Teachable Review: Honest Take After Testing It for 60 Days

What Teachable actually is in 2026 (after the pricing restructure)

Teachable had a rough 2025. They discontinued the free plan in June, restructured all pricing tiers upward, and absorbed a wave of complaints from creators who'd built their course business around the free tier. If you read older Teachable reviews, the pricing is wrong, several tiers changed significantly.

Here's the honest current state: Teachable is still one of the cleanest course-only platforms available. The pricing is higher than it used to be, the Starter plan's 7.5% transaction fee is a real catch, and there's still no community feature. But the core product, course builder, checkout, student experience, is solid. We ran it for 60 days.

Sasha is an online fitness coach in Denver who built a 6-week strength training course after three years of one-on-one coaching. She had the curriculum ready and a small Instagram audience, but no idea where to host and sell it. She'd looked at Kajabi (too expensive for one course), Thinkific (confusing interface), and ClickFunnels (overkill without a paid traffic strategy). That left Teachable. This review covers what she would have found.

Current pricing (as of May 2026)

The Starter plan transaction fee, do the math before you commit

This is the most common mistake new Teachable creators make: they sign up for Starter ($39/mo) without factoring in the 7.5% platform transaction fee on every sale.

Here's the math at $500/month in course revenue:

• Teachable platform fee: $37.50 (7.5%)
• Stripe processing: ~$17.50 (2.9% + $0.30 × transactions)
• Starter plan cost: $39/mo
• Total fees: ~$94/mo

Compare that to Builder at $69/mo annual with 0% platform fee:

• Teachable platform fee: $0
• Stripe processing: ~$17.50
• Builder plan cost: $69/mo
• Total fees: ~$86.50/mo

Builder is actually cheaper than Starter once you're doing more than roughly $400/mo in revenue. If you're selling any meaningful volume, Starter is not the economical choice, it's a false economy.

What the course builder is actually like to use

We built a 12-module course in Teachable with a mix of video lessons, PDF downloads, and short quizzes. The honest assessment:

What works well

• ✓Video upload is genuinely smooth. Drag a video file into the lesson builder, it transcodes in the background, you move on. No fiddling with external video hosting or embed codes.
• ✓Drip scheduling works as expected. Set a release schedule, lesson 1 on day 0, lesson 2 on day 3, and Teachable handles it automatically. Essential for cohort-based programs.
• ✓Checkout is built in. Stripe and PayPal connect in about 5 minutes. No separate checkout tool needed, no custom domain SSL issues. The student checkout experience is clean.
• ✓Student progress tracking. You can see exactly where every student is in your course, who's finished, who's stuck on lesson 4, who hasn't logged in since signup.

What's missing or frustrating

• ✗No community features. Students can't talk to each other inside Teachable. Discussion forums, peer accountability threads, student-to-student interaction, all require an external tool. Kajabi and Mighty Networks have this built in.
• ✗Email marketing is not included. Teachable sends transactional emails (enrollment confirmation, password reset) but not email campaigns. You'll need Kit, GetResponse, or Mailchimp wired up via Zapier for actual marketing.
• ✗Quiz functionality is basic. You get multiple choice and true/false. No open-ended questions, no grading rubrics, no essay submission. For serious educational programs, this is a limitation.

Teachable vs. Kajabi vs. Mighty Networks, which to pick

The choice is usually this simple: if community matters to your course product (students interacting, cohort accountability, peer support), look at Mighty Networks. If you want everything, email, community, courses, website, in one expensive platform, look at Kajabi. If you just want to sell and deliver courses cleanly without paying for tools you won't use, Teachable is the right fit.

The verdict

Teachable is still a solid course platform in 2026, cleaner to set up than Kajabi, more focused than Mighty Networks, and better for self-paced courses than ClickFunnels. The pricing restructure in 2025 made it more expensive, and the elimination of the free plan was a real loss for creators testing the waters.

The Starter plan is a trap at any meaningful sales volume, do the transaction fee math before you commit. Builder at $69/mo annual is where Teachable makes sense financially. If that price point works for your projected revenue, it's a dependable tool. See current pricing on our Teachable page.