Basic, Growth, or Pro? The 2026 Ultimate Guide to Kajabi Plans for Content Creators!

The Creator Economy is no longer a niche experiment. It's a legitimate industry, and the infrastructure that supports it has matured considerably over the last few years. Platforms have consolidated, pricing has evolved, and the all-in-one model — where your website, your courses, your email list, your community, and your checkout process all live under one roof — has proven itself as the most practical approach for the overwhelming majority of independent creators.

After working inside Kajabi for years across courses, coaching programs, and multi-brand ventures, I've found that Kajabi is the platform that has most consistently delivered on that all-in-one promise. It's where serious knowledge creators — educators, coaches, authors, consultants, podcasters, community builders — go when they're ready to stop patching together a dozen separate tools and start running a coherent, professional business. And for 2026, Kajabi's plan structure has been refined to reflect three genuinely distinct stages of a creator's journey: Basic, Growth, and Pro.

This guide exists to answer one question honestly: which of those three plans is right for you, right now? Not for who you intend to become in two years, but for where your business actually stands today. Choosing correctly from the beginning saves money, saves frustration, and keeps you focused on building rather than managing platform decisions you didn't need to make yet.

One thing before we dive in. Kajabi offers a 30-day free trial — not the 14-day trial you may have seen referenced in older articles or comparisons. Thirty days is a meaningful amount of time. It's enough to build your website, set up a product, run your first email sequence, and genuinely feel whether the platform suits how you work. I'll mention it throughout this guide because it changes the calculus on when to start. The honest answer is almost always: start now, use the trial seriously, and let the platform tell you whether it fits.

Quick Plan Summary (If You Want the Short Answer)

If you don't want to read the full breakdown, here's the practical answer.

• Basic is for early-stage creators building their first real product, growing their first 1,000–2,500 subscribers, and validating that people will pay for what they know.
• Growth is for validated businesses — creators with proven revenue, expanding product catalogs, growing email lists, and a need for automation and affiliate-driven expansion.
• Pro is for operators managing multiple brands, large audiences, or building infrastructure that includes separate websites, communities, and a branded mobile experience.

Choose the plan that reflects where your business is today — not where you imagine it might be someday.

How Kajabi Structures Its Pricing in 2026

All three plans are available on monthly billing or annual billing. Annual billing is where the real savings live — and the savings are substantial enough to factor into your decision if you're planning to use Kajabi beyond a few months.

On the Basic plan, annual billing saves you $431 over the year compared to paying monthly. On Growth, the saving is $600. On Pro, it's $1,200. These aren't token discounts designed to look impressive in marketing copy — they represent months of usage that annual billing essentially gives you for free. If you've completed your 30-day trial and decided Kajabi is the right platform, committing annually from day one makes genuine financial sense.

All three plans also include 0% transaction fees when you use Kajabi Payments as your payment processor. This is one of the most creator-friendly policies in the industry, and it's worth dwelling on for a moment. Many platforms that appear cheaper on the surface take a percentage of every sale you make — 2%, 3%, sometimes more. On a business generating $50,000 a year, a 3% platform fee is $1,500 leaving your account annually that you never see. With Kajabi Payments, that doesn't happen. Standard payment processing fees apply, as they do with any payment system, but Kajabi itself takes nothing from your revenue.

If you choose to use a third-party payment provider — Stripe, PayPal, or another processor you may already have in place — there are additional Kajabi fees: 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth, and 0.5% on Pro. Whether to factor this into your plan choice depends on whether switching your payment processor is practical for your situation, but it's worth knowing before you decide.

Why Not Just Use Cheaper Tools?

On paper, Kajabi is rarely the cheapest option.

If your only metric is monthly subscription cost, you can assemble a stack of separate tools — a website builder, a course host, an email platform, a checkout system, a community platform, an automation tool — and pay less at the beginning. Many creators do exactly that.

But serious operators don't optimise for sticker price. They optimise for system drag.

When you stack tools, you are not just paying for subscriptions. You are paying in integration complexity. You are paying in cognitive load. You are paying in time spent troubleshooting connections instead of building products.

