Kajabi's bundled email vs Thinkific + Kit: what the bundle is worth at each list size

Last updated: September 30, 2026

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links to Kajabi, Thinkific and Kit. If you sign up through one of them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It does not change what you pay, and it does not change the arithmetic on this page. Every review states how close we got to the product. Learn more.

How well we know this tool: Not hands-on — published pricing only — every figure here is computed from the three vendors' own pricing pages and help articles. We opened Kajabi and Thinkific trial accounts on August 27, 2026 and used them into September, and saw Kajabi's Basic plan limits on its subscription screen, but no email was sent through any of the three and we have no Kit account. Kit's prices at five list sizes, from 1,000 to 25,000 subscribers, were captured from its pricing page by a person on September 14, 2026. The Thinkific Basic features on this page come from the feature table on Thinkific's pricing page, read by machine on September 28, 2026 and not yet checked by a person. What this means.

You are about to launch a first course, and the choice is between Kajabi Basic, which has email inside its price, and a cheaper course platform with an email tool you pay for separately. The bundle is worth whatever the separate tool would have cost you — and for a list of 1,000 people, the email tool in this comparison costs $0.

Update, September 30, 2026. This page said we could not tell which Thinkific plans the pricing page's “Email Automation” row belongs to, and that we did not hold Thinkific Basic's limits. We have since read that page's feature table cell by cell (read by machine on September 28, 2026 and not yet checked by a person). The row is marked on Basic, Start, Grow and Plus, so Basic includes it. The section on it below says so, and the Basic limits we now hold are listed there. No price or table on this page changed: the tables still buy Kit for all email on the Thinkific side, because the row does not say what Thinkific's email automation reaches, and we have not sent an email with it.

Update, September 14, 2026. Kit's prices by list size have been added from Kit's pricing page, which a person captured at five list sizes, from 1,000 to 25,000 subscribers, on both monthly and yearly billing. Before this update the page priced Kit's paid plan only at 1,000 subscribers and, on monthly billing, at one more size taken from an example in Kit's billing help. With the new prices in, the two-tool route comes out the more expensive one at 25,000 subscribers, if Kajabi's 25,000-contact limit includes a list of exactly that size: $6.83 a month more than Kajabi Growth on annual billing. We also changed what this page says about our commissions. It had put Thinkific's at $12, which is 30% of the monthly equivalent of annual billing; it had described Kit's as 50% of the plan price; and it had said the route the arithmetic points at is the one that pays us least. None of that rests on terms we have confirmed, so that section now lists the terms without dollar amounts.

The short answer

Two rows in the feature table on Kajabi's pricing page, one under each of two section headings, carry the whole argument. The three figures in each row are Basic, Growth and Pro, in that order:

Marketing Emails Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited

Contacts 2,500 25,000 100,000

So Kajabi Basic, at $143 a month on annual billing, lets you send as many marketing emails as you like to at most 2,500 contacts. The other route is Thinkific Basic at $40 a month plus Kit's Free plan, and Kit's help article prices that plan like this:

The Free plan costs $0 per month for as long as you stay under 10,000 subscribers.

Kit's pricing page states the same limit as “Free—up to 10,000 subscribers”, and the same help article also lists “Up to 10,000 email subscribers”. “Up to” includes 10,000 and “under” does not. The rows below use “up to”; if Kit enforces “under”, the 10,000 row is the first one that needs a paid Kit plan, which puts the two-tool route at $155.83 a month there against $199 for Kajabi Growth.

Which makes the two-tool route $40 a month — the Thinkific plan and nothing else — up to 10,000 subscribers. At a list of 1,000 that is $103 a month less than Kajabi Basic, or $1,236 a year, and it carries 10,000 subscribers instead of 2,500 contacts. Past 10,000 the Kit plan is no longer free, and at 25,000 subscribers the order flips on our reading of Kajabi's contact limit; the first table below has the figures.

