Kajabi

What it is

Kajabi is a hosted platform for building and selling courses, coaching programs, communities, memberships, newsletters and podcasts from one account, with email marketing, landing pages, checkout and tax calculation built in rather than bolted on. Founded in 2010, it predates most of today’s build-in-public infrastructure tools and has spent that time consolidating functions that a creator would otherwise buy separately.

The newest layer is AI: Cofounder acts as a planning assistant across the business, Expert Agents are trained on a creator’s own content to answer questions or draft material in their voice, and Amplify plugs into a shared marketing contact pool that Kajabi says covers more than 551 million people. None of that is independently verified here; it is Kajabi’s own description of what the tools do.

Who should use it

A coach, educator or practitioner with an established audience and revenue who wants one system instead of a course host, an email tool and a landing-page builder wired together with Zapier. It fits someone who values consolidation enough to pay $143 a month at the low end before any transaction fees. It fits poorly someone starting from zero, since there is no free tier and the entry price is well above comparable platforms like Podia or Teachable.

What stands out

The January 2026 price change is the fact to know before signing up. Growth moved from $159 to $199 a month and Pro from $319 to $399, both on annual billing, with no discount or legacy pricing held over for existing customers. That is a 25% jump on Growth with no new feature attached to it, and it is the specific trigger behind a Change.org petition and a run of one-star Trustpilot reviews in the following weeks.

The fee structure rewards scale in a way that punishes a business still finding its footing. Kajabi’s own payment processor charges 2.9% + $0.30 per card transaction on Basic, only easing to 2.7% + $0.30 once a business is paying for Pro at $399 a month. Routing payments through a third-party processor instead cuts that to 2%, sliding down to 0.5% on Pro, but that path adds its own integration work most solo creators skip.

The trust signals are the part worth sitting with longest. BBB’s own profile for Kajabi LLC lists an F rating and 18 complaints closed in the past three years, and the complaint pattern lines up with what Trustpilot reviewers describe independently: charges appearing partway through a trial, a 30-day trial that some reviewers say behaved like a much shorter one, and cancellation processes that left a customer facing a fee to retrieve their own contact data. None of this means the product doesn’t work as advertised for the people it works for, but it is a specific enough pattern, across two independent review sources, that a new signup should read the cancellation terms before entering a card number.

The verdict

Kajabi’s pitch holds up on the product side. An expert-led business selling courses, coaching or memberships gets a genuinely unified system, and the AI additions are a real differentiator against course-hosting competitors that are still catching up. Where it falls short is the business practices around billing: a January 2026 price increase with no grandfathering, a BBB F rating with a real complaint count behind it, and a trial experience that multiple reviewers describe as inconsistent with what the marketing promises.

Skip Kajabi if the business isn’t yet earning enough to comfortably cover $143 to $399 a month before fees, if avoiding a 2.9% card fee on every sale matters at your margin, or if the billing complaint pattern here is enough to make you want a platform with a cleaner track record even at the cost of fewer built-in features.