Annual vs monthly course platform pricing: what the discount is actually worth
Last updated: September 23, 2026
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How well we know this tool: Not hands-on — published pricing only — every figure here comes from the published price lists. We opened trial accounts on Kajabi, Thinkific and Podia in August 2026, but nothing on this page was observed inside a product. What this means.
Every course platform in our data set charges less per month if you pay for a year up front. The saving is advertised per month, which is the small number; the charge lands as a year, which is the large one. So we worked out both totals for all 11 plans. The discount is real — 21.6% across the whole set — but it is a discount you only collect if you are still there in month 9.
The short answer
Kajabi Pro saves the most in cash: $1,200 a year. Teachable Growth cuts the deepest as a percentage, at 26.5% off. At the other end, Podia Mover takes only 14.3% off — $84 over a year, the thinnest discount here.
The catch is the same everywhere. Paying annually means paying the whole year now, and across these 11 plans the prepaid year costs the same as 8.8 to 10.3 months of monthly billing. Stop before that month and monthly billing was the cheaper decision, whatever the discount rate said.
How this is calculated
Two numbers per plan, both published: m, the month-to-month price, and a, the annual price expressed per month. Everything below comes from these three lines:
Cost of a year, monthly = m × 12
Cost of a year, prepaid = a × 12
Break-even month = (a × 12) ÷ m
Worked through on Kajabi Pro: $499 × 12 = $5,988 paid monthly, against $399 × 12 = $4,788 paid up front — a saving of $1,200, or 20.0%. The break-even is $4,788 ÷ $499 = 9.6 months.
The break-even is the number that decides this, and it is not the discount percentage. It is not "a year" either — it is the point in the year at which the money you already handed over stops being more than you would have paid by the month.
Every plan, ranked by what a year of annual billing saves
| Plan | You save | Discount | Monthly | Annual, per month | A year, monthly | A year, prepaid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kajabi Pro | $1,200 | 20.0% | $499 | $399 | $5,988 | $4,788 |
| Thinkific Grow | $660 | 25.1% | $219 | $164 | $2,628 | $1,968 |
| Kajabi Growth | $600 | 20.1% | $249 | $199 | $2,988 | $2,388 |
| Teachable Growth | $600 | 26.5% | $189 | $139 | $2,268 | $1,668 |
| Kajabi Basic | $432 | 20.1% | $179 | $143 | $2,148 | $1,716 |
| Thinkific Start | $324 | 24.8% | $109 | $82 | $1,308 | $984 |
| Teachable Builder | $240 | 22.5% | $89 | $69 | $1,068 | $828 |
| Podia Shaker | $180 | 15.2% | $99 | $84 | $1,188 | $1,008 |
| Thinkific Basic | $168 | 25.9% | $54 | $40 | $648 | $480 |
| Teachable Starter | $120 | 25.6% | $39 | $29 | $468 | $348 |
| Podia Mover | $84 | 14.3% | $49 | $42 | $588 | $504 |
Highlighted: the largest saving in cash (Kajabi Pro) and the largest discount rate (Teachable Growth).
The two rankings disagree, and that is worth noticing before you use a discount percentage to choose anything. Teachable Growth takes 26.5% off but hands you $600; Kajabi Pro takes only 20.0% off and hands you $1,200. A percentage off an expensive plan is a bigger number than a percentage off a cheap one, which is a statement about the sticker price and not about the deal.
Which platforms discount hardest
Adding up a full year of every plan a platform publishes, then comparing the two totals:
| Platform | Saving | Discount | Range across plans | Plans priced | A year, monthly | A year, prepaid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teachable | $960 | 25.2% | 22.5%–26.5% | 3 | $3,804 | $2,844 |
| Thinkific | $1,152 | 25.1% | 24.8%–25.9% | 3 | $4,584 | $3,432 |
| Kajabi | $2,232 | 20.1% | 20.0%–20.1% | 3 | $11,124 | $8,892 |
| Podia | $264 | 14.9% | 14.3%–15.2% | 2 | $1,776 | $1,512 |
Teachable and Thinkific sit at the top on roughly 25.2% and 25.1%. Podia is the outlier in the other direction at 14.9% — its annual billing asks for the same commitment as everyone else's and gives back the least for it.
One caveat, and it is ours rather than the vendor's: Podia publishes one plan more than the 2 counted here. Its annual price is on the pricing page; its month-to-month price is not, in any form we could read. A discount needs both numbers, so that plan is absent from this data set, from the tables above and from that Podia average. If it discounts differently, the Podia row moves.