One assumption holds this whole page up: Kajabi counts contacts and Kit counts subscribers, and we are treating them as the same unit. If your Kajabi contact list would be much larger than your email list — buyers who never subscribed, for instance — the plan you need on the Kajabi side moves up sooner than this arithmetic says. Every price below is the monthly figure on annual billing, except in the one table introduced as monthly billing.

What each route costs at your list size

The Kajabi side changes because of the contact cap, not because of the email volume. The two-tool side is the Thinkific price for as long as Kit's Free plan covers the list, and takes on a paid Kit plan once it does not:

Annual billing on both sides. The "Thinkific Basic + Kit plan you need" column is Thinkific Basic at $40 plus Kit's Free plan at $0 up to 10,000 subscribers, and plus Kit Creator's yearly price divided by twelve above that. The "Costs more" column names the side that costs more: Kajabi, or the Kit route (Thinkific plus Kit).

Read the "Costs more" column as the price of the bundle at that list size, for as long as it says Kajabi. It is $103 a month while Kajabi Basic still fits, and it widens to $159 at 3,000 contacts, because by then Kajabi Growth is the plan you need and the Kit side has not moved.

At 25,000 the order flips. With Kit's pricing page set to “For 25,000 email subscribers”, the Free card reads “Up to 10,000 subscribers only”, so a list that size needs Kit Creator. Kit's Creator card at that size, on yearly billing, reads “$1,990 billed yearly—Save $398 per year”, which is $165.83 a month. Add Thinkific Basic and the two-tool route is $205.83 a month against $199 for Kajabi Growth: the Kit route costs $6.83 a month more, or $82 a year. That comparison reads Kajabi Growth's limit of 25,000 contacts as including a list of exactly 25,000. Kajabi's pricing page, in the text we captured, gives the number without an “up to” or an “under”. One contact more and the Kajabi plan you need is Pro at $399 a month, and Kit's price above 25,000 is not in our data.

We captured Kit's prices at 10,000 and at 25,000 subscribers and at no list size between them, so where between those two the routes change places is not something this page can tell you.

What Kit's Free plan leaves out

The Free plan is built around growing your list. These features live on the Creator and Creator Pro plans:

• Visual automations and the automation template library
• Email sequences
• Rules and RSS campaigns
• Kit MCP
• Paid apps in the Kit App Store. Free apps are still available to you
• Smart Recommendations
• Earning from Paid Recommendations

The first two items are the ones that decide this comparison for a course launch. If your plan is a welcome sequence, or a five-email sequence that sells the course on a schedule, you need at least Kit's Creator plan at every list size, and the two-tool route stops being $40 a month. Here it is at each list size we captured, against the Kajabi plan whose contact limit covers the same list, on annual billing:

And on monthly billing, on both sides:

Both tables are the cost of one month. Kit's help puts its yearly deal as “Our annual plans offer 12 months for the price of 10.” On monthly billing, its pricing page puts “Billed monthly (Pay yearly, save 17%)” under each paid price.

Every Kit price in these tables comes from Kit's pricing page as a person captured it on September 14, 2026, at each list size, once with monthly billing and once with yearly. That page is the source for every Kit price by list size on this page, and Kit's help sends you to the same place: “Pricing scales with your subscriber count. To see the exact price for your subscriber tier, visit the Kit pricing page.” The same prices, with Creator Pro beside them, are laid out in our Kit pricing by subscriber count page.

The annual table divides the yearly price by twelve rather than using the monthly figure the yearly card shows, because the card rounds up: at 1,000 subscribers it shows $33 for $390 a year, which is $32.50 a month. Kit's help table gives the same monthly prices at 1,000 subscribers, under the row “Starting price (up to 1,000 subscribers)”: “$39 / month” for Creator and “$79 / month” for Creator Pro.

On annual billing the two-tool route is cheaper at every list size here up to 10,000 — by $70.50 a month at 1,000 and by $43.17 at 10,000 — and at 25,000 it is $6.83 a month more than Kajabi Growth, on the same reading of Kajabi's contact limit. On monthly billing it is $4 a month more at 25,000.

