Podia vs Kajabi in 2026: The Email Allowance Nobody Prices

Podia Shaker is $84 a month with no transaction fee. Kajabi Growth is $199 a month billed annually. On plan price that is a difference of $115 a month, or $1,380 a year, and it is the reason most people leave Kajabi for Podia.

Then you look at what each includes for email, and the comparison stops being simple. Podia Email is free up to 500 active subscribers on Shaker, after which it is billed separately by subscriber count. Kajabi Growth includes 25,000 contacts.

If your list is eight thousand people, one of those platforms is charging you for seven and a half thousand of them and the other is not.

A course and membership platform is software that hosts your lessons, gates access, takes payment, and runs the marketing around all of it.

Podia and Kajabi are the two most-compared products in that category, and they bundle very different amounts of email into the headline price.

Full disclosure: Framekit is our own product and it is not a like-for-like alternative to either of these. We host no courses and our store rejects recurring prices, so memberships are impossible on our platform. We say where that rules us out in a marked section near the end, and we have kept the comparison itself between the two products.

How We Compared Podia and Kajabi

We priced one creator on both rather than comparing feature grids, because the feature grids in this category converged years ago and the differences that remain are all about allowances.

The profile: a creator selling a $199 course and running a small paid membership, turning over $6,000 a month, with an email list of 8,000 active subscribers. The list size is the variable doing the work here, and we say so up front so you can substitute your own.

Every price and allowance below was read on the vendor's own pricing page or help centre in August 2026, on a fresh account with no promotional code, and is linked at the point of use. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, we say that rather than estimating it.

Verified means we read it in the company's own documentation and are reporting it with a link. Measured means we ran the flow ourselves. Judgements about how each product feels to use are labelled as ours.

There are no star ratings in this comparison. The large review sites refused our automated checks while we were researching, and for a decision that turns on published allowances, a link you can open is better evidence than a score you cannot check.

In one lineone creator with a $199 course, a small membership, $6,000 a month in sales and an 8,000-person list, priced across every tier of both platforms.

The Two Ladders

Read the last two columns together and the two companies' pricing philosophies become obvious. Podia charges less and meters your audience. Kajabi charges more and meters your payment processor.

The Email Allowance

In one linePodia's plan price excludes email above a small free allowance, and Kajabi's includes a large one, which means the cheaper platform on paper is not necessarily the cheaper platform on your card.

This is the finding that reorganised our comparison, and it is not on Podia's pricing page.

Podia's help centre states that all plans come with Podia Email free up to a number of subscribers that depends on your plan: 100 on Mover, 500 on Shaker, and 1,000 on Earthquaker.

Above that, your email plan is billed based on the number of active subscribers in your account, rather than on a monthly send count.

Kajabi's pricing page includes contacts in the plan: 250 on Starter, 2,500 on Basic, 25,000 on Growth, and 100,000 on Pro, with email marketing included at every tier.

For our creator with 8,000 subscribers, that is the whole comparison. Kajabi Growth at $199 a month covers the list entirely. Podia Shaker at $84 a month covers 500 of them and bills the remaining 7,500 separately.

We were not able to verify Podia's email pricing tiers, only the free allowances and the fact that billing is by active subscriber count.

That is a real gap in this article and we would rather flag it than fill it with a number from somewhere else.

What we can tell you is the shape: the $84 figure is a plan price, not a bill, and the difference between it and Kajabi Growth's $199 narrows by however much Podia charges for 7,500 subscribers.

One useful detail from the same documentationonly actively subscribed people count. Contacts marked as not subscribed or unconfirmed do not count toward the limit.

So a list with a long tail of dead addresses costs less on Podia after a clean-up than before one, which is a genuine and unusual incentive to maintain your list properly.

The Transaction Fee Runs the Other Way

In one linePodia charges 5 percent on its entry plan and nothing above it, while Kajabi charges nothing through its own payments and 0.5 to 5 percent if you use your own processor.

Podia's fee. The pricing page lists Mover at $42 a month or $504 a year with a 5 percent transaction fee still applied, Shaker at $84 a month or $1,008 a year with no fee, and Earthquaker at $150 a month or $1,800 a year.

There is no permanent free plan, only a 30-day trial with full access and no card required.

At our creator's $6,000 a month, Mover's 5 percent is $300, so Mover costs $342 against Shaker's $84. The crossover is $840 a month in sales, which is the $42 price gap divided by 5 percent. Anyone above that on Mover is paying Podia for the privilege of paying Podia more.

Kajabi's fee. There is no platform transaction fee when you use Kajabi Payments, which processes at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on Basic, 2.8 percent on Growth, and 2.7 percent on Pro.

If you route payments through a third-party gateway instead, Kajabi charges 5 percent on Starter, 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Growth, and 0.5 percent on Pro.

That third-party fee is a soft form of lock-in worth pricing before you commit.

If you have an existing Stripe account with history and integrations you would rather keep, staying on it costs 1 percent on Growth, which at $6,000 a month is $60 a month or $720 a year, purely for using the processor you already had.

