Podia pricing explained: Mover, Shaker, and Earthquaker

We make Drry, a Podia competitor, so read this with that in mind. Podia costs $42, $84, or $150 a month on annual billing, and the cheapest plan adds a 5% cut of every paid sale on top. Payment processing of 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction applies on all three plans separately. The number most people miss, and the one this guide spends the most time on, is the email subscriber allowance: 100, 500, and 1,000 respectively.

Podia is a well-liked product, and deservedly so. It is one of the simplest ways to sell a course, a download, or a membership without assembling four tools first, and the interface has a calm, unfussy quality that a lot of heavier platforms lost years ago. This guide is not an argument that Podia is bad. It is an argument that the published price is not the whole price, and that one specific line in the plan grid decides whether Podia works for you. Our own product enters once, in a clearly labeled section near the end.

The three plans, and what Mover holds back

Podia presents its pricing on annual billing, so these are the annual rates. All three plans are the same product at heart, and the differences are mostly ceilings and a handful of feature gates:

• Mover, $42 a month ($504 a year): 100 email subscribers, 50 products, 500 videos, 25 spaces. Podia takes 5% of every paid sale.
• Shaker, $84 a month ($1,008 a year): 500 email subscribers, 150 products, 1,000 videos, 100 spaces, and one assistant seat. The platform fee drops to 0%.
• Earthquaker, $150 a month ($1,800 a year): 1,000 email subscribers, and unlimited products, videos, and spaces. Also 0% platform fee.

The feature gap between Mover and the plans above it is worth reading carefully, because it is larger than the plan grid's tidy layout suggests. On top of the 5% fee, Mover has no assistant or team seat, no affiliate marketing, no upsells, no PayPal, and no Zapier. Shaker and Earthquaker add an assistant seat plus all four of those features.

That list has a shape to it. Affiliates and upsells are revenue features: the tools you reach for precisely when a product starts selling. PayPal is a payment method a meaningful slice of buyers still prefer. Zapier is how you connect anything Podia does not do natively. So Mover is not simply a smaller Podia. It is a Podia with the growth levers removed, which means the plan you start on is the plan least equipped to help you outgrow it.

The 5% fee and the $840 break-even

Mover's 5% is a platform fee, and it sits on top of the standard 2.9% plus $0.30 processing charge that applies on every plan. Two separate cuts, taken from the same sale. Because the fee scales with revenue while the plan price does not, there is a clean crossover: 5% of $840 is $42, exactly the monthly gap from Mover to Shaker. Below roughly $840 a month in sales, Mover is genuinely the cheaper plan. Above it, you are paying Shaker's price in fees and getting Mover's feature set for it.

$840 a month is not a lot of revenue. That is 18 customers at $49, or 29 at $29. Any product that is working at all clears it quickly, which makes Mover a starter plan with a short shelf life rather than a long-term home. To Podia's credit, the fee is stated plainly on the pricing page. But a percentage is a number you have to sit down and multiply, while $42 is a number you feel immediately, and that asymmetry does a lot of quiet work.

The email subscriber ceiling, which is the real story

Here is the line that decides Podia for most people, and the one almost no comparison article mentions. Podia includes 100 email subscribers on Mover, 500 on Shaker, and 1,000 on Earthquaker. Read that last one again. The $150-a-month top tier, the one with unlimited products and unlimited videos and unlimited spaces, includes one thousand email subscribers.

Two clarifications, because this gets misreported. First, the limit is on subscribers, not on how many emails you send. It is the size of your list, not your monthly send volume. Second, exceeding your allowance does not break anything: Podia sells a paid add-on for additional subscribers. Podia confirms the add-on exists, but does not publish its price table on the pricing page, and the add-on is priced the same at every tier regardless of which base plan you are on.

That last detail matters more than it first appears. Because the overage price does not improve as you move up the plans, upgrading from Mover to Earthquaker does not buy you cheaper email at scale. It buys you a slightly higher starting allowance and then hands you the same add-on bill as everyone else. Your list size becomes a variable cost that runs alongside your plan cost, growing with your audience, and it is the one number on the pricing page that you cannot check against a published figure before you commit.

Be fair about what this does and does not mean. If you sell to a small, high-value audience, a few hundred subscribers may be all you ever need, and the allowance will never come up. If email is a side channel and your traffic comes from somewhere else, same. But Podia markets email as a core part of the offer, an all-in-one that replaces your separate newsletter tool, and for a platform making that promise, an allowance measured in hundreds is the number that decides whether the headline price is real for you. Before you compare $42 against anything else, find out how big your list will be twelve months from now, and ask Podia what the add-on costs at that size.

The free plan that went away

Podia used to have a free plan. It removed it on October 14, 2024, and replaced it with a 30-day free trial with full feature access and no credit card required, available on all three plans.

The trial is a good one. No card is a real commitment on Podia's part, and full feature access for thirty days is enough to build a product, write the emails, and put it in front of real buyers. If you are evaluating, use it properly rather than clicking around for an afternoon.

But a trial and a free plan solve different problems. A trial answers "do I like this tool?" A free plan answers "can I run this thing at $0 while I figure out whether anyone wants it?" The second question often takes longer than thirty days. Plenty of audiences are built slowly, in the gaps around a day job, and a clock that starts the moment you sign up is a poor fit for that. If you are still validating, Podia's floor is now $42 a month once the thirty days are up.

Who Podia genuinely suits

Podia is a good fit for a specific and fairly common situation, and it is worth naming plainly:

• You want simple, and you mean it. Podia is one of the least intimidating ways to put a paid product online. If you have abandoned two other platforms because the setup defeated you, that counts for more than a feature checklist.
• Your list is small, or lives elsewhere. If you have a few hundred subscribers and no plan to build a large one, the allowance is a non-issue and the pricing is honest.
• You sell one-off products, not just memberships. Downloads, single courses, and webinars all fit Podia's model comfortably.
• You will start on Shaker, not Mover. If you expect to clear $840 a month, skipping Mover entirely avoids both the 5% fee and the missing growth features.

How that compares to a flat price with 0% on every plan (our pitch, disclosed)

This is the section where we sell you something, so weigh it accordingly. Drry runs courses, community, funnels, and email in one place, and we charge a flat subscription with 0% platform fee on member payments on every plan, including the free one. Payments run through your own Stripe account, so only Stripe's standard processing applies and the customer relationship belongs to you.

• A free plan that does not expire: 100 members, 5 GB of storage, unlimited courses and a community feed, no card required. The thing Podia stopped offering in October 2024.
• Then flat $29 or $99 a month. No percentage of your sales at any tier, so the bill does not grow because your revenue did.
• Email on every plan: the free plan covers 100 sends a month, and sends are unlimited on the paid plans. No subscriber-count add-on running alongside your subscription.

Run the earlier example through that: the coach grossing $4,900 a month pays a flat $29 or $99 to us instead of the $287 a month Mover would cost at that revenue, and keeps the $245 the 5% would have taken. That is a structural argument rather than a quality one. Podia is a genuinely pleasant product built on a model that charges you more as you succeed, in two directions at once: a fee on sales at the entry tier, and an add-on on subscribers at every tier. If those two lines stay small for you, Podia is a fine choice and we would rather you knew that than found out later. See our pricing if you want the full comparison in numbers.