Teachable pricing explained: plans, fees, and the 2025 reshuffle

We make Drry, a Teachable competitor, so read this with that in mind. Teachable costs $39, $89, or $189 a