So here's the answer first, and the working underneath.
For most of what a course platform does, we aren't better. Kajabi is bigger and connects to far more things than we do. Skool costs less than we do and is better at making a room feel busy. Teachable and Thinkific have both been at this for longer than we have. We're small and new next to all four, and anyone comparing track records should hear that from us rather than work it out later.
We're better at one thing. Teaching a modest number of people something over several weeks, and knowing where each of them has got to. If that's the job you're buying for, the price difference is large enough to be faintly silly. If it isn't, one of the others is your answer, and I'd rather you found that out on this page than three weeks into moving your courses across.
The part of a pricing page nobody reads
You've probably already built the grid. Courses, video, community, email, checkout, coupons, a page builder. Every column says yes to everything, an evening disappears, and you end up exactly where you started. That isn't you comparing badly. Feature lists stopped telling these products apart years ago, because each of them copied the others until the lists converged.
Something on those pages does still tell them apart, and it isn't the ticks. It's the small numbers sitting next to them.
Whatever a platform counts is the thing it was built to grow.
Kajabi, from their own pricing page
On 17 August 2026, with the annual option selected, their page showed three plans: Basic at $143 a month, Growth at $199 and Pro at $399. Billed monthly rather than yearly, Basic was $179. Basic came with 5 products, 2,500 contacts, 1 website, 1 community and 2 admin users. Their own comparison table listed a fee of 2% for money taken through a payment provider other than theirs, falling to 0.5% on the top plan. Prices move, so go and look before you decide anything.
Now read the meters rather than the prices. Products. Contacts. Websites. Admin users. Those are the units of a business that emails a large list and sells to people who have never met it, and that business is real and Kajabi serves it properly. If you run funnels to several thousand strangers, it's the better tool and it isn't close.
What goes wrong for a practitioner is that one of those meters fills up by itself. Contacts accumulate. Every enquiry, every free download, every person who came to a single workshop in 2023 and was never seen again stays in the count, and the count is what the bill is worked out from. The number that decides your price climbs on its own, in months when nothing sold and months when something did, while the actual teaching is eleven people on a six-week course. Justine Lette, who runs Hypnosis New Zealand, was paying over $100 a month elsewhere and using a fraction of it. We've put the year-by-year sums on a page of their own.
Skool costs less than we do, and that is simply true
Their page on the same day listed two plans. Hobby at $9 a month, with a 10% transaction fee. Pro at $99, with 2.9%.
Nine dollars is a fifth of what we charge. If a lively group is the whole of what you want, that is a great deal of group for the money, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't.
The meter there is the sale itself, which changes the arithmetic completely once you're selling to the group rather than only gathering one. That sum is worked through row by row on the Skool page and I'm not going to repeat it here.
The two I won't put a number on
Teachable and Thinkific.
Both are proper course platforms, both older than us, both entirely capable of holding your course and taking money for it. I haven't got a dated copy of either pricing page in front of me, so I'm not going to quote one. A price I half-remember is a price I'm inventing, and you'd catch me at it inside a minute. Open them yourself and apply the same test: what does each one count?
An opinion that helps nobody, least of all me: the annual-or-monthly toggle that opens on annual is the worst small invention in software pricing. You see the lower figure, feel briefly better about the whole business, and only then find out it's the price of promising them a year. Everybody does it. Airlines do it with the bag, my gym does it with the joining fee, and if we had two prices to toggle between we'd almost certainly do it too. I'd like to think we wouldn't. I'm not confident.
The only thing we meter
Active students. Up to a thousand of them.
That's the entire list. Courses, products and communities are uncapped. There's no count of contacts, no count of websites, no count of admin logins, and no percentage taken off what you sell. Hosted video arrives with a terabyte of bandwidth a month and runs at $10 a terabyte beyond that, which is the only other figure anywhere.
Metering students has a bias built into it, and the bias is deliberate: the number that sets your bill only moves when somebody is learning from you.
What "built for teaching" looks like on screen
A lesson can be a video, a written page, an audio file, a PDF, a quiz, or an assignment that a student hands in and you mark by hand with feedback written underneath. Lessons can be released week by week instead of dropping the whole course on somebody the day they pay. Emails go out on their own as people move through. Certificates when they finish.
None of that is clever. It's the ordinary equipment of teaching, and it's what tends to be thin on a product that was designed around selling.
Ninety seconds to a first draft
The wall was never the software. It's the blank page at eight on a Sunday evening, when you've got three free hours and no idea which end to start.
Describe the course in a sentence. Say how many sections, how many lessons each, and who it's for.
Ninety seconds or so later there's a course on the screen with its sections and lessons already in place. It won't sound like you. It'll sound like a competent stranger who read your subject once. Fixing that takes an evening. Writing the whole thing from nothing takes three Sundays and usually doesn't happen.
Four reasons to pick one of them instead
- If most of your income comes from selling to people who've never heard of
you, and volume email to a cold list is how you do it, the bigger platforms meter the right thing for that work and we don't.
- If you want a busy public feed with strangers joining daily, a
community-first product will beat us, and Skool in particular will.
- If this has to be wired into a stack of other tools you already run, all four
of them connect to far more than we do.
- You can point your own domain at your portal. What we do not offer is full
white-label hosting, where every address a student sees is yours.
What you pay, and what you don't
$47 a month. One plan, no tiers to decode.
That covers unlimited courses and products, up to 1,000 active students, hosted video with 1TB of bandwidth a month, AI course generation, the AI assistant with 1,500 messages a month, unlimited communities and one to one chat. We take 0% of your sales. You bring your own Stripe account, Stripe charges its own 2.9% plus 30 cents, and nothing else comes to us. There's a 30-day money-back guarantee.
No second price sits behind a bigger plan, and nothing new appears in the month a course sells well.
The only way I know to settle it
There's a 30-day free trial and it doesn't ask for a card.
Move nothing. Take one course you already teach, put it in, add the three people who message you most, and leave whatever you're paying for now running exactly as it is. Two weeks later you'll be holding two bills and one clear opinion about which of these products wants you to teach and which one wants you to sell.