Kajabi raised Basic 20% and dropped its contact list 75% in one email. Here is what to do.

On January 13, 2026, Kajabi sent existing customers an email about pricing. Basic went from $149 a month to $179. The contact limit on Basic dropped from 10,000 to 2,500. The Kickstarter tier at $89 was retired and replaced with a new Starter tier at the same price but a 250-contact ceiling. A reader on r/kajabi posted the screenshot under the title “$1200/year price increase WTF.” Three months later the comments thread is still active.

Five months on, the comments split into two camps. Creators with under 1,000 students stayed and grumbled. Creators in the 2,500 to 10,000 contact band, who had been on Basic and now had to upgrade to Growth at $249 to keep their email list intact, started writing the “I cancelled Kajabi” posts. They are the part of the audience this essay is for.

If you sell courses, coaching, memberships, or any digital product where the work is “your audience pays you to learn from you,” your stack probably looks expensive right now and your usage of that stack is probably under 30 percent of what you pay for. This page is a diagnosis and four real options, ordered cheapest to most ambitious. There is no single answer. There is a right answer for the size and shape of what you sell.

The diagnosis

Before picking a different tool, figure out what you are actually paying Kajabi for. The bill is the easy part. Most creators do not see the lock-in and the surcharge structure until they try to leave.

The bill. Kajabi’s 2026 monthly prices are $89 Starter, $179 Basic, $249 Growth, $499 Pro. Annual billing drops those to $71, $143, $199, $399 respectively. The Starter tier ships with 250 contacts and 1 product. Basic ships with 2,500 contacts and 5 products. Growth ships with 25,000 contacts and 50 products. On top of subscription, Kajabi charges 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on Starter and Basic for card transactions, 2.8 percent on Growth, 2.7 percent on Pro.

The Stripe gotcha. If you bring your own Stripe account instead of using Kajabi Payments, Kajabi adds a surcharge on top of Stripe’s normal fees: 5 percent on Starter, 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Growth, 0.5 percent on Pro. This is not normal. Most platforms let you bring your own processor at no markup. Kajabi penalizes you for not using their rails.

The lock-in. Kajabi publishes a REST API at api.kajabi.com/v1 with documentation, which is better than HoneyBook. Where it falls down is in migration tooling: there is no first-party way to export every video, every course curriculum, every signed student, every email subscriber, and every payment record in a clean format another platform can consume. Course videos live in Kajabi’s Wistia-backed player; moving means re-uploading everything. Kajabi Communities live at kajabi.com URLs; switching means losing the social graph.

The fit gap. Kajabi was designed around an “all-in-one” creator who runs courses, memberships, email, landing pages, and payments through one product. Most creators do not look like that. They look like a coach with a single signature program who already has Beehiiv or Kit for email, a yoga teacher running a small membership who would rather host video on YouTube unlisted, a designer who teaches one cohort a year and wants the marketing site to be a real designer site (Webflow, Framer) instead of a Kajabi template. For each of these, half of the bundle sits empty and the half that gets used is mediocre at the parts it covers.

The usage. Multiple analysts who teardown Kajabi’s feature set put solo creator usage in the 25 to 30 percent range. A coach selling one $1,200 program touches the LMS, the landing page, the checkout, and basic email. The community module, the affiliate manager, the multi-product upsell engine, the funnel builder, and the AI credits sit unused.

Once those five are on the table, the question stops being “is Kajabi bad.” It becomes “which of my five complaints is the one I should solve first?” The answer depends on which path below fits the size of what you sell and how much of the bundle you actually use.

Path A: Trade down to a cheaper, more focused platform

Useful if your only complaint is the bill and your business is well-shaped for a packaged platform.

Thinkific is the closest like-for-like. Start is $99 a month ($74 annual). Grow is $199 a month ($149 annual). Both tiers cap at 10,000 students and bundle communities. Thinkific Payments charges 2.9 percent with no third-party-processor surcharge on top, which is the cleanest pricing difference from Kajabi. If your business is courses with a small community, Thinkific does the same job for less and lets you keep your Stripe account without a penalty.

Podia is the play if your product mix is courses plus digital downloads plus a small newsletter. Mover is $42 a month with a 5 percent platform transaction fee and a 100 email subscriber cap. Shaker is $84 a month with zero platform fees and 500 subscribers. Earthquaker is $150 a month with unlimited products and 1,000 subscribers. The trade-off is the email subscriber limits, which feel low if you have a real list. For coaches and creators with under 1,000 subscribers, Podia is the price floor.

