October 19, 2026
Kajabi's pitch has always been simple: instead of stitching together a course host, a website builder, an email platform, a payment processor, and an affiliate tool, you get all five under one login and one invoice. For a lot of creators, that's genuinely appealing -- fewer integrations to break, one support line to call, one place to look for your numbers. The catch is in how Kajabi prices that bundle. Plans are tiered, and the tiers aren't really about features so much as they're about volume: how many contacts you can hold in your email list, how many products or courses you can publish, and how many admin seats or websites you get. Lower tiers reportedly cap contacts somewhere in the low thousands and products in the single digits; the top tier stretches to around 100,000 contacts and unlimited products, per Schoolmaker's 2026 pricing breakdown. Affiliate marketing tools and the more advanced automations are gated behind the mid and upper tiers too -- you don't just pay more as you grow, you pay more to unlock capability you may need at all. Kajabi restructured its pricing in January 2026, and sources genuinely disagree on what the tiers are now called and what they cost -- whether an entry-level plan still exists, where the exact dollar lines sit. Don't take a number you read anywhere (including this post) as gospel. Go check [kajabi.com/pricing](https://kajabi.com/pricing) directly before you make a decision.
Here's a mechanic worth sitting with: Kajabi Payments, its built-in processor, is reportedly fee-free. But if you'd rather run payments through your own Stripe account -- maybe you already have Stripe set up elsewhere, or you just don't want your course revenue routed through a platform-owned processor -- Kajabi adds its own surcharge on top of whatever Stripe already charges. That surcharge reportedly scales from around 2% on the lowest tier down to about 0.5% on the top tier. Think about what that structure is actually optimizing for. It's not just monetizing a feature -- it's nudging you toward Kajabi's own payment rails, and if you resist, it quietly taxes you more the smaller your plan is. A creator just starting out, with the least revenue to spare, pays the highest surcharge rate for the privilege of using their own payment processor. That's a detail that doesn't show up until you're already several months into building your course library.
Kajabi isn't a poorly reviewed product. Capterra's aggregated reviews put it around 4.4 out of 5 overall, which is solid company in this category. But look at the sub-scores and a pattern shows up fast: value for money is consistently the weakest one, sitting closer to 3.7 out of 5, and cost is the single most common complaint -- not from people who hate the product, but from people who otherwise like it and still feel like they're overpaying. Secondary complaints cluster around a steep learning curve, visual customization that lags behind dedicated website builders, and support that can feel generic once you're past onboarding. That's a pretty clear signal. People aren't leaving Kajabi because the course delivery is bad -- they're grumbling about it because the bill keeps growing with their contact list and their product catalog, regardless of whether they're using the rest of the suite.
Most solo coaches and consultants don't run affiliate programs. Most don't need five admin seats across multiple websites. Most have an email list in the low thousands, not the tens of thousands, and most publish a handful of courses or cohorts, not fifty. What they actually need, day to day, is narrower: a client portal where students log in and see their stuff, a gated membership area that unlocks content as people pay or progress, and a checkout flow that takes their money without drama. That's maybe 20% of what Kajabi ships. The other 80% -- the generic page builder, the full email marketing suite, the affiliate infrastructure, the multi-site admin tooling -- sits there unused, but it's not optional. It's bundled in, and the tier you need for your contact count or product count is the tier you pay for, marketing suite included. This is the same pattern we've written about with per-seat SaaS pricing more broadly: a platform prices itself around your growth, not your usage, because growth is easier to meter than actual feature use. Building the specific thing you need in ViibeStack flips that. A client portal, a gated content area, and a simple checkout connected to your own Stripe account is a real, owned app -- see our rundown on building a customer self-service portal for what that looks like in practice. There's no contact ceiling forcing an upgrade, no product cap, and no built-in surcharge layered on top of your processor because the processor is just yours.
None of this makes Kajabi a bad product. It's mature, it's full-featured, and a business that's actually running email campaigns, managing an affiliate program, and juggling multiple admins across several course sites gets real value out of having all of that under one roof. If you're deep in the marketing side -- sequences, funnels, affiliates, A/B testing landing pages -- the bundle earns its keep and unbundling it yourself would mean managing four or five separate tools and integrations, which is its own kind of overhead. This is a fit question, not a verdict. Our own buy vs. build vs. ViibeStack breakdown covers that tradeoff in more general terms if you're still weighing it. The honest split is: heavy marketing-suite users who touch most of what Kajabi offers are probably in the right place. Everyone else -- the coach who mostly needs to deliver content and collect payment -- is paying a flat subscription for four tools they don't use to get the one they do, and that subscription grows precisely as their list and catalog grow.
Before your next Kajabi renewal, pull up your actual usage: how many email campaigns did you send last month, have you ever touched the affiliate dashboard, do you need more than one admin seat. Then ask the real question -- are you paying for features you use, or for features Kajabi bundled together because unbundling them would be harder for Kajabi to price? If it's the second one, it's worth looking at what a purpose-built portal in ViibeStack would actually cost you to run instead. Check ViibeStack's pricing and see how it compares against whatever tier Kajabi quotes you.
Sources