Teachable Review: The Plans, the 7.5% Starter Fee and the Student Charges
Teachable review, checked October 2026: Starter $29/mo with a 7.5% fee, Builder $69/mo, student usage charges, no course export, and who should pick Podia or Kajabi.
专家评测
The Teachable you remember is gone
If your picture of Teachable comes from a creator blog written before mid-2025, most of it is out of date. On June 15, 2025 Teachable retired Basic, Pro and Pro+ and replaced them with Starter, Builder, Growth and Advanced. Existing schools were moved to whichever new plan matched their product and student counts, and the new price applied from the first renewal on or after June 29, 2025. The old rates were not grandfathered.
Three other things moved with it. The free plan is gone: the help centre says plainly that Teachable "no longer offers a free plan", and a school whose paid plan lapses stays offline until someone pays again. Students who arrive without buying now carry a monthly charge past a threshold. And in 2026 the old Teachable Pay gateway gave way to Teachable Payments, built on Stripe. Advanced, launched at $309 a month billed annually, has since dropped off the public pricing page in favour of a sales-led Custom tier, although a help article updated in September 2026 still lists it as self-service.
The product is the same idea it has been since Ankur Nagpal started it in New York: a hosted school for courses, coaching and digital downloads, owned since 2020 by the Brazilian creator platform Hotmart. Teachable claims more than 150,000 creators.
Plans and prices
Checked on the Teachable pricing page on October 8, 2026. The page shows no last-updated date, and a "Get 3 months for the price of 1" promotion was running in its header.
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually | Transaction fee | Products | Admin users |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $39/mo | $29/mo | 7.5% | 5 | 1 |
| Builder | $89/mo | $69/mo | 0% | 10 | 1 |
| Growth | $189/mo | $139/mo | 0% | 50 | 5 |
| Custom | Contact sales | 0% | - | - | |
Every plan includes up to 1TB of video storage, unlimited community spaces, memberships, bundles, coupons, order bumps, upsells, abandoned-cart emails and automatic sales tax handling. Students get iOS and Android apps. A product is one course, coaching offer or download however many lessons it holds, and memberships, bundles and unpublished drafts do not count against the cap. There is a 7-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
The seat count is where small teams get caught. "Admin-level user" covers owners, authors and custom roles, so the moment a co-instructor needs to edit their own course, Starter and Builder are full. Growth is the first plan with more than one seat. It is also the only plan with course certificates, imported students, removal of Teachable branding and free subtitles, plus full Zapier and public API access. A two-person school that wants completion certificates is a $139-a-month customer, whatever it earns. Affiliate programs and real-time support start at Builder.
The real fee stack
On Starter the plan price is the smallest number on the bill. Starter takes 7.5% of every sale, and Teachable's fee article says that applies on Teachable Payments and on your own Stripe account alike. The retired Basic plan charged 5%. Card processing sits on top: 2.9% + 30¢ for US cards and 3.9% + 30¢ for international ones on the pricing page, though the help centre lists 4.4% for international cards, so budget for the higher figure. PayPal costs 3.49% + 49¢ domestic and 4.99% + 49¢ international. A chargeback is $15.
Then come the bundle surcharges the pricing table leaves out. On the Standard bundle, tax handling adds 0.5% and recurring subscription payments add 0.7%. The Global bundle adds 2.8% to every transaction instead, and Teachable's own worked example lands at 5.7% + 30¢ per sale. US schools that connect their own Stripe account pay Teachable a 2% integration fee per transaction on top of Stripe's rate.
Take one month of forty $50 sales to US buyers, $2,000 gross, on monthly billing. Starter costs $39 for the plan, $150 in transaction fees and $70 in card processing: $259, about 13% of revenue. Builder costs $89 plus the same $70, or $159. The crossover comes early. Builder is $50 a month dearer than Starter on monthly billing, and 7.5% of sales reaches $50 at roughly $667 a month ($533 on annual billing, where the gap is $40). Past that, Starter is the expensive plan.