The other side: how long you have to stay
Annual billing is a bet that you will still be running this business in a year. Here is what the bet costs if you lose it. "If you stop after 3 months" assumes the prepaid year is not refunded — check that assumption against the vendor's terms, because our data set holds prices, not refund policies.
| Plan | Break-even month | Extra paid if you stop then | Months free, equivalent | Paid up front | Monthly for 3 months |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Teachable Growth | 8.8 | $1,101 | 3.2 | $1,668 | $567 |
| Thinkific Basic | 8.9 | $318 | 3.1 | $480 | $162 |
| Teachable Starter | 8.9 | $231 | 3.1 | $348 | $117 |
| Thinkific Grow | 9.0 | $1,311 | 3.0 | $1,968 | $657 |
| Thinkific Start | 9.0 | $657 | 3.0 | $984 | $327 |
| Teachable Builder | 9.3 | $561 | 2.7 | $828 | $267 |
| Kajabi Basic | 9.6 | $1,179 | 2.4 | $1,716 | $537 |
| Kajabi Growth | 9.6 | $1,641 | 2.4 | $2,388 | $747 |
| Kajabi Pro | 9.6 | $3,291 | 2.4 | $4,788 | $1,497 |
| Podia Shaker | 10.2 | $711 | 1.8 | $1,008 | $297 |
| Podia Mover | 10.3 | $357 | 1.7 | $504 | $147 |
Read the "Extra paid if you stop then" column as the price of being wrong about yourself. On Kajabi Pro it is $3,291 — 2.2 times what those 3 months would have cost you month to month. If you are 3 months into your first course and still not sure it will sell, the monthly plan is not the expensive option. On the lightest commitment in the set, Teachable Starter, monthly billing lets you find that out for $117 instead of $348.
The "months free, equivalent" column is the same discount expressed the way it usually gets marketed. Across these 11 plans it runs from 1.7 months to 3.2 months, so the familiar shorthand of two months free understates 9 of them and overstates the other 2, all of them Podia's.
How much the billing cycle is worth next to the other decisions
Put the discount beside the fees it sits next to. At $5,000 a month across 25 sales at $200 each, with card processing at 2.7%–2.9% plus $0.30 a sale depending on the plan:
- Switching from monthly to annual billing improves your take-home by at most $100 a month, on Kajabi Pro.
- Switching between plans moves it by up to $364 a month — the spread between the plan that leaves you the most at this revenue and the plan that leaves you the least.
At this revenue level, choosing the right plan is worth about 3.6 times as much as choosing the right billing cycle. Annual billing is the smaller lever, and it is the one that costs you flexibility. Pull the other one first.
The sharpest version of that: 2 plans here take a cut of every sale on top of the plan fee. On Teachable Starter, the transaction fee of 7.5% eats the entire year's annual-billing discount by the time you have sold $1,600 worth of courses — about 8 sales at $200. The discount is a one-off; the transaction fee is forever.
Who this is not for
- Anyone who has not sold a course yet. The break-even runs to 10.3 months at the far end. If you do not already know that people buy what you are making, you are prepaying for an answer you do not have. Pay monthly until you do.
- Anyone whose cash is tight this month. The discount is stated per month; the charge is not. Kajabi Pro leaves your account at $4,788 in one go. A saving you had to borrow to collect is not a saving.
- Anyone still comparing platforms. Annual billing is a bet on the platform as much as on yourself, and migrating a course library mid-year does not refund the unused months. If you might switch, the monthly premium is buying you the option to.
- Anyone selling seasonally or launching once a year. Twelve months of platform fees against two months of sales is a different calculation from the one on this page, and pausing on a monthly plan may beat any discount here.
- Anyone on a plan that takes a percentage of sales. Fix that first. The billing cycle is the smaller of the two decisions, by the arithmetic above.
What this does not tell you
This is arithmetic on published prices and nothing more. We have not subscribed to any of these platforms — the box at the top of this page says so — and the following are all outside what the price lists show:
- Whether a prepaid year is refundable, pro-rated on cancellation, or neither. This decides how much the "Extra paid if you stop then" column really costs you, and it is not a price, so it is not in our data set.
- Whether the annual rate is locked at renewal or re-quoted at whatever the price is then.
- Promotional or first-year pricing that is not on the public pricing page.
- Sales tax or VAT applied to a single large charge rather than twelve small ones.
- Foreign transaction fees your card may add to one big charge in USD.
- One Podia plan whose monthly price we could not verify, and which is therefore absent from every table here. We would rather show a gap than a guess.
- Feature and usage limits per plan, which are the reason to pick a tier in the first place.
Check the numbers yourself
Both prices for every plan are on these 4 pages. Each one toggles between monthly and annual pricing with JavaScript, and the two states show different numbers — the "Monthly" and "Annual, per month" columns in our first table are the two states of that toggle. Check both, because reading only one of them is how we got these numbers wrong the first time.
- Kajabi — https://kajabi.com/pricing
- Thinkific — https://www.thinkific.com/pricing/
- Teachable — https://teachable.com/pricing
- Podia — https://www.podia.com/pricing
Our course platform fee calculator runs the same arithmetic against your own revenue and sales count, with a switch for monthly or annual billing, so you can see the gap on your numbers rather than ours.
For Kajabi's three plans in more detail, including what its help says about annual renewals, see Kajabi pricing.
Prices checked September 23, 2026 against each vendor's public pricing page. If a number here is out of date, tell us at hello@feesandfigures.com and we will fix it and note the change at the top of this article.