What Our Creator Actually Pays

This is the same creator priced across every tier of both platforms, at $6,000 a month in sales with an 8,000-person list, before card processing. The email column is the one that makes the plan prices misleading on their own.

Kajabi Basic is not a row you can choose here, because 8,000 subscribers exceeds its 2,500 contacts.

That is the same mechanism as Podia's allowance, expressed as a hard tier boundary rather than a separate bill, and it is arguably the more honest of the two designs because you find out before you are charged.

The practical instructionopen Podia's email pricing for your own subscriber count, add it to $84, and compare that to $199. If your list is under a thousand people, Podia wins comfortably and this whole section is academic.

If your list is five figures, do the arithmetic before you migrate, because migrating twice is the expensive outcome.

Where Podia Wins

In one linePodia costs less at the plan level, asks you to configure far less before anything is live, and its 30-day trial with no card required is the most generous evaluation window anywhere in this category.

Price, for small lists. Shaker at $84 a month against Kajabi Growth at $199 is a real saving of $1,380 a year for a creator whose list fits inside the free allowance, and plenty of working creators sell $6,000 a month to an audience of a few hundred people.

The trial. Thirty days with full access and no payment details required. In a category of annual commitments and painful migrations, being able to rebuild your entire course and decide afterwards is worth more than most features.

Simplicity. Three plans, one obvious upgrade path, and a product that does not assume you have staff. Kajabi's interface is built for a business with a marketing function, and it shows in how many things there are to configure before anything is live.

The consolidated bill. Courses, downloads, coaching, community, a website, and email in one subscription. For a solo creator, fewer tools is a genuine benefit rather than a feature-list entry.

The gotchaMover at $42 with a 5 percent fee is the tier most people start on and the wrong one above $840 a month in sales. Set a reminder rather than trusting yourself to notice.

Where Kajabi Wins

In one lineKajabi bundles an email list large enough to matter, gives you seats for the people who work with you, and is built on the assumption that this is a business with staff rather than one person and a laptop.

Contacts included. 2,500 on Basic and 25,000 on Growth, with email marketing at every tier. If you email a real list, this is the single largest difference between the two products and it is the reason Kajabi's price is not as high as it looks.

Admin users. Basic gives 2, Growth gives 11, Pro gives 26. Podia's plans are not organised around seats, so if you have a virtual assistant, an editor, and a support person, Kajabi's structure fits and Podia's does not.

Multiple websites. Pro carries 3 sites. Anyone running two brands from one business otherwise buys two subscriptions.

Depth of marketing tooling. Funnels, offers, automations, and access groups are more capable than Podia's equivalents. Whether you need them is a separate question, and most solo creators do not.

The gotchathe third-party gateway fee. Route payments outside Kajabi Payments and you pay 2 percent on Basic or 1 percent on Growth, which at $6,000 a month is $120 or $60 every month for using your own processor.

Migration Costs More Than the Saving in Year One

In one linethe subscription difference is the visible cost of switching and the automations, funnels, and existing members are the invisible ones, and they usually exceed a year of savings.

What moves. Video, lesson content, product records, and customer lists all export and import in some form. Expect to re-upload video rather than transfer it.

What does not. Email automations, tags, and behavioural triggers are configuration rather than content, and nothing exports them.

Funnels and landing pages rebuild in a day or two, but their conversion history and split-test results do not follow, so you restart the learning.

What costs you customers. Existing members on active subscriptions must be recreated on the new processor, which in practice means asking people who already pay you to re-enter a card. Some will not.

Plan the announcement, give notice, and expect a churn spike in the switching month.

The arithmetic for our creatormoving from Kajabi Growth at $199 to Podia Shaker at $84 saves $1,380 a year before Podia's email billing for 7,500 subscribers is added. Against that, budget three to five working days of rebuilding and a bad month of churn.

Over two years the move is probably right if the email cost is small. Over one year, with an eight-thousand-person list, it is genuinely unclear, and that is an honest answer rather than a hedge.

Where Framekit Fits, and Where It Does Not

We build a website builder rather than a course platform, so on the job these two products actually do we are not an alternative at any price. Rather than leave that implicit or bury it, here is our position stated once, starting with what rules us out.

Framekit is an AI website builder for creative work, with a portfolio, client galleries, and a digital store on one domain, at $0 free with a 5 percent sale fee, $9 Starter, $19 Pro at 3 percent, and $39 Business at 0 percent.

Where we are simply not an optionno course player, no lesson progress, no drip scheduling, and our store rejects recurring prices outright, so memberships and payment plans cannot be built on us at all. Both products in this comparison do all of that.

The one reader we are relevant tosomeone comparing Podia and Kajabi for a product that is actually a set of files, with no pacing and no membership.

If removing the lesson player would not change what your buyer receives, you are shopping in the wrong category and a store on your own site costs a fraction of either.