Zapier (or similar automation bridges) becomes the glue holding everything together. And while Zapier is powerful, it also introduces fragility. If one connection breaks, your checkout might stop tagging buyers correctly. If a webhook fails, your email sequence doesn't trigger. If an API key expires, your funnel quietly stops working. None of these failures announce themselves loudly — they simply leak revenue and trust until you notice.

Payment fees compound in a similar way. A platform that takes 2% or 3% of every sale may look inexpensive at $49 per month. But at $100,000 in annual revenue, that percentage becomes $2,000–$3,000 leaving your business every year. Over time, the "cheaper" stack is not cheaper at all.

And then there is time leakage — the invisible cost few creators calculate. Time spent managing plugins. Time spent updating integrations. Time spent learning multiple dashboards. Time spent explaining your tech stack to a virtual assistant. Time spent fixing problems that exist only because your tools were never designed to live under one roof.

An all-in-one platform is not about convenience. It is about structural coherence.

Serious operators reduce system drag. They choose architecture that supports scale before scale demands it. Kajabi's pricing reflects consolidation — not just features, but simplification.

If you are experimenting casually, stacking tools can make sense. If you are building a long-term knowledge business, the hidden cost of fragmentation eventually becomes more expensive than the subscription you thought you were avoiding.

The Basic Plan — $143/month (billed annually) or $179/month (billed monthly)

Save $431 per year with annual billing.

Who this plan is genuinely for

The Basic plan is not a starter kit for people who are still figuring out whether they have an idea worth pursuing. It's the right plan for someone who has an idea they believe in, possibly a small existing audience, and is ready to build the infrastructure that turns that idea into a real product and a real business. If you're at the "I've been thinking about doing this for a while and I'm finally going to actually do it" stage, Basic is your starting point.

What you get

The core of Basic is five products, 2,500 contacts, one website, one community, and unlimited landing pages, marketing emails, and funnels. You also get a custom domain, checkout pages, payment integrations, third-party integrations, Kajabi's AI features, and Creator Studio. An additional admin user is included, which matters if you have a partner, an assistant, or a virtual helper who needs access without sharing your login.

What five products actually means in practice

Five products sounds limited until you think about what "product" means in Kajabi's architecture. A product can be a course, a coaching program, a digital download, a podcast, a membership subscription, or a community. For a creator at the beginning of their journey, five slots is ample room. A flagship course, a companion workbook, a one-time workshop recording, a lead magnet mini-course, and a membership — that's already a complete product ecosystem on a single plan. The constraint is real but it's not constraining for where you're likely starting.

The 2,500 contacts is similarly more generous than it sounds for a new creator. Building an email list to 2,500 genuine subscribers who open your emails and care about what you do takes real work and real time. If you reach that ceiling, the problem isn't the plan limit — it's a good problem. It means your list-building is working, and upgrading to Growth is the natural next step.

What Basic doesn't include

Advanced automations, the affiliate program, and the ability to remove Kajabi branding are Growth plan features and above. For a creator in the early stages, none of these are likely to be limiting immediately. But understand what each represents as your business grows. Advanced automations mean your email sequences, tagging, and customer journeys happen intelligently without you manually triggering them. The affiliate program means you can reward people for sending you customers — a powerful growth mechanism once you have an audience. And removing Kajabi branding keeps your product experience fully in your brand universe rather than co-branded with the platform. You'll want all three eventually; you probably don't need them today.

How you could use this

Picture an educator who has spent years teaching a subject — speed reading, coding, cooking, financial planning, language learning — and has decided to translate that expertise into an online course and a community. On Basic, they could build their website and establish their brand presence, launch their first online course as their primary product, set up a landing page and email sequence to grow their subscriber list, and create a community space for students to connect and engage with each other and with them. That's a complete, professional, revenue-generating business on one plan. The fundamentals are all there.

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The Growth Plan — $199/month (billed annually) or $249/month (billed monthly)

Save $600 per year with annual billing.