The payments switch did bring one real improvement. Teachable Payments pays out daily, about two business days after each sale, holds no reserve on earnings, and offers 37+ local payment methods to creators in 41 countries.
Free students now cost money
Students who buy through Teachable checkout are unlimited. Students who join any other way - a free lead-magnet course, a manual enrollment, an import from your old platform - are not. Each plan includes 100 of them, and the pricing page charges $0.50 a month for every one above that.
Run that against a common funnel. A free five-day mini-course that collects 2,000 sign-ups puts 1,900 students over the line, which reads as $950 a month at the pricing-page rate. The help centre's usage-fee table, updated in May 2026 for schools "on legacy usage limits", is gentler: Builder includes 1,000 active students at $0.10 a month for each extra one, but only 50 imported students before $1.00 a month each. So a creator migrating 3,000 existing buyers from another platform onto a legacy Builder plan would face close to $3,000 a month in imported-student fees.
Teachable says about 90% of creators never see a usage fee. The ones who do are exactly those who built a free-course funnel or moved an old list in, and one Trustpilot reviewer in August 2026 described the policy as "charging you for students that don't use their payment system." Keep free lead magnets in your email tool, and send only paying students through Teachable checkout.
AI tools
Course Starter drafts a curriculum, lesson content and a sales page from a short brief, on every plan. The Quiz Generator turns lesson material into quizzes in seconds. Both hand you a first draft to rewrite rather than something to publish, which still beats a blank editor.
The tool that saves real hours is transcription with automatic subtitles and translations in more than 70 languages. It is free only on Growth; Starter and Builder pay per use. Support chat also routes through an AI agent called Sunny before it reaches a person.
Support, and what leaving looks like
There is no course export. Teachable's help centre says it has no native feature to export "a course as a single unit", and that there "isn't a single 'export everything' option". Videos, PDFs and audio come out one file at a time from the curriculum editor, lesson text by copy and paste. Students and transactions do export as CSV, so your list is portable. An 80-lesson course is an afternoon of clicking. Keep master copies of every file outside Teachable from the first upload.
Support is email on every plan, real-time from Builder and priority from Growth, with hours of Monday to Friday, 10am to 8pm Eastern. Trustpilot showed a 3.3 TrustScore from 1,107 reviews when checked in October 2026, and slow replies are the recurring complaint: "A simple reply takes 2 days, then when you answer, it's another 2 days to get the next reply," one creator wrote in September 2026.
Teachable vs Thinkific, Kajabi and Podia
| Platform | Entry plan | Platform fee on entry plan | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Teachable Starter | $29/mo annual, $39 monthly | 7.5% | 5 products, 1 admin, 100 non-buying students |
| Thinkific Basic | $40/mo annual, $54 monthly | Check the pricing page | 30-day trial, no free plan |
| Kajabi Basic | $143/mo annual, $179 monthly | None; Kajabi Payments 2.9% + 30¢ | 5 products, 14-day trial |
| Podia Mover | $42/mo billed annually | 5% | 50 products; 0% on higher plans |
Podia Mover costs $13 a month more than Starter on annual billing but takes 2.5 points less per sale and allows ten times as many products, so it wins for a creator with a catalogue of small downloads. Our Podia review covers where it falls short. Kajabi is roughly double Builder's price and fits someone who wants marketing pages, funnels and courses on one bill. Thinkific sits between Starter and Builder on price and gives a 30-day trial instead of seven days.
Verdict
Buy Teachable on Builder if you sell paid courses or coaching, clear about $700 a month, work alone, and want a clean student experience with mobile apps and daily payouts. At $69 a month billed annually with no platform fee, it is fair value. Move to Growth only when you need a second editor, certificates or free subtitles.
Skip it if your growth plan depends on free courses or importing a large existing student list: the per-student charges can outrun the plan price. Podia handles that funnel more cheaply. Skip Starter entirely once sales pass a few hundred dollars a month, because 7.5% is the steepest platform fee among these four. And if you want sales funnels and course hosting under one roof and can afford $143 a month, Kajabi is the better fit.