Teachable Pricing in 2026: The Real Cost for a Growing Coach
There's a tab pinned in your browser that says "Teachable - Billing." You opened it last week to check one thing, saw a number that was higher than you remembered, and closed it again before it could ruin your afternoon.
That number is why you're here. Teachable pricing looks tidy on the sales page: a few plans, a few dollar amounts, a reassuring "most popular" badge. The real cost shows up later, in the transaction fees and the add-ons and the second tool you bought because the first one didn't do the thing.
What does Teachable pricing actually cost?
Teachable's paid plans are Starter, Builder, and Growth, plus custom plans priced through their sales team. Billed annually, Starter is $29 a month, Builder is $69 a month, and Growth is $139 a month. Pay monthly and those become $39, $89, and $189.
There's no free plan any more. Teachable's help centre says it stopped offering one. What you get instead is a 7-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can test it, but you can't run on it for free the way you once could.
Here's the sentence that matters. The price you see is the price to host and sell courses. It is not the price to run a coaching business, and those are two different jobs.
Teachable was built as a course platform. If your whole model is "record a course, put it behind a login, sell seats," it does that job well and it has done it for years. The trouble starts when you grow past that single job, which most coaches do fast.
No free plan, and the limits on Starter
Starter lets you load up to 5 products and take payments, with 1 admin seat. That feels like enough until you look at what's missing. Starter has no student emails at all, so you can't message the people who bought from you without a separate tool.
Then there's the transaction fee. Starter charges a 7.5% fee on every single sale, even when you connect your own Stripe account. That cut is the hidden part. On a $500 program, a 7.5% skim is money you never see as a line item on your card. You just notice the payout is smaller than you expected.
There's one more cost that catches people off guard. From 3 September 2026, new schools pay $0.50 a month for each free or imported student above 100. Build a sizeable free list inside Teachable and that quiet per-head charge starts adding up before anyone has bought a thing.
Where transaction fees stack up
Here is the pattern that catches growing coaches. The 7.5% fee only lives on Starter. Move up to Builder or Growth and it drops to zero, so the plans are built to nudge you upward the moment you start selling anything real.
That means the "affordable" entry plan is only affordable if you barely sell anything. And if you're barely selling, you don't need the platform yet. You are not choosing between a cheap plan and an expensive plan. You are choosing between paying the platform monthly or paying it per sale.
Run the math on your own numbers. Sell 20 spots in a $400 program on Starter and that's $8,000 in sales. The 7.5% fee alone takes $600, before Stripe's own processing touches a cent. Over a year of launches, that fee costs far more than upgrading to Builder would have.
This is the thing nobody frames clearly on the pricing page. One of these costs just hides better than the other.
Payment processing on top of the platform fee
Transaction fees are not the same as payment processing fees. Teachable Payments charges 2.9% plus $0.30 on a US card, 4.4% plus $0.30 on international cards, another 0.5% when tax is charged, and 0.7% on recurring payments. The Stripe pricing page lays out comparable processing rates plainly, and those apply no matter which platform you use.
The point is that Starter's 7.5% sits on top of all of that, not instead of it. On Starter you're paying the processor and the platform for the same sale. It's worth doing this math honestly, the same way you would for the real cost of business software for solopreneurs across your whole stack.
The add-ons Teachable pricing doesn't include
Now the part that turns an $89 plan into a much bigger monthly bill. Teachable prices the course. Your business needs more than a course, and each missing piece is a separate bill.
Look at what a growing coach actually runs, and what Teachable doesn't cover:
- Email marketing and automation. Even on Builder you can only send one-off emails to students, with no sequences and no automations, so most people add a dedicated email tool.
- A real CRM to track leads and conversations, which a course platform does not give you.
- Landing pages and sales funnels. There's no funnel builder in Teachable.
- Booking and scheduling for your calls. Coaching products have no built-in booking calendar, so you paste a Calendly-style link.
- A community space if you run a group program. Teachable's community feature has been closed to new schools since August 2026.
- Invoicing and contracts for your one-to-one work.
