trigger a surprise bill. Podia never auto-upgrades. Instead sending is switched off, scheduled broadcasts go back to draft and campaigns pause, which is worse if it happens halfway through a launch sequence. Anyone with a large list on a dedicated tool such as Kit should leave it there and use Podia for the store.

Payments and tax: Podia is not your merchant of record

Podia never holds your money. Payments go straight to your connected Stripe or PayPal account, you are the seller, and payouts land in about five business days (Stripe's first payout usually takes 7-14 days). A platform dispute cannot freeze a balance Podia never had.

The cost of that arrangement is tax. Podia calculates sales tax and VAT at checkout for the places where you are registered, EU VAT OSS and IOSS included, and zero-rates reverse-charge sales when a business buyer enters a tax ID. Then it stops: "Podia doesn't file or remit your sales taxes for you." Sell an ebook to buyers in Germany, the UK and Australia and the registrations and filings are yours. A merchant-of-record service like Gumroad remits that tax for you, which is a large part of what its 10% + $0.50 per sale pays for.

Checkout handles 20+ currencies, though some, such as AED, INR and KRW, work only through Stripe. Payment plans that split a price into monthly instalments are available; upsells on products, events and plans are Shaker and Earthquaker only.

The limits the pricing page skips

Video is the cap that bites hardest. Mover stops at 500 videos and Shaker at 1,000, and the help centre says "additional video capacity is not available as a separate add-on". A course library that outgrows Shaker leaves two choices: pay $179 for Earthquaker, or host the videos somewhere else and embed them. Podia said in 2021 that it used Wistia behind the scenes; it does not name a provider today.

Downgrading is blocked while you are over the lower plan's limits. With 55 products you cannot drop to Mover's 50 until you delete or merge five. Live events are not hosted by Podia either. It recognises Zoom, Google Meet and YouTube Live links, and the suggested home for a replay is a course you upload it to. The "Powered by Podia" footer comes off your site on paid plans but not during the trial, and it cannot be removed from transactional emails at all.

Support starts with Penny, an AI chatbot. You can ask it for a human, and email goes to [email protected], but there is no phone line and no published response time, on any plan. Users notice. Trustpilot shows 4.2 from 147 reviews when checked on 7 October 2026, and the recent complaints are about exactly this: "The chatbot was unhelpful and i had to wait 6 hours and still no response from a human" (July 2026). Others call the same team "incredible". Capterra rates it 4.6 from 126 reviews, where one user wrote that Podia changes "basic logic in the system without any alerting to the customers".

Moving in is free; moving out is on you

Podia will migrate your products for free: up to 50 on Mover, 150 on Shaker or Earthquaker, with videos up to the plan's cap. Tests and quizzes, sales pipelines and site pages do not come across, so a quiz-heavy course from Thinkific or Teachable gets rebuilt by hand. Once the migration team starts, no part of the plan payment can be refunded.

Leaving is less tidy. You can export contacts, per-product customer lists and sales as CSV, but product exports include "active customers only", so anyone whose access expired is missing. Podia documents no export for course content and no bulk video download. Cancel and the site goes offline immediately; your content is stored for 180 days and comes back only if you reactivate a paid plan. Keep master copies of every video and lesson outside Podia from the first day.

Podia vs Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific and Gumroad

Kajabi wins only when the email list is already big: its 2,500 included contacts would cost $28 a month as a Podia add-on, but $179 buys five products where Podia's Mover allows 50. Teachable Starter undercuts Mover by $10 and charges 7.5% instead of 5%, so it is the worse deal from the first $400 of monthly sales. For a single digital product with no community, Sellfy or Gumroad is simpler still.

Verdict: who should buy Podia, and who should not

Buy Podia if you are a solo creator selling a mix of courses, downloads, coaching and a community, and you want one bill, one checkout and one login for all of it. Start on Mover while you validate the idea. Move to Shaker the month sales pass about $1,000, because from there the 5% fee costs more than the upgrade, and Shaker also brings PayPal, upsells and affiliates.

Skip it in four cases. With an email list in the thousands, a dedicated tool such as Kit is cheaper per subscriber, or Kajabi Basic includes 2,500 contacts. If you sell worldwide and want someone else to file VAT, use Gumroad, because Podia only calculates tax. If you need quizzes, certificates or a video library past 1,000 files without paying $179, look at Thinkific or Teachable. And if you are testing an idea with no budget, Gumroad costs nothing per month; Podia no longer has a free plan.

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