Platform fee comparison

#1. Why this needed to be re-verified from the source

Searching for course-platform pricing surfaces dozens of nominally independent "2026 pricing breakdown" articles, nearly all of them affiliate-monetized comparison sites with a financial interest in steering you toward whichever platform pays the best referral commission. Several repeated figures that turned out to be stale by a tier or two once checked against the vendor's own live page. Every number in this lesson was fetched directly from the named vendor's own pricing page in August 2026. [Established] for each platform's own stated fee and price — these are the vendors' own disclosed terms, not a third party's summary of them — with the standard caveat that a vendor can change pricing at any time, so re-verify before committing to an annual plan.

One structural fact applies to every platform below and to the payment processor underneath all of them: on top of whatever platform fee is listed, Stripe's standard US card rate (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction) or a materially similar PayPal rate applies to essentially every plan on every platform. That processing fee is not a platform's cut — it's the cost of moving money at all — but it's easy to forget when a platform advertises "0% transaction fees" and a seller reads that as free.

#2. The five platforms, plan by plan

Teachable — Starter, $39/mo ($29/mo billed annually), 7.5% platform transaction fee on top of Stripe processing. Builder, $89/mo ($69/mo annually), 0% platform fee. Growth, $189/mo ($139/mo annually), 0%. A Custom/Enterprise tier above that, also 0%. Teachable removed its free plan in 2025. [Established] — teachable.com/pricing, fetched directly.

Kajabi — three tiers, no plan-independent "platform transaction fee" line item the way Teachable has one; instead Kajabi's own payment processing rate steps down as you pay more. Basic, $179/mo ($143/mo annually): 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction through Kajabi Payments. Growth, $249/mo ($199/mo annually): 2.8% + $0.30. Pro, $499/mo ($399/mo annually): 2.7% + $0.30. Using a third-party processor other than Kajabi Payments or PayPal adds a further 2% / 1% / 0.5% fee by tier on top of whatever that processor separately charges. Kajabi markets this as "no revenue sharing," which is accurate in the sense that there's no separate cut layered on top of the processing rate the way Teachable's Starter plan has — but Kajabi's own quoted rate is the processing rate, so "no transaction fee" oversells it slightly if a reader assumes that means free-of-Kajabi-cost. [Established] — kajabi.com/pricing, fetched directly.

Podia — Mover, $42/mo ($33/mo billed annually): 5% transaction fee on top of Stripe/PayPal processing. Shaker, $84/mo ($75/mo annually): 0%. Earthquaker, $150/mo ($125/mo annually): 0%. [Established] — podia.com/pricing, fetched directly.

Skool — the simplest and most bifurcated fee structure of the five. Hobby, $9/mo: 10% platform fee on every member payment the community processes. Pro, $99/mo: 2.9% platform fee. There is no middle tier. At roughly $1,270/month in community revenue, the $90/month gap between plans is offset by the fee-percentage difference, so any community doing meaningful recurring revenue is materially better off on Pro. [Established] — skool.com/pricing, fetched directly. Skool is structured around communities-with-courses-attached rather than a standalone course product, which matters for the comparison below.

Circle — Professional, $89/mo (annual billing): 2% transaction fee. Business, $199/mo: 1%. Circle Plus, custom pricing: 0.5%. Circle, like Skool, is a community-platform-first product with courses as one feature among several (livestreams, member profiles, paywalled spaces), not a course-first tool. [Established] — circle.so/pricing, fetched directly.

#3. What actually differs between these, beyond the sticker price

Reading the fee schedules side by side, three real, load-bearing differences fall out — not "which is cheapest," which depends entirely on volume, but which mechanism each one bets on:

• Teachable, Podia, and Kajabi are course-commerce platforms first — checkout, drip-release, certificates, and course-specific analytics are native and mature. Their fee structures reward committing to a higher tier once revenue justifies it: every one of them has a "free at the top tier, taxed at the bottom tier" shape, which is a real incentive to underprice your entry commitment and pay the transaction tax while you're small, or overcommit to a tier you can't yet fill.
• Circle and Skool are community platforms with courses bolted on. Their comparatively low, flat percentage fees (0.5–2.9%) reflect that community/membership recurring revenue, not one-time course sales, is the core product they're priced around — a meaningful distinction if what you're actually selling is an ongoing cohort or membership rather than a one-time course purchase, which is the mechanism the pricing lesson returns to.
• None of these five is meaningfully cheaper than the others at low volume, and the ranking flips at different revenue thresholds for each pair. The right way to compare them for a specific business is to run your own expected monthly revenue through each fee schedule above, not to trust a single "X is the cheapest platform" headline — which is exactly the kind of claim the affiliate-comparison sites this lesson deliberately avoided quoting exist to produce.

#4. What this doesn't cover

This lesson deliberately doesn't rank these five against each other on course-building UX, community features, email/marketing tooling depth, or customer support quality — those are real differentiators, but they're subjective and change faster than fee schedules do, and every comparison-site "winner" in this research turned out to correlate suspiciously well with which platform paid that site's affiliate commission. The next lesson covers the self-hosted and lightweight alternatives to all five, where the fee math changes shape entirely.