Skool is a different shape: one $99 a month tier for everyone, unlimited members, unlimited courses, unlimited live calls, with a 2.9 percent transaction fee. It is community-first and course-second, which is the inverse of Kajabi’s design. If your business is a paid community that happens to ship a course, Skool is closer to the work and lighter on the wallet. The single-tier pricing also removes the “do I upgrade or not” friction that defines Kajabi’s middle band.

If the only thing wrong with Kajabi is the price, this path saves you 30 to 80 percent of the bill in an afternoon of migration work. The trade-off is that you are still on a packaged platform with the same kind of lock-in, just less expensive and less bundled.

Path B: Unbundle into focused tools

Useful when you only use a third of Kajabi’s bundle and you would rather pay each tool to do its one job well.

The maturing creator stack in 2026 looks roughly like this. Beehiiv or Kit for email at $30 to $89 a month depending on list size. Stripe for payments at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents with no platform surcharge. Mux or Cloudflare Stream for video hosting at $5 to $20 a month plus minutes-served. A small course site on Astro, Framer, or Webflow at $10 to $40 a month. Circle or Discourse for community at $89 a month if community matters. Cal.com or Calendly for 1:1s at $12 a month.

Total floor: roughly $90 a month for a course business without community, roughly $180 a month with community. The all-in spend can land below Kajabi Basic and dramatically below Kajabi Growth.

The trade-off is that you stitch the pieces together. The course site has to be configured to gate access by Stripe customer status. The email list has to be set up to add and remove subscribers based on purchase events. The video player has to be embedded with signed URLs so non-customers cannot share links. None of these is hard. All of them require an evening of careful setup and a tolerance for being your own integrator.

The upside is structural. Every byte of your data is in tools that have public APIs and clean exports. There is no platform-level surcharge on transactions. Each component can be swapped without rebuilding the others. The whole stack is yours.

This path is also why a row of newer products exists. Lemonsqueezy, Whop, Gumroad’s new course features, and the early stage tools that started showing up in 2025 are all betting that creators want their bundle smaller. They are useful as middle ground if the full unbundle feels like too much assembly.

Path C: Move community-first or membership-first

Useful when the heart of what you sell is the community or the recurring membership, and the course is a side feature.

Mighty Networks at $79 a month (Launch) or $179 a month (Scale) is the most mature option here. Launch caps at 200 GB storage and 2 percent transaction fees. Scale doubles storage and drops the fee to 1 percent. Mighty was designed around the cohort and member experience, not the course catalog. If your students come back monthly because of who they meet in your space, Mighty fits that shape better than Kajabi.

Skool belongs in this category too, and is cheaper than Mighty at the entry tier. Worth a look in parallel.

MemberSpace or MemberStack are useful if you already have a website on Squarespace, Webflow, or Wix and you want to gate parts of it for paying members without moving everything to a creator platform. Both are paid add-ons that handle the auth and payment layer and leave your existing site where it is.

The pattern across this path is the same. One focused tool that nails the verb your business actually does is almost always better than one generic tool that lists your verb on a feature page.

Path D: Build the slice of the workflow you actually use

Useful when your business has 3 or more idiosyncratic rules that no platform models well, and the cost of paying for the wrong bundle over the next five years is larger than the cost of a few focused weekends.

This path is the new one in 2026. It is not “learn to code.” It is “describe what your business does to Claude or Cursor and have it build the small set of CRUD screens that run the parts only you can run.”

The data model under a creator business is small. Roughly six tables: students, products, lessons, payments, email subscribers, and a calendar of dated events (live calls, cohort starts, drip releases). The screens are around ten: a student list, a single-student view, a product editor, a lesson uploader, a checkout page, a payments dashboard, an email subscriber view, a calendar of upcoming dates, a settings page, and one or two workflow-specific pages. That is a focused build with a coding agent that is already good at this kind of thing.

The hosting cost is $0 to $5 a month on a Cloudflare Workers or Vercel hobby tier. The agent subscription is $20 a month. The transaction fees are Stripe’s 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, the same as every other path, with no platform surcharge.

A practical version of this path borrows architecture from open-source starters. Atrium is a client portal that Vibra-Labs published on GitHub in March 2026 with Stripe-powered invoicing, file sharing, custom domains with SSL, role-based permissions, and white-label branding. A creator can fork Atrium, point an AI agent at it, and adjust the data model to fit a course business in one or two weekends. The shape is already there.

