Teachable Pricing Overview
Teachable is a popular online platform that is a go-to for professional and hobby online course creators alike. Teachable has the capabilities to:
- Sell online courses
- Create a community
- Have a custom website
- Email marketing
- Affiliate marketing
Whilst Teachable isn’t an all-in-one platform (like rival Podia is), what they do offer, they offer well.
In fact, I personally find Teachable to be one of the most user-friendly platforms I’ve created online courses on. I also find that the features that it does offer are second to none.
It’s clear that when it comes to available features, Teachable has definitely gone for quality over quantity.
Teachable has been around since 2014 and boasts over 100,000 creators on its platform and its mission is to enable creators to “easily create an online course or coaching business with our powerful yet simple all-in-one platform.”
Teachable Pros
- Website builder – The website builder that Teachable provides is really easy to use but very customisable. Teachable provides you with templates that you can amend to match your brand. Whilst it could offer more options for customisation, I feel that for the majority of people, Teachable offers what you need to build your web pages for your online course.
- Fuss-free layout – I like that Teachable’s dashboard and navigation are fuss-free. This means that it’s easy to put your online course and web pages together and get them published. As an example, I was able to put my freebie Toolkit together in just 1 day. That’s how easy and fuss-free the platform is to use.
- Payment management – Teachable manages all of the course payments themselves and has quick payouts to course creators. I like that you don’t need to bother sorting out payment with another platform and link it all together and that you can do everything from within Teachable. From within Teachable, you can set one-time payments, payment plans, and subscriptions, without needing to use another platform such as Stripe or PayPal.
Teachable Cons
Lack of integrations – as you’ll see later in this review, Teachable does not offer as many in-platform integrations as competitors such as LearnWorlds do. Although Teachable can have many integrations linked to it, they rely heavily on Zapier for this to happen.
The FREE Online Course Creation Toolkit
This Toolkit has my top recommended resources for creating your own online course. It covers course platforms, slides and presentations, graphics and images, and business tools to help you create an amazing online course.
This is a comprehensive Toolkit that is suitable for anyone creating their first course, through to seasoned course creators who might want to see what tools other course creators use.
Does Teachable have a free plan?
Unlike a lot of its competitors, Teachable does offer a free plan. Within the Teachable free plan, you get the following features:
- Unlimited students
- $1 + 10% per transaction
- Instant payouts (Applies if you set up Teachable Payments. If on Monthly Payment Gateway, receive PayPal deposits once a month with a 30-day delay)
- Unlimited courses
- Unlimited coaching services
- Product bundles
- Course design templates
- 1 admin-level user (Admin users include primary owners, owners, and authors)
- Product support
- Third-party integrations (including Google Analytics, Sumo, and Segment)
- Basic quizzes
Are free plans even worth it?
I think it’s great that Teachable offers a free plan. It’s a great opportunity for you to test the waters with the platform and see if it’s for you on your online course creating journey.
However, in my humble opinion, free plans aren’t always worth it.
If you look at the Free Plan, Teachable takes a commission of $1 plus 10% of your course transaction. That means that if you’re selling a course for $100, Teachable is getting $11 of that course price.
Sell just 3 of your $100 courses and you’ve already paid Teachable in fees what you could have paid for their Basic Plan, but you didn’t get the additional features that come with the Basic Plan.
Therefore, in my humble opinion, sign up for the Free Plan if you want to see what Teachable is all about and get to grips with the platform. But, once you’ve decided that Teachable is for you, I’d sign up for the Basic Plan as a minimum.
Not only will you be able to take advantage of the additional features that the Basic Plan offers, but you’ll also have access to Teachable:u where you can get tutorials and how-to guides to sky-rocket your online course creation.
Does Teachable take a percentage of course fees?
Depending on which plan you’re on, yes Teachable does take a percentage of your course fees.
- On the Free Plan, Teachable takes $1 + 10% of the transaction cost.
- On the Basic Plan, Teachable takes 5% of the transaction cost.
- Teachable does not take any percentages of any course fees of courses sold on its Pro or Business plans.
Basic Plan ($29 per month)
The Basic Plan is $29 per month if you pay annually. If you pay monthly, the Basic Plan is $39 per month.
Within the Basic Plan, you get the following features:
- 5% per transaction
- Instant payouts (Applies if you set up Teachable Payments. If on Monthly Payment Gateway, receive PayPal deposits once a month with a 30-day delay)
- Members-only community
- 2 admin-level users
- Admin users include primary owners, owners, and authors.
- Product support
- Course creator training
- Access to training courses in teachable:u
- Custom domain support
- Coupon codes
- Drip course content
- Integrated email marketing
- Third-party integrations (Including Facebook, Google Analytics, Sumo, Segment, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Zapier Triggers, and Circle.so)
- Private student community
Pro Plan ($99 per month)
The Pro Plan is $99 per month if you pay annually. If you pay monthly, the Pro Plan is $119 per month.
Within the Pro Plan, you get the following features:
- No transaction fees (Transactions processed by the Monthly Payment Gateway for schools that were created before 10/9/18 will be subject to a 2% transaction fee)
- Instant payouts (Applies if you set up Teachable Payments or custom payment gateway. If on Monthly Payment Gateway, or non-custom PayPal gateway, receive PayPal deposits once a month with a 30-day delay)
- 5 admin-level users
- Admin users include primary owners, owners, and authors.
- Priority product support
- Graded quizzes
- Advanced reports
- On courses, students, videos, and upsells
- Unbranded website (Please note that secure URLs (e.g. login and checkout pages) and myTeachable (including the mobile app) are exceptions where there will be some indications that Teachable is powering the site.)
- Course completion certificates
- Course compliance
- Integrated affiliate marketing
- Group coaching calls
Business Plan ($249 per month)
The Business Plan is a serious upgrade on the other plans and probably won’t be necessary for most bloggers. But depending on the scale of your online school and online course ambitions, this information might still be useful to you.
The Business Plan is $249 if you pay annually. If you pay monthly, the Business Plan is $299 per month.
The Business Plan is $249 and includes the following features:
- No transaction fees
- Instant payouts (Applies if you set up Teachable Payments or custom payment gateway. If on Monthly Payment Gateway, or non-custom PayPal gateway, receive PayPal deposits once a month with a 30-day delay)
- 20 admin-level users (Admin users include primary owner, owners, and authors. For more than 20 admins, contact Sales.)
- Priority product support
- Manual student imports
- Bulk student enrollments
- Custom user roles
- Advanced theme customization
- Group coaching calls
Included in all Plans
Regardless of which plan you opt to go with, all Teachable Plans come with the following features:
- Unlimited video
- Unlimited products
- Unlimited hosting
- Integrated payment processing
- Student management
- Lecture comments
- Basic quizzes
- No fees on free products
- VAT (value-added tax) for EU
Monthly or annual payments?
At the time of writing, all Teachable plans can be paid monthly or annually.
Depending on your plan, it’s between $10 and $50 more per month to pay monthly.
If you choose to pay annually, then this is a one-time payment made every 12 months until you cancel your plan. If you’re paying annually, the annual fees for each plan are listed below:
- Free Plan – $0
- Basic Plan – $348
- Pro Plan – $1,188
- Business Plan – $2,988
Teachable Features
Small Transaction Fees
On the Free and Basic Teachable Plans, there is a small transaction fee. For the Free Plan, this is $1 + 10%, and for the Basic Plan, this is 5%.
The Pro and Business Plans do not take any transaction fees.
Depending on your course prices and sales, I would always recommend anyone getting a Teachable Plan to work out their transaction fees versus upgrading your Plan.
If you’re selling enough courses that you’re basically paying enough to cover the next Plan upgrade, my advice would be to upgrade your plan. If you can get to the Pro Plan then you won’t be paying any transaction fees at all.
Additionally, you will reap the benefits of getting the additional features on the next plan up. In my opinion, it’s better to pay a higher monthly fee and get additional features, than pay the equivalent in transaction fees and not get any additional features in return.
Integrations
In comparison to products such as Podia and LearnWorlds, Teachable doesn’t support as many integrations as it could. Instead, Teachable heavily relies on Zapier to support its integrations. This isn’t a problem for many, but something which you may want to bear in mind.
Zapier, however, integrations with over 3,000 partners to create workflows to work for you.
From within Teachable, you can set up the following integrations yourself, without the need to use Zapier:
- Circle Space
- Google Analytics
- Mailchimp
- ConvertKit
- Zapier
- Segment
- Facebook Pixel
Some of these integrations are available on all plans, whilst some are only available on the Basic Plan and higher.
Coupon Codes
Coupons are available on Teachable’s Basic Plan and up.
Teachable offers 4 types of coupons:
- All product coupons are coupons that can be applied to every product and pricing plan available within your school.
- Product type coupons are coupons that can be applied to every pricing plan of that specific product type. Within schools, you have three product types available: courses, coaching, and bundle products. For example, coupons that you set for all courses do not apply to coaching or bundle products.
- Pricing plan-specific coupons are coupons that apply only to a specific pricing plan within a specific product. These coupons are tied to a single pricing option and do not apply anywhere else inside your school.
- You can also create single-use coupons to provide product discounts for specific users or organizations in your school. These are unique, one-time-use codes.
Certificates of Completion
I love including certificates of completion at the end of courses. I find that they are a nice touch to engage your students and entice them into completing the whole of your course.
Certificates help students show off what they have learned and achieved through completing their course. This is great for students to then use for CPD, show to their employers, or just to add to their social media profiles (which also acts as some advertising for you!)
Course completion certificates are available on the Pro Plan and above only.
Webinars, Live Streaming & Video
You can include as many videos in your online courses as you’d like because Teachable offer no limit on video bandwidth on any of its plans.
That means that you can pre-record videos and upload them to your courses to your heart’s content with no worries about maxing out your bandwidth space.
Private Student Community
Within Teachable, on the Basic Plan and above, you can also set up a private student community. The benefits of this are to connect with your audience through discussions and engaging topics.
A private student community is more exclusive than a Facebook Group, where you have access to all of the information about your customers so you can offer a tailored membership site for them.
Payment Plans
Teachable manages its own payments and a major bonus of this is that you can offer payment plans, even without having a Stripe account.
For many online course platforms, Stripe is needed to set the payment plan up correctly. If like me, you live somewhere where Stripe is not available, you can be a bit stuck for options. Therefore, Teachable managing its own payments works really well for me.
Equally, if you just don’t want to have your payments handled off the platform you’re using, you’ll like this option too.
Upsells
Your customers and students who purchase your courses and/or downloads can be upsold other products you offer.
When they checkout, you can select for the student/customer to get money off another bundle or product if they purchase it whilst purchasing their current course or download.
It’s a win-win situation where your student gets more for a discount and you make an additional sale.
On the Pro Plan and above, you can also add upsells within your actual course. This is a great option to be able to talk about another product and then give your students the opportunity to buy that product whilst still in your first course.
Drip Content
When you create an online course, you might not always want all of the course content available to your student as soon as they sign up.
This is where drip content comes in.
Available on all of Teachable’s plans, drip content keeps students engaged and means that students are more likely to complete your course.
When creating drip content, you can set when you want your students to access certain modules of your course and in which order. For example, you might want to have someone access module 2, 7 days after they have purchased and accessed module 1 of a course.
Equally, you might want lesson 2 to be made available 24 hours after accessing lesson 1. It’s completely up to you.
Within the drip content feature, you can access drip emails. This means that you can customise and automate emails within Teachable which are automatically sent to your students when a new section of their course is available to them.
Affiliate Program
Teachable has an in-built affiliate marketing platform available on its Pro and above plans. The affiliate marketing platform means that you can give your students a custom commission for any product, course, or download which they sell through their affiliate link.
You can keep your affiliate programme private, or make it available to anyone to use.
Custom Domains & Subdomains
Every Teachable school will automatically be given a subdomain which will be something like https://MYAWESOMETEACHABLESCHOOL.teachable.com.
All of Teachable’s plans allow you to have a custom domain name, for example, https://MYAWESOMETEACHABLESCHOOL.veritysangan.com or https://MYAWESOMETEACHABLESCHOOL.com.
Setting up a custom domain is an easy process within Teachable and is usually active within 24 hours (although my experience was a lot quicker!!).
This is a nice touch as having a custom domain/subdomain brings your domain in line with your branding.
Teachable Alternatives
Teachable’s Customer Support
Teachable has a fantastic knowledge base that has countless articles and how-to guides to help you with any queries you might have about the platform. They also have a YouTube account with support videos.
If you need to contact Teachable for further support, they have an email available. If you are logged into your account, they also have chat support available Monday-Friday 10am-5pm ET.
To date, I haven’t used chat support, but, in my experience, they respond to email queries very quickly.
Summary of Teachable Pricing
In summary, I think that Teachable offers great value for money in all of their plans. The platform is a serious contender in the world of online courses and it’s clear to see why it’s one of the more popular online course platforms available.
They offer a great Free Plan where you can test out some of the features and get a feel for the platform. However, I’d recommend upgrading to the Basic Plan as a minimum once you start selling your courses. This way, you’re paying less in transaction fees and getting more features to boot.
Fancy trying out Teachable for yourself? Click here to visit Teachable now.