Who this plan is genuinely for

The Growth plan is for creators who have already proven that their idea works. You have products that sell. You have an email list with real, engaged people on it. You know what your audience wants, and you're now focused on systematizing the business, diversifying your offerings, and building the marketing infrastructure that lets growth happen without you manually driving every part of it. If you're managing the operations of a Basic plan and finding yourself wanting more — more products, more automation, more sophisticated email behavior, more growth levers — Growth is where you belong.

What you get

The jump from Basic to Growth is substantial. Fifty products (up from five), 25,000 contacts (up from 2,500), ten extra admin users (up from one), plus advanced automations, webhooks, Kajabi's built-in affiliate program, and the ability to remove Kajabi branding. The monthly price difference between Basic and Growth on annual billing is $56. For a creator who is actively generating revenue and building a real business, $56 is a straightforward trade for the capabilities it unlocks.

What fifty products means in practice

Fifty products gives you an entirely different kind of creative freedom. You're not managing slots — you're building a catalog. You could have multiple courses at different price points and difficulty levels, a membership with tiered access, group coaching programs that run in cohorts, standalone workshops, a resource library, mini-courses built as lead magnets, and specialized programs for specific segments of your audience. This is where a knowledge creator stops having one thing for sale and starts having an ecosystem.

The 25,000 contacts, meanwhile, gives you serious list-building room. Growing an email list from 2,500 to 25,000 is a major business achievement that might take years of consistent effort — and when you get there, your contact limit won't be what stops you.

Advanced automations: where the real time-saving happens

For a solopreneur who is also the content creator, the course designer, the email writer, the customer service team, the accountant, and the marketing department, automation is not a luxury. If you are manually managing customer journeys at scale, you are building a job, not a business. Automation is the thing that makes the operation sustainable. Advanced automations in Kajabi allow you to build sequences that respond to what your contacts actually do — tagging someone who purchases a specific product differently from someone who hasn't, triggering a follow-up sequence after a course completion, moving people between segments based on engagement, sending the right message to the right person at the right moment without you being the one who decides when the moment is.

This is genuinely where time multiplies. A well-built automation system works while you're creating content, while you're sleeping, while you're running another part of your business. The setup takes real thought and real work upfront — but once it's running, it runs.

The affiliate program: organic growth with architecture behind it

Kajabi's built-in affiliate program, available from Growth onwards, is one of the most underused features on the platform. The concept is simple: your students, your community members, your readers — people who have already experienced what you do and genuinely believe in it — can refer others to you and earn a commission when those referrals convert. You set the commission rate, they get a unique tracking link, and Kajabi handles the attribution and payment tracking automatically.

The value of this is hard to overstate. Word-of-mouth has always been the most powerful marketing channel for knowledge creators, because a recommendation from a trusted peer carries weight that a paid ad simply cannot replicate. The affiliate program gives that word-of-mouth momentum a structure and an incentive. It doesn't manufacture enthusiasm — you can't affiliate-program your way to referrals if your product isn't genuinely good — but it channels existing enthusiasm into a reproducible system.

How you could use this

A creator who has built a successful flagship course and a growing email list might move to Growth to launch a complete learning ecosystem — multiple courses at different stages of a learning journey, a premium membership community for ongoing support, a group coaching program for high-touch learners, and a resource library available as a standalone product. They might also launch their affiliate program among their most satisfied students, creating a referral network that feeds new students into the top of the funnel while they focus on creating the next course. Advanced automations handle the email sequences, the tagging, and the customer journeys. The creator's primary job becomes creating content and serving students — not manually managing marketing operations.

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The Pro Plan — $399/month (billed annually) or $499/month (billed monthly)

Save $1,200 per year with annual billing.

Who this plan is genuinely for

Pro is for creators who have outgrown a single brand or a single audience, or who are building something that requires maximum flexibility, custom technical integration, and the highest level of professional presentation. It's also for creators who have multiple distinct businesses and want to manage them under one Kajabi account rather than paying for separate accounts for each. If you look at the Pro features and your immediate reaction is "I don't need any of that yet," you probably don't. If you look at them and recognize capabilities you've been wanting for months, you're ready.

What you get

Unlimited products, 100,000 contacts, three websites, three communities, 25 admin users, the custom code editor, API access (included at a $25/month value), a branded mobile app (included at a $199/month value), the removal of Kajabi branding, and a reduced third-party payment provider fee of 0.5%. The branded mobile app alone represents nearly half the annual-plan monthly price if valued separately.

Three websites and three communities: the multi-brand possibility

This is the feature that transforms Pro from "more of Growth" into a genuinely different architectural capability. With one Kajabi account, you can run three completely separate websites — each with its own domain, its own design, its own community, its own product catalog, and its own brand identity — that your audience would never know share an underlying platform.

Consider what this means for a creator with multiple business ventures. A speed reading and learning skills business with its own website and student community. A publishing brand with a separate website and reader community. A children's educational channel with its own distinct presence. Three audiences, three brand experiences, three product ecosystems — one Kajabi Pro account, one monthly fee, one dashboard. The alternative is three separate Kajabi accounts at three times the cost, or three different platforms each with their own limitations and their own learning curves. Keep this simple math in mind if this applies to you: if you ran three Growth accounts at $199/month (annual billing), that's $597/month. Kajabi Pro at $399/month saves $198/month — over $2,300 per year.

The branded mobile app: what it actually changes

Kajabi's branded mobile app is included in the Pro plan at a listed value of $199/month. What this means in practice is that your students and community members can download an app from the App Store or Google Play that carries your brand name, your logo, and your visual identity — not Kajabi's. They open your app to access their courses, check the community, watch their lesson progress, and engage with your content. From their perspective, they're using your platform.

For creators who are building a long-term relationship with a community — one that extends over months or years of a student's learning journey — this matters more than it might seem at first. An app on a phone's home screen is a consistent, daily reminder of your brand's presence in someone's life. A mobile experience that feels like yours, not like a third-party hosting platform's, changes the perceived professionalism and the emotional connection of the relationship.

API access and the custom code editor

API access opens the door to custom integrations with external tools, data systems, and workflows that go beyond Kajabi's standard third-party integration options. If you're working with a developer, have specific technical requirements for how your business systems connect, or want to build something that the standard platform doesn't natively support, the API is what makes that possible.

The custom code editor gives you direct access to modify the design and functionality of your Kajabi pages beyond what templates allow. For a creator who has specific branding requirements or who works with a designer to build a precise visual experience, this removes the ceiling on what's achievable within the platform.

How you could use this

A professional educator with twenty years of expertise in their field — someone who has already built one successful online business and is now expanding into adjacent territories — might use Pro to run their original education business as the first website, a publishing operation with its own distinct audience as the second, and a content channel aimed at a completely different demographic (say, families and children) as the third. Each business has its own website, its own community, its own product catalog, and its own look and feel. Students of the education business never see the publishing brand unless they go looking for it. Readers of the publishing brand don't experience the education business's interface. The children's channel audience has a completely age-appropriate experience. The creator manages all three from one Kajabi dashboard, pays one Pro plan fee, and has a $1,200 annual saving versus monthly billing.

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Kajabi Plans at a Glance: 2026

All plans include: unlimited landing pages, unlimited marketing emails, unlimited funnels, custom domain, website builder, checkout pages, payment integrations, third-party integrations, AI features, Creator Studio, and access to the Kajabi Customer App.

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Is Kajabi Right for You Right Now?

Kajabi is a serious platform with serious pricing. Before you commit — even to a free trial — it's worth answering that question directly rather than discovering the answer six months and several hundred dollars in.

Kajabi is very likely the right choice if you can say yes to most of these:

• You want one platform handling your website, courses, email marketing, community, checkout, and analytics — not separate tools you have to connect and maintain.
• You are either already generating consistent revenue from your knowledge or expertise, or you have a clear, realistic plan to do so within the next few months and are willing to invest in the infrastructure that makes it happen.
• You value the time you'd spend managing and troubleshooting a stack of separate tools more than you value the monthly cost difference.
• You're building something with long-term intent — not testing a passing idea, but committing to building a real audience and a real business around what you know.

Kajabi is probably not the right choice right now if any of these are true:

• You're at the very beginning — no audience, no validated offer, no revenue yet — and your primary goal is to test whether anyone will pay for what you do before investing in the infrastructure to deliver it at scale. In that case, a simpler, cheaper course platform makes more sense until you've proven demand.
• You care more about deep design customisation and complex site architecture — advanced blogging, highly specific page structures, full code control — than you do about integrated marketing and automation.
• You genuinely enjoy building and managing best-of-breed tool stacks and don't mind the integration overhead. Some creators find real satisfaction in that kind of technical control, and for them the all-in-one model feels constraining rather than liberating.

One objection worth addressing honestly: platform dependence. When your website, your email list, your courses, your community, and your checkout all live inside one platform, you are making a significant commitment to that vendor. This is a legitimate concern and worth thinking through clearly. The honest answer is that some degree of platform dependence is unavoidable in any serious business — the question is whether the dependence is on a stable, established platform with a strong financial position and a clear long-term roadmap, or on a fragile integration of tools that could break or change pricing independently at any moment. Kajabi has been operating since 2010, has processed billions in creator revenue, and has continued investing in the platform rather than stagnating. That doesn't make the risk zero — no platform commitment is zero risk — but it puts the dependence question in its proper context. The more pressing risk for most creators is not platform lock-in but business fragmentation: spreading your infrastructure across so many separate tools that a single integration failure can quietly break your entire customer journey without you knowing.

If you're genuinely unsure which side of this line you're on, the 30-day free trial is the right answer. Build something real inside Kajabi for thirty days — not a demo, not a quick look around, but an actual working version of your first product and your first email sequence. By the end of that month you'll know from experience rather than speculation.

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Choosing the Right Plan: A Decision Framework

The question is never which plan has the most features. The question is which plan honestly reflects where your business is right now and what it genuinely needs for the next twelve months of operation.

Start on Basic if: You have fewer than five products planned for the next year, your email list is under 2,500 or not yet built, and you haven't yet proven consistent revenue from your content or expertise. Basic gives you everything you need to build, launch, and validate — a real website, real products, real email marketing, real funnels. The constraints are real but they're not limiting for a business at this stage. A flagship course, a companion product, a lead magnet, and a growing email list is a complete and viable business on the Basic plan.

Upgrade to Growth when: Your product count is pushing toward five and you can see the catalog you want to build clearly requires more. Your email list is approaching 2,500 contacts and growing. You're ready to build an affiliate program among your most satisfied students and community members. You want sophisticated automation — sequences that respond intelligently to what people do rather than just time-based email drips. The $56 monthly difference between Basic and Growth on annual billing is easy to justify the moment you're actively using any one of those Growth-level capabilities.

Choose Pro from the start if: You're managing two or three distinct brands or content verticals that need separate websites, separate communities, and separate product catalogs. Your email list is large or growing toward a scale that Basic or Growth can't contain. You're building a team of more than ten people who need backend access. You want a branded mobile app carrying your identity rather than Kajabi's. If none of those apply yet, Pro is not your plan today — it's your plan when your business grows into it.

A practical milestone path for most creators looks like this: launch on Basic, grow to your first 500 contacts and two or three products, validate that people are paying and engaging, then evaluate Growth when you hit either the product ceiling or the contact ceiling — whichever comes first. That upgrade decision will be obvious when it arrives because you'll feel constrained before you see the numbers.

Kajabi makes upgrading straightforward when you're ready. The cleanest approach is always to start on the plan that fits today's reality and move up when you genuinely bump against its limits — not when you imagine you might eventually need more. Growing into a plan is far healthier than paying for infrastructure before you've built the business that needs it.

The 30-Day Free Trial: How to Use It Well

Kajabi currently offers a 30-day free trial, which is meaningfully longer than the 14-day trials common to many platforms. Thirty days is enough time to build something real and evaluate the platform based on actual use rather than demos and feature lists.

