The short version. Gumroad charges nothing monthly and takes 10% plus 50 cents a sale, which makes it correct until you are selling regularly. Teachable is $29 a month billed annually and then takes 7.5%, which is the catch most people miss. Podia bundles everything for $42 a month and caps your email list at 100 people on that plan. Circle is $89 a month and is the answer only when the thing you are selling is access to other people. Kajabi starts at $143 a month billed annually on Basic and is not a place to find out whether anyone wants your course.
Every price and fee here came off the vendor’s own pricing page on 16 August 2026.
Turning an audience into revenue? Our directory keeps shortlists for founders who publish and reviews them on a schedule.
Read the limits, not the price
The monthly figure at the top of these pricing pages is the least interesting number on it. What decides your bill is a transaction fee you have to scroll for, or a cap on something you did not think of as a metered resource.
Three that catch people, all of them verified on the vendor’s own page:
- Teachable’s Starter plan takes 7.5% of every sale on top of the $29 a month.
- Podia’s Mover plan allows 100 email subscribers at $42 a month, and also charges 5% on sales.
- Kajabi’s Starter tier allows one product and 250 contacts, and its price is not listed on the pricing page at all.
Two of those limits are on your audience rather than your sales, which is a strange thing to meter on a platform sold to people building an audience. So we ranked on total cost at real sales volume, on what is capped rather than what is priced, and on whether you can start without committing money to an idea nobody has paid for yet.
1. Gumroad costs nothing until somebody buys
No monthly fee. 10% plus 50 cents per transaction on your own sales, and 30% on sales that come through the Discover marketplace. Verified 16 August 2026.
Most first products do not sell, and the useful property of Gumroad is that finding this out costs you nothing. You upload a file, you get a checkout link, you put it in a newsletter. If nobody buys, you are out an afternoon rather than a year of subscription.
The 10% is high compared to a flat monthly fee, and that is the correct trade at low volume. Selling a $50 product ten times a month costs you $55 in fees. The same ten sales on Teachable’s Builder plan cost $69 whether they happen or not.
The crossover is worth knowing precisely. At a $50 price point, roughly a dozen sales a month is where Gumroad’s cut passes Teachable Builder’s monthly fee. Below that, Gumroad wins on cost and wins much harder on risk.
What you do not get is a course experience. There is no drip, no completion tracking, no student progress. Gumroad sells files and access, competently, and stops there.
Who it is wrong for: structured courses where people need to move through modules in order, and anyone whose sales have become predictable. Above a few hundred dollars a month in revenue, that percentage stops being a bargain.
2. Teachable, if you read the fee on the plan you are buying
Starter is $39 a month, or $29 a month billed annually, with a 7.5% transaction fee. Builder is $89 a month, or $69 billed annually, with 0%. Growth is $189 a month, or $139 billed annually, with 0%. Custom is quoted. Verified 16 August 2026.
Teachable is a genuine course platform. Curriculum, drip, quizzes, completion, student management, and the mechanics that make a course feel like a course rather than a folder of videos.
The pricing needs care. Starter’s headline is $29 and its real cost is $29 plus 7.5% of everything you sell. Builder is $69 with nothing on top. The difference between the plans is $40 a month, so 7.5% of your sales passes $40 at around $533 a month in revenue. Above that, the cheaper plan is the expensive one.
That is not a trick, it is just badly signposted, and the number of people paying 7.5% on $2,000 a month to save $40 is not small.
Who it is wrong for: a single small digital product. You are buying course infrastructure you will not use, and Gumroad does the job for nothing until you are selling properly.
3. Podia does everything, and meters your list
Mover is $42 a month, or $504 a year, with 5% fees, 100 email subscribers, 50 products. Shaker is $84 a month, or $1,008 a year, with no fees, 500 email subscribers, 150 products. Earthquaker is $150 a month, or $1,800 a year, with no fees, 1,000 email subscribers, unlimited products. Payment processing of 2.9% plus 30 cents applies separately. Verified 16 August 2026.
The pitch is one tool instead of four: courses, downloads, a community, email and a website, all under one bill. For someone tired of stitching Gumroad to Kit to Circle, that has obvious appeal and the product is decent.
Then you reach the email subscriber limits and they are the story. One hundred subscribers on the $42 plan. Five hundred on the $84 plan. A thousand on the $150 plan. For a founder whose whole strategy is building an email list, those numbers are not a tier, they are a wall, and the free tier of every newsletter tool on the market beats all three.
So Podia is all-in-one on the condition that you do not lean on the email part, which is an awkward condition for an all-in-one. It ranks third because the course and storefront side is good and the bundling is real, not because the pricing makes sense.
Who it is wrong for: anyone with a list over a few hundred people, unless you are willing to keep email somewhere else and pay Podia for the rest.
4. Circle, when what you sell is the room
Professional is $89 a month with a 2% transaction fee, 3 admins and 10 moderators. Business is $199 a month with 1%, 5 admins and 15 moderators. Circle Plus is custom priced with 0.5% and unlimited seats. Verified 16 August 2026.