Each of those is a subscription. A standalone email platform, a scheduler, a funnel builder, a community app: add them up and the course platform is suddenly the smallest line on your statement. This is the exact sprawl that makes you dread opening the billing tab.
Put real numbers on it. A minimal coach stack of Teachable Builder at $89, Calendly Standard at $12, and Kit's Creator plan at roughly $33 once you hit 1,000 subscribers comes to about $134 a month before any payment fees. And that stack still has no CRM and no funnels.
It also creates work that has nothing to do with coaching. When your email tool doesn't talk to your course platform, you're the integration. You export a list here, paste it there, and hope the tags survive the trip. If that sounds familiar, it's worth reading how certain business software saves admin time while other tools just add more, because disconnected tools are the ones that add more.
Is Teachable worth it as you grow?
For a pure course creator who only sells courses and nothing else, Teachable is a reasonable home and the pricing is fair for that single job. Say that plainly. If your business is one course and a sales page, you may not need to change anything.
But that is rarely the coach reading this. You have discovery calls, a list you email, a group you want to run, clients you invoice, follow-ups you keep forgetting. The course is one room in a much bigger house, and Teachable only ever rented you the one room.
So the real Teachable pricing question isn't "which plan." It's "what else am I paying for to make up the difference, and how many hours a month do I spend stitching those tools together." That total, the plan, the transaction fees, the add-ons, the lost time, is the number that belongs in your billing tab, and it's usually two or three times the headline figure.
More competition every year means more pressure to run a tighter business, not a messier one. Paying four or five vendors to do what should be one job is the opposite of tight.
What to do instead of stacking tools
This is where the math points somewhere different. If you're already paying for a course platform plus email plus a CRM plus a scheduler plus a funnel tool, the question stops being "which course platform" and becomes "why are these five separate bills."
ESC Hub is built for that second question. It's an all-in-one platform that holds the pieces a coaching business actually uses, email, CRM, funnels and landing pages, bookings, automations, course hosting, and community, in one place, on one login. It's $97 a month and includes 20,000 emails, then $1 per 1,000 after that. No 7.5% skim on each sale. No exporting a list at midnight because two apps won't speak.
The real difference isn't the feature list, because plenty of platforms claim the same list. It's that you're not left alone to wire it together. ESC Hub comes with daily coaching calls, 24/7 live chat, and a people-first team that actually answers. Setting it up isn't another project you carry by yourself. When something breaks or you're not sure how to build the thing, a person helps you, which is the opposite of the "good luck, here's a help doc" treatment most tools hand you.
If you want to compare the two head to head before you decide anything, there's an honest breakdown of ESC Hub vs Teachable and why one tool can replace six that goes further than this pricing overview.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Teachable charge transaction fees?
Yes, on the Starter plan. Starter takes a 7.5% cut on every sale, even when you use your own Stripe, on top of normal payment processing. That fee drops to zero only on Builder and Growth.
How much does Teachable really cost per month?
Billed annually, Starter is $29, Builder is $69, and Growth is $139 a month, but that's course hosting only. Add the email tool, CRM, scheduler, and funnel builder most coaches need, and the true monthly cost is often two to three times the plan price.
Does Teachable have a free plan?
No. Teachable no longer offers a free plan. You get a 7-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee, but ongoing use requires a paid plan.
Is Teachable good for coaches specifically?
It's good for selling courses. It's thin for everything else a coach runs. There's no booking calendar for coaching products, no funnel builder, no sequences or automations in email, and community is closed to new schools, which is why most coaches end up bolting on extra tools and extra bills.
What's a cheaper alternative to Teachable's full stack?
An all-in-one platform like ESC Hub replaces the course tool and the four or five add-ons around it with a single $97 a month subscription, which usually costs less than the pieces combined once you count transaction fees.
The number that actually matters
Teachable pricing is only honest if you count all of it: the plan, the 7.5% per-sale fee on Starter, the per-student charge above 100, and the stack of tools you bought to fill the gaps. Add those together and the course platform was never the cheap option it looked like. Before you decide anything, run your real total through the Savings Simulator to see what you're actually paying across every tool, the full number, not the headline one, and then weigh it against running the whole business in one place with a team that helps you set it up.