If you take the trial, commit to using it like a working month, not a browsing session. Choose the plan tier that matches your current situation and sign up at that level. Build your website. Load your first product — even if it's a rough first version. Set up at least one email sequence: a welcome sequence for new subscribers is the most useful starting point. Build a landing page for a lead magnet. Send one email to a test list. Go through the course creation and community setup process end to end.

By the end of thirty days, you won't be guessing whether Kajabi suits how you work. You'll know. The investment of time in the trial pays for itself many times over compared to committing to a year of a platform that turns out not to fit your workflow.

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What's Changed Since Earlier Kajabi Plan Comparisons

If you've read other articles comparing Kajabi plans — including an earlier version of this guide published in November 2024 — you'll notice the plan structure looks different now. Kajabi has refined its lineup over the past year, retiring an earlier Kickstarter tier, updating pricing across all plans, adding new features including Creator Studio, Cohort Courses, Video Transcriptions and Translations, and the Universal Inbox, and restructuring which capabilities sit at which tier. The 30-day trial has also replaced the 14-day trial that was standard for much of 2024.

One source of confusion worth addressing directly: you may encounter other articles or comparisons that list a Kajabi Kickstarter plan at around $69–89 per month. That plan exists but is no longer available to new subscribers — Kajabi grandfathered existing Kickstarter subscribers on their current plan but closed it to new sign-ups. If you're starting fresh today, the three plans available to you are Basic, Growth, and Pro, at the pricing outlined in this guide. Any article currently presenting Kickstarter as a new subscriber option is working from outdated information.

This guide reflects the current 2026 plan structure as of the date of publication. For the most current information — including any promotions Kajabi may be running that weren't available when this was written — check the current pricing page directly.

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Frequently Asked Questions: Kajabi Plans 2026

Can I switch from Kajabi monthly billing to annual billing later?

Yes. You can switch from monthly to annual billing at any time. When you do, the annual savings apply from your next billing cycle — so there is no penalty for starting monthly and committing annually once you have tested the platform and are confident it fits your business. Given that annual billing saves $431 on Basic, $600 on Growth, and $1,200 on Pro compared to paying monthly, switching as soon as you have completed your trial and decided to stay is straightforward financial sense.

Does Kajabi charge transaction fees on the Basic plan?

No. All three Kajabi plans — including Basic — have 0% transaction fees when you use Kajabi Payments as your payment processor. Kajabi takes nothing from your revenue on any sale you make. Standard payment processing fees apply as they do with any payment system, but there is no additional Kajabi revenue-sharing cut on top of those. The only transaction fees that apply are if you choose to use a third-party payment provider instead of Kajabi Payments — in that case the fee is 2% on Basic, 1% on Growth, and 0.5% on Pro.

How many contacts can I have before I need to upgrade from Basic?

The Basic plan allows 2,500 contacts. In practice, the upgrade trigger usually becomes obvious before you hit that hard limit — you will feel the constraint as your list-building gains momentum and you start thinking carefully about who to keep on your list to stay under the ceiling. When you upgrade to Growth, the contact limit increases to 25,000, giving you substantial room to grow without needing to manage your list defensively. For most creators, reaching 2,500 genuine, engaged subscribers represents real business progress — and at that point the Growth plan upgrade is easy to justify from revenue alone.

Final Thoughts

Three plans. Three genuinely distinct stages of a creator's business. One platform that handles everything from your first landing page to a multi-brand empire with a mobile app and a community of 100,000.

The decision you're making today isn't permanent — it's just the right starting point for where you are now. And the 30-day free trial means you don't have to make it based on speculation. You can experience the actual platform, with the actual features of the plan you're considering, and make an informed decision from a position of real knowledge.

If you're looking for the cheapest way to experiment, Kajabi may not be your platform. If you're building a real business with long-term intent, it likely is.

Whatever you're building — your first course, your tenth product, or a complete ecosystem of knowledge businesses — the goal is the same: a business that lets you focus on what you actually do, rather than on managing the tools that are supposed to support it. That's what Kajabi is built for.

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