Kajabi Makes You Build a Course Platform. Coaches Just Need a Sales Page.
Kajabi sells what it calls "the operating system for human expertise." The pricing reflects that ambition. As of this week, Starter is $71 a month on annual billing, Basic is $143, Growth is $199, Pro is $399. There is no free tier. There is a 50%-off-for-12-months promo running on every plan.
Most coaches do not need an operating system for human expertise. Most coaches need one sales page in front of a Stripe link. The rest is overhead they are paying for whether they use it or not.
What Kajabi assumes about you
Kajabi is built around the assumption that a coaching business is a software platform. You will host courses. You will run a community. You will send broadcast email. You will publish landing pages. You will manage members. You will publish a podcast. You will ship a mobile app. You will operate, in effect, your own SaaS.
For about ten percent of coaches, that assumption is correct. They run six-figure cohorts, they have a thousand-person community, they ship weekly content, they need every one of those modules wired together.
For the other ninety percent, the assumption is the bill. You signed up because you needed somewhere to send a webinar opt-in this Friday. You are now paying $143 a month for a community you have not opened, a podcast tab you have not used, a mobile app nobody has downloaded, and a course module that holds three videos.
That is the all-in-one tax. You pay it whether the modules earn or not.
The actual stack most coaches use
Look at what gets touched in the average week for a coach pulling $5K to $30K a month:
- A sales page. Maybe two.
- A Stripe checkout link.
- An email broadcast tool.
- A calendar link.
- A Zoom or Riverside link for the call itself.
That is the operating stack. Five things. None of them are a course platform. None of them are a community. None of them are a mobile app.
Kajabi Basic, on annual billing, is $143 a month for those five things bundled with twenty things you do not touch. Add the 50%-off-for-12-months promo and you are at roughly $72 for the first year, $143 forever after.
Now price the same five things as separate parts. A description-first publishing tool that ships sales pages in sixty seconds: $10 a month. Stripe Checkout: free, plus per-transaction fees you are paying anyway. An email tool you actually like: $20 to $50 a month at this scale. A calendar tool: free or $10. Zoom: $15.
Total: $55 to $85 a month for the operating stack. Roughly half of Kajabi Basic forever, with no twenty-thing bundle attached.
The specific failure scenario
Here is the moment Kajabi misfires for the ninety percent.
You decide on Tuesday to run a webinar this Saturday on a new offer. You log in to Kajabi to spin up an opt-in page. You hit "Pages." You pick a template. You start editing. The template assumes a course launch. You strip out the curriculum module. You strip out the bonus stack. You strip out the testimonials block because the testimonials are not for this offer yet. You wrestle the form into the right place. You publish. The page works. It took you an hour and a half.
You will run that exact same play again in two weeks. You will spend that exact same ninety minutes again.
The page itself is shaped like every other sales page on the internet. Headline, value, social proof, offer, button. The work to ship it is not creative work. It is editor-tax work. Kajabi charges you $143 a month for a workflow that taxes you ninety minutes per page.
A description-first tool charges you $10 a month for a workflow that taxes you sixty seconds per page. The page lands in the same place. The Stripe link works the same way. The webinar fills the same way.
Where Kajabi actually earns its price
Real cohort programs. Real communities. Real content libraries. Coaches running $50K-plus monthly programs with a real software footprint underneath them. The Pro tier at $399 is genuine value if you are running that operation.
For the operator running a $5K-to-$30K-month coaching business with a Stripe link and a calendar, Kajabi is the wrong shape. You are paying for a SaaS bill to run a non-SaaS business.
The simpler stack
Strip the bundle. Pay for what you touch. Send the saved $80 a month into ad spend, or into the course you are actually trying to build.
If you ship sales pages frequently, the highest-leverage line item to swap out is the page builder. That is where the editor tax is highest, and that is where description-first publishing has the cleanest math against an all-in-one. Ship your next sales page in ten minutes. Then ship the one after that in ten minutes. Then ask whether you still need the rest of the bundle.
You probably do not.
→ Try HTML Pub free. Five pages, no credit card. Ten dollars a month when you outgrow free.
About the author. Michael Sacca is the CEO of Leadpages and HTML Pub.