For everyone else, the right answer is one of the two products above, and our guides to Kajabi alternatives and Podia alternatives cover the wider field.

How to Choose

In one linethe size of your email list decides this comparison more reliably than any feature difference, so start there and work down until one of these questions describes you.

1. Is your list under about 500 people? Podia Shaker at $84 a month. The email allowance covers you and the saving against Kajabi is real.
2. Is your list in the thousands? Price Podia's email billing for your subscriber count and add it to $84 before comparing with Kajabi Growth at $199. Do not assume.
3. Is your list above 2,500 and are you considering Kajabi Basic? You cannot; Basic includes 2,500 contacts. Growth at $199 is the entry point for you.
4. Are you selling under $840 a month? Podia Mover at $42 with its 5 percent fee is cheaper than Shaker. Above that, move.
5. Do you have staff who need their own logins? Kajabi. Basic gives 2 seats and Growth gives 11; Podia is not organised around seats.
6. Do you want to keep your existing Stripe account? Price Kajabi's third-party gateway fee first: 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Growth.
7. Would removing the video player leave your product unchanged? Neither. You are buying a classroom you will not use.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Podia cheaper than Kajabi?

On plan price, yes: Shaker is $84 a month against Kajabi Growth at $199 billed annually. But Podia includes only 500 free email subscribers on Shaker and bills separately above that, while Kajabi Growth includes 25,000 contacts.

For a creator with a list in the thousands, the real bills are much closer than the plan prices suggest.

How many email subscribers does Podia include?

Podia's help centre states that Podia Email is free up to 100 active subscribers on Mover, 500 on Shaker, and 1,000 on Earthquaker. Above those allowances, email is billed based on your number of active subscribers.

Contacts marked as not subscribed or unconfirmed do not count toward the limit.

How many contacts does Kajabi include?

250 on Starter, 2,500 on Basic, 25,000 on Growth, and 100,000 on Pro, with email marketing included at every tier. This is the main reason Kajabi's higher plan prices are not as expensive as they first appear for anyone running a real list.

Does Podia charge a transaction fee?

Yes, 5 percent on the Mover plan at $42 a month. Shaker at $84 and Earthquaker at $150 charge no transaction fee. The crossover from Mover to Shaker is $840 a month in sales, so anyone above that on Mover is overpaying.

Does Kajabi charge a transaction fee?

Not when you use Kajabi Payments, which processes at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on Basic, falling to 2.7 percent on Pro. If you use a third-party payment gateway instead, Kajabi charges 5 percent on Starter, 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Growth, and 0.5 percent on Pro.

Which is better for memberships?

Both support recurring billing, and Kajabi's tooling around offers, access groups, and funnels is more complete. Podia's membership is simpler and cheaper, and for a solo creator running one community that simplicity is usually an advantage rather than a limitation.

Does Podia have a free plan?

No, only a 30-day trial with full access to all features and no payment details required. That is the most generous evaluation window in this category, and it means you can rebuild your entire business inside Podia before deciding.

How long does it take to move from Kajabi to Podia?

Realistically three to five working days, plus a churn spike in the switching month.

Video and lesson content move, but email automations, tags, funnels, and conversion history do not, and existing subscription members have to be migrated to a new processor, which means asking paying customers to re-enter a card.

Which one should a first-time course creator choose?

Podia, on the 30-day trial, because the risk of finding out it is wrong for you is zero and the price is half. Revisit the decision when your email list passes a few hundred people, which is the point at which Podia's allowance and Kajabi's included contacts start to matter.

Do I need Kajabi Pro?

Almost certainly not. Pro at $399 billed annually buys unlimited products, 100,000 contacts, 26 admin users, and 3 websites. If you are not running multiple brands with a team, Growth at $199 covers what a serious solo course business needs.

Final Verdict

If your email list is small, buy Podia Shaker at $84 a month. It costs less than half of Kajabi Growth, the 30-day trial makes the decision reversible, and for a solo creator the simpler product is usually the better one.

If your email list is large, do not assume Podia is cheaper. Its plan price excludes email above 500 subscribers on Shaker, and Kajabi Growth at $199 includes 25,000 contacts.

Price Podia's email for your own subscriber count and then compare, because this is the single most commonly skipped step in this comparison and it is the one that decides it.

And if you are on Podia Mover selling more than $840 a month, move to Shaker today. That one is not a judgement call.

Where Framekit is not an option. We do not host courses, track lesson progress, or bill recurring subscriptions, so neither of these has a Framekit-shaped alternative.

We are only relevant if your course turned out to be a bundle of files, in which case a store on your own site does the job for a fraction of either price.

Related readingTeachable vs Kajabi, the best Kajabi alternatives, and the best tools to sell online courses.

For the other pairing educators run most often, see Thinkific vs Teachable, where the two platforms charge for opposite things.

For the cheaper end of the same decision, Payhip vs Podia prices Podia against a platform with a genuinely free plan.

For Podia against the community-first option instead, see Circle vs Podia.