Circle is the best community product here by some distance, and community is a different business from selling a course. People pay monthly for access to each other, the churn maths are kinder, and the thing improves as more people join rather than degrading.
Eighty-nine dollars is a real commitment before anyone has joined, and that is the reason it sits fourth rather than higher. Communities also fail in a specific way that courses do not: an empty forum is worse than no forum, and no software fixes that. Do not buy this to find out whether people want a community. Run one badly in a group chat first.
The transaction fee is worth noting because it is easy to miss on a page dominated by the monthly price. Two percent on Professional, on top of the $89 and on top of Stripe.
Who it is wrong for: one-off products, and anyone who does not have the time to show up daily. A paid community is a job, not an asset.
5. Kajabi is for a business that already exists
Basic is $179 a month, or $143 a month billed annually, with 5 products and 2,500 contacts. Growth is $249 a month, or $199 billed annually, with 50 products and 25,000 contacts. Pro is $499 a month, or $399 billed annually. Starter allows 1 product and 250 contacts and its price is not listed on the pricing page. Kajabi Payments processing runs 2.9% plus 30 cents, and third party payment providers carry an extra 5% on Starter down to 0.5% on Pro. Verified 16 August 2026.
Kajabi is the most complete platform in this category and it is priced like it. Courses, funnels, email, a website, a community, payments and analytics in one place, built for people running a seven-figure education business who want one vendor and one support number.
For that business it is defensible. A hundred and forty-three dollars a month is nothing against six figures of course revenue, and consolidating five tools has real value once the operation is large enough for tool sprawl to cost you time.
For a founder with an audience and an idea, it is the wrong shape entirely. You are paying $1,716 a year to discover whether anyone wants what you are making, and the honest way to discover that costs $0 and takes a weekend.
The extra 5% on Starter for using an outside payment provider also deserves a mention, because it is the kind of clause that turns a cheap plan into an expensive one quietly.
Who it is wrong for: anyone who has not yet sold the thing. Come back when the revenue is real and the tool sprawl is annoying you.
Cases this list will not settle
Physical products. Different problem, different tools, and inventory changes everything about the decision.
Cohort programmes with live teaching. Scheduling, attendance and live sessions push you toward purpose-built cohort tools rather than any of these.
Anyone selling to enterprises. Procurement, invoicing and purchase orders are not what a creator checkout is for.
Anyone whose real problem is that nobody knows who they are. Every platform here converts an audience. None of them create one, and picking between them is a comfortable way to avoid the harder job.
Left off, and why
Thinkific. A reasonable competitor to Teachable. Its pricing page returned a 403 to us on 16 August 2026, so we have not ranked it on numbers we could not read.
Lemon Squeezy and Paddle. Merchant of record services that handle sales tax for you, which is worth real money once you sell internationally. A different category and a genuinely good reason to leave this one.
Stripe Payment Links. Almost free and completely unopinionated. If you can host the file yourself, this is the cheapest checkout there is.
Substack and Ghost paid subscriptions. If the product is really your writing, you may not need any of this. Charge for the newsletter instead.
Questions we get asked
What does selling a $50 product ten times a month actually cost?
About $55 on Gumroad, $29 plus $37.50 in fees on Teachable Starter, $69 on Teachable Builder, and $42 plus $25 on Podia Mover. Gumroad and Teachable Builder are close, and Gumroad is the safer bet because it costs nothing in the months you sell nothing.
When does Teachable Starter stop being cheaper than Builder?
At around $533 a month in sales, where the 7.5% fee matches the $40 monthly difference. Above that you are paying more to be on the cheaper plan.
Is Podia’s 100 subscriber limit real?
Yes, on the Mover plan at $42 a month, per its own pricing page. Shaker at $84 allows 500 and Earthquaker at $150 allows 1,000. If email is central to how you sell, keep your list elsewhere and treat Podia as a storefront.
Should I start on Gumroad and move later?
For a first product, yes, and it is the recommendation we make most often. Validate for nothing, move when the percentage starts to hurt, and accept that migrating a few hundred customers is a slightly annoying afternoon rather than a crisis.
Course platform or community platform?
A course sells information and people finish it or do not. A community sells access to other people and has to be hosted by you, indefinitely. If you are not going to show up every day, buy the course platform.
Do transaction fees stack with payment processing?
Yes, always. Stripe or PayPal takes its cut first, then the platform takes its own. On Podia Mover that is 5% plus 2.9% and 30 cents. On Circle Professional it is 2% plus processing. Budget for both.
Our maintained directory shortlists for founders who publish cover the rest of that path, from posting to capturing emails to getting paid.
Last reviewed: 16 August 2026. Every price and fee was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on that date. Thinkific is unranked because its pricing page returned a 403 to us. Kajabi does not publish a Starter price. We review this page quarterly.
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