What else is inside the Kajabi price

Email is not the only thing the bundle covers, and the same feature table gives the rest of the limits that we have recorded:

Annual billing. These are the limits we have in our data set, not a full feature list.

Those are the figures we hold, so those are the ones we compare. If a bundle is worth paying for, it is worth it for the rows in this table plus the parts of Kajabi we have not priced, and this page is not the place to settle that.

The other side of the comparison has limits of its own. These are the rows we hold for Thinkific Basic ($40 a month on annual billing) from the feature table on its pricing page, read by machine on September 28, 2026 and not yet checked by a person:

• Current students: 10,000 — “Unique students who currently have unexpired access to at least one course on your site.”
• Published courses: Unlimited
• Course video bandwidth: 100 GB/mo
• Administrators: 1
• Communities: 1, with 5 spaces
• Paid memberships: not on Basic; the table marks them from Start
• Email automation: marked

That last row is the one that bears on this page. Here it is as the pricing page words it:

Email Automation Manage email automation with customizable, ready-made templates and pre-built sequences.

The table marks it on Basic, Start, Grow and Plus, Basic included. What the row does not say is who those emails go to, how many people they can reach, or whether they do what Kit's help puts behind Kit's paid plan in the list above. Other lines on the same page are about sales: the site menu describes Email Automation as “Drive and recapture sales with automated emails”, and the Basic card lists “Abandoned-cart emails” — “Recover sales automatically when students bail at checkout”. The card is about people who reached checkout, and neither line says it emails a list of people who have not started a purchase. The row is one sentence and a check mark, and we have not sent an email through Thinkific. So the tables above still buy Kit for all email on the Thinkific side, and the automation tables price Kit Creator at every list size. If Thinkific's own automation runs the sequence you plan, the rows of those two tables up to 10,000 subscribers — 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 and 10,000 — price a Kit plan you may not need, and the two-tool route there comes to $40 a month on annual billing, or $54 on monthly billing: Thinkific Basic and Kit's Free plan, on the “up to” reading of Kit's free limit. Above 10,000 the list needs a paid Kit plan whichever tool sends the sequence, unless Thinkific's email replaces Kit altogether, and nothing we hold lets us price that. Try the sequence you plan in a Thinkific trial before you pay for Kit Creator.

Who this is wrong for

• You want one login and one bill. The two-tool route is two subscriptions, two support queues and one integration between them that you keep working. We have not put a price on that, and you should not let us: the hours are yours, and you know what they are worth better than a fee table does.
• You are going to use the rest of what Kajabi bundles. Its funnels and its community sit in the same price, and none of that is in the arithmetic here. A bundle you use half of is a different purchase from a bundle you use a tenth of.
• You plan to sell a membership. Thinkific's feature table does not mark paid memberships on Basic; it marks them from Start, at $82 a month on annual billing. This page prices Basic and does not compare memberships.
• Your list is heading past 10,000 subscribers. Kit's help article is direct about the Free plan: “You'll need to upgrade to a paid plan to keep sending. Everything you've built stays exactly where it is, and automations, sequences, and the rest of the paid features unlock as soon as you upgrade.” Past that line the two-tool route carries a Kit Creator price, and at 25,000 subscribers it is $6.83 a month more than Kajabi Growth, or $82 a year, if Kajabi's limit includes a list of exactly 25,000. If you expect to get there, compare the two routes at the size you expect to reach, not the size you start at.
• Your list will pass 2,500 contacts inside a year on Kajabi Basic. The plan jump is the real cost of the cap, not the email: Basic to Growth is $56 a month, or $672 a year, and it buys you 22,500 more contacts. If you expect to cross that line, compare Growth at $199 against the two-tool route from the start rather than budgeting for Basic and moving later.
• You are choosing a course platform, not an email plan. The fee arithmetic for the platforms themselves is in our course platform comparison, and it does not always point the same way this page does. Kajabi's own plans, fees and tax are on Kajabi pricing.

What this does not tell you

• Whether Kajabi's email tooling is better or worse than Kit's. Not one email was sent through either of them for this page. Deliverability, the editor, the automation builder and the reporting are all outside what a price comparison can reach.
• Thinkific Basic's limits beyond the rows listed above. Those are the rows this page uses, not the whole feature table, and the limits on an entry plan are the kind of thing that decides a launch. Read the rest of the table on Thinkific's pricing page before the price decides anything.
• What Thinkific's email automation can do. We have the row and its check marks, not the tool.
• Kit's prices at list sizes we did not capture. We captured five list sizes: 1,000, 3,000, 5,000, 10,000 and 25,000 subscribers. Prices between those, and above 25,000, are not in our data.
• The integration between Thinkific and Kit. We have not connected one, so we cannot tell you what syncs, how fast, or what breaks when a refund happens.
• Payment processing and transaction fees. Those belong to the platform comparison linked above, and they are the same on both sides of this page.

Check it yourself

Kajabi: pricing page, including the feature table quoted at the top — read September 14, 2026 for the limits, and the plan prices checked September 23, 2026. The two figures that matter here, 2,500 contacts and unlimited marketing emails, were also on the subscription screen of a Kajabi Basic trial account on September 6, 2026. Thinkific: pricing page, prices checked September 23, 2026; the feature table rows, including “Email Automation”, read by machine on September 28, 2026 and not yet checked by a person. Kit: pricing page and the help article on its Free plan, both read September 14, 2026. Kit's help articles Creator plan vs Creator Pro plan and Billing at Kit, also quoted above, were read by machine only. Kit's prices at the five list sizes come from that same pricing page, captured by a person on September 14, 2026 at each size on both monthly and yearly billing. We keep those captures; the Kit pricing page linked here is where to check them.

The arithmetic is one line: the Kajabi figure is the annual-billing price of the cheapest plan whose contact limit covers your list, reading each limit as including its own number, and the two-tool figure is Thinkific Basic plus Kit's Free plan up to 10,000 subscribers, or plus Kit Creator's yearly price divided by twelve at each captured list size above that. For a list between two captured sizes, this page has no Kit price. Nothing else is in it.

Who pays us, and why that did not change the tables

Kajabi, Thinkific and Kit all pay us a commission, which makes this page worth reading twice. The terms we hold:

• Kajabi: 30%, for as long as that customer keeps paying
• Thinkific: 30%, once, on the first payment only
• Kit: 50%, for 12 months; after that, only if we refer at least 10 paying customers a year, which we have not done so far

We have not confirmed what each percentage is charged on, or how each program counts a yearly charge, so we do not put a dollar figure on which route pays us more at a given list size. On the terms as we read them, it can be either. We left the tables as they are, because the tables are subtraction and you can redo them.

Caveats on our own terms, from the same records: for Thinkific, their dashboard shows a single payout and their approval email calls the same commission recurring; until they tell us which is right, we assume the smaller one; for Kit, the figure is from the offer heading in the partner dashboard; we have not yet opened the offer details; for Kajabi, this comes from their application page and we have not been able to re-check it inside the dashboard.

If you are going to sign up anyway

• Start a Kajabi trial — affiliate link
• Start a Thinkific trial — affiliate link
• Open a Kit account — affiliate link

Using one costs you nothing extra and changes no number on this page. Kit's Free plan costs $0 up to 10,000 subscribers, and if that is where the arithmetic sends you, that is where it sends you.

Course platform prices checked September 23, 2026 against each vendor's public pricing page; Thinkific's feature table read by machine on September 28, 2026 and not yet checked by a person; Kajabi's plan limits, Kit's prices and Kit's help articles captured September 14, 2026; Kit's prices at five list sizes captured from its pricing page by a person on September 14, 2026. 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.