Course platform fee calculator
Last updated: September 23, 2026
Every platform publishes a monthly price. None of them show you what is left after the transaction fee and the card processing fee are taken out. Put your numbers in and see the difference.
| Plan | You keep | % | Total cost | Plan cost | Platform fee | Card processing |
|---|
Want the worked example instead? We ran every plan here at $2,000, $5,000 and $10,000 a month in Kajabi vs Teachable vs Thinkific: what you actually keep.
The two percentages that get confused
Pricing pages use the words "transaction fee" for two completely different things, and the difference is worth hundreds of dollars a month.
| Platform fee | The platform's own cut, charged on top of your plan and on top of card processing. Only 2 of the 11 plans here have one: Teachable Starter at 7.5% and Podia Mover at 5%. Every other plan in this table is 0%. |
|---|---|
| Card processing | Stripe's cut — about 2.9% + $0.30 per sale. You pay this everywhere, on every platform, always. Kajabi and Thinkific print this number on their pricing pages under the heading "transaction fees", which is where the confusion starts. It is not an extra platform cut. |
So Teachable Starter costs you 7.5% + 2.9% + $0.30 per sale, while Thinkific Basic costs you 2.9% + $0.30. Both pages say "transaction fee". Only one of them means the platform is taking a second bite.
There is a third case, and two of these platforms charge it: bringing your own payment provider instead of the platform's own. That adds a percentage on top of what your provider already takes.
- Kajabi adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth and 0.5% on Pro. Kajabi's is charged only to creators in the 25 countries where Kajabi Payments is available; Kajabi says it is not charged where Kajabi Payments is unavailable, and PayPalis exempt.
- Thinkific adds 5% on Basic, 2% on Start and 1% on Grow. Thinkific's is charged only to creators in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the EU, and only on the first $1,000,000 of sales in a calendar year.
Tick the box above to see what it does to your own numbers.
Check every number yourself
Every price in this table was read off the vendor's own pricing page on September 23, 2026, with the monthly and annual toggle checked separately, by a person. Not scraped, not copied from another comparison site. All eleven plans:
- Kajabi — https://kajabi.com/pricing
- Thinkific — https://www.thinkific.com/pricing/
- Teachable — https://teachable.com/pricing
- Podia — https://www.podia.com/pricing
One caution about reading these pages yourself: all four toggle between monthly and annual pricing with JavaScript, and the two states show different numbers. Check both. Podia in particular drops from $49 to $42 on Mover and $99 to $84 on Shaker when you switch the toggle.
What this does not include
- Email marketing, if the plan does not bundle it
- Affiliate payouts, refunds and chargebacks
- International card fees, which run about 1% higher
- Taxes and VAT/GST handling
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.