If you opened your Kajabi bill in 2026 and did a double take, you are not imagining it. The plans went up, the contact limits came down, and a new fee appeared for the crime of using your own payment processor. This is the survival guide I wish existed for anyone staring at that renewal and wondering whether to pay it, downgrade, or leave.
I sell a community platform you buy once, so I have a side in this. I am going to be straight about what Kajabi does that my product does not, because pretending otherwise would waste your time and mine.
What changed in 2026
Kajabi restructured its plans with higher prices and tighter limits, and there was no grandfathering for existing customers. Here is the current shape of it.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per mo) | Contacts | Kajabi Payments fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $179 | $143 | 2,500 | 2.9% + $0.30 |
| Growth | $249 | $199 | 25,000 | 2.8% + $0.30 |
| Pro | $499 | $399 | 100,000 | 2.7% + $0.30 |
Source is kajabi.com/pricing. The Basic plan's contact cap in particular is far smaller than the old entry tier, so a growing list quietly forces an upgrade. Annual billing saves roughly 20%.
Prices verified July 2026. Re-check kajabi.com/pricing before you decide, vendor pricing drifts fast right now.
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The fee most reviews miss
Here is the line that should stop you. If you route payments through your own processor instead of Kajabi Payments, Kajabi charges you an extra fee on top of your processor's own cut. On Basic that surcharge is 5%. It falls to 2% on Growth and 1% or 0.5% on Pro, but the message is the same at every tier. Using your own Stripe account is a billable event.
| Plan | Fee for using your own processor |
|---|---|
| Basic | 5% |
| Growth | 2% |
| Pro | 1% to 0.5% |
Verified against kajabi.com/pricing in July 2026 (PayPal is excluded from the surcharge). This is the opposite of ownership. You are paying rent for the privilege of holding your own customer relationship.
A platform that charges you extra for using your own bank has told you exactly who it thinks owns the money.
What Kajabi is genuinely good at
Now the honest concession, because Kajabi earns it. Kajabi is not really a community tool that got expensive. It is an all-in-one knowledge-commerce suite, and the community is one room in a much bigger house.
- Courses, email marketing, sales funnels, landing pages, and checkout all live under one login, genuinely integrated.
- The email and automation tooling is real marketing software, not a bolt-on, and plenty of six-figure course businesses run their whole operation on it.
- If you sell courses as your primary product and the community is a bonus, replacing Kajabi means assembling three or four separate tools.
That breadth is the whole reason the price hike stings instead of triggering an instant cancel. You are not paying for a community. You are paying for the machine your business runs on. So the real question is not whether Kajabi is worth it. It is which parts of it you actually need to keep.
The survival options, in order
Three honest paths, from least disruptive to most.
- Stay and trim. Switch to annual billing for the roughly 20% cut, drop to the plan whose contact limit you actually need, and use Kajabi Payments to dodge the third-party surcharge. If Kajabi runs your entire business, this is the pragmatic move.
- Unbundle. Keep the piece Kajabi is best at, courses and email, and move the pieces you are overpaying for. Most creators are on a $249 or $499 plan mostly to host a community that a purpose-built tool would run better and cheaper.
- Own the community layer. If the community is the part that matters most, stop renting it. Buy a community platform once for $399, run payments through your own Stripe with no surcharge and no platform fee, and let Kajabi go or shrink to a smaller plan.
The migration path, honestly
I am not going to sell you a one-click escape, because it does not exist and you would catch me lying by the weekend. Moving off Kajabi is a real weekend of work, sometimes two, and one piece of it genuinely hurts.
- Contacts export cleanly. Kajabi gives you a full contacts CSV, so your member list comes with you. This part is easy.
- Recurring subscriptions do not migrate. This is the painful one. Your existing paying members cannot be ported to a new processor as active subscriptions. They have to re-subscribe through your new Stripe. Plan a clear announcement, a short overlap window, and a good reason for them to move with you.
- Course content is a rebuild, not a transfer. Expect to re-upload videos and re-create lessons. On Seedly Communities the classroom module supports video, text, live, quiz, and assignment lessons, so the structure ports even though the files do not.
That is the real cost, stated plainly. A weekend of setup and a re-subscribe campaign, traded against never paying a repricing again.
Kajabi's five-year figure is our multiplication of the verified annual price, before any processing or surcharge. It passes $399 of cumulative rent in the third month. The whole comparison across every platform is in the five-year cost post.
The pay-once alternative
Seedly Communities is $399 once, or $249 as a bundle add-on with Seedly CRM in the same checkout. The transaction fee is 0% because members pay through your own Stripe, and there is no surcharge for using it, because it is your platform. Members are unlimited, you get the full source code with a commercial license, and the classroom, events, chat, and live video ship in the same codebase. Your ongoing cost is your own hosting, which is the honest trade.
FAQ
How much did Kajabi go up in 2026?
Does Kajabi charge extra for using my own payment processor?
Can I move my Kajabi subscriptions to another platform?
What does owning a community platform cost?
For the full picture, the five-year cost post puts Kajabi next to every rented platform, the classroom module shows what your courses would run on, and when you are ready, the checkout is one page.