The honest version of this option is that it pays off most for creators whose business is going to outlive the next two platform price hikes, whose workflow is genuinely unusual, and who are comfortable doing the work of validating the result against real student traffic before a launch day. Building the LMS in a Saturday is not the same as proving it survives 200 students hitting it at the start of a cohort. The companion piece on the verification ladder covers what to check after the agent claims a change is done; the runtime side (does the cart hold under load, do the emails actually send) is its own discipline.

How to decide

Each path solves a different problem. Match it to the one bill or one missing feature that bothers you most this month.

You pay too much and you use what you pay for. Path A. Move to Thinkific or Skool in an afternoon. Your business does not change.

You pay too much and you only use the LMS plus checkout. Path A first (Thinkific), then Path B if Path A still feels heavy after two months.

Your business is mostly community and the course is a side feature. Path C. Mighty Networks or Skool. Keep Kajabi for a quarter if a wholesale switch feels risky, then drop it.

Your business has idiosyncratic workflow rules (cohort gating by week, gated content by date, custom upsell logic, multi-currency, a referral program that does not fit anyone’s affiliate module). Path B with a real plan to migrate to Path D over a couple of months. The unbundled stack holds the business while the custom layer is built.

You have run this for five-plus years, your workflow has unusual steps that you have explained to two different platform support teams, you have absorbed two price hikes, and your students are loyal enough that the platform is no longer the brand they pay for. Path D. The cost of staying is now larger than the cost of building.

What not to do

The mistakes below show up repeatedly when creators try to move.

Trying to migrate everything in one weekend. Pick the single piece that hurts most. Move that one piece. Leave the rest where it is for two to three months while it stabilizes. The migration cost is dominated by the video re-uploads and the email-subscriber-state copy, and both get smaller per workflow.

Underestimating video migration. Kajabi hosts your videos in its player. Moving means downloading every video, re-uploading to Mux or Cloudflare Stream, and updating every lesson page. For a 40-lesson course this is roughly a day of work even with automation. Plan for it.

Letting the Stripe surcharge be the only reason to move. The 0.5 to 5 percent third-party processor surcharge is real and annoying, but on a $30,000 a year course business it is at most $1,500. Use the surcharge as a tiebreaker between paths, not as the primary reason. The primary reason is whether the platform fits your shape of business.

Switching processors without checking deposit timing. Kajabi Payments deposits land in 2 to 5 business days. Stripe direct can be next-day with the right setup. If you launch a cohort and need to refund a student on day three, the timing difference matters.

Building Path D before trying Path A. Most creators do not need a custom app. They need a cheaper platform that fits better. The four out of five who would be happy on Thinkific or Skool should move to Thinkific or Skool, not spend two months building.

Skipping the validation step. A custom LMS that works for your one test student on a Saturday is not the same product as one that holds up when 200 students hit it at cohort launch. The verification ladder is one half of the discipline; running the new system in parallel for a real cohort cycle before going all in is the other half. Skipping either is how creators end up with a half-broken launch and a hostile audience.

Where this leaves you

The honest summary is that Kajabi is not a bad product. It is a product designed around a creator who looks slightly different than most of its paying users. The January 2026 changes made that gap visible in two ways: the price went up at the entry tier and the contact capacity dropped so sharply that the next tier became almost mandatory. The interesting thing is not that some creators are leaving. It is that the migration patterns now split four ways, where three years ago they only split two (Kajabi or Teachable, pick one).

If your stack costs $250 a month and you use 30 percent of it, you have roughly $1,500 a year of room to work with. The cheapest path (switching to Thinkific or Skool) recovers most of it in an afternoon. The most ambitious path (building the slice that runs your specific business) recovers all of it and gives you a tool shaped to your business, with the trade-off that you do the work of validating it against real student behavior before you trust it.

The reference page on scoping a first project is the right next read if Path D is the one calling. The spreadsheet-to-app reference is the right next read if Path B is the one calling and your data currently lives in a sheet. The CLAUDE.md essay is the right next read either way, because the brief is the part most people skip and then regret in week three.

If your stack costs $250 a month and you have been meaning to look at it, the cheapest decision you can make today is to open last month’s bill, write down which lines you actually used in the last 30 days, and pick the path that addresses the biggest gap between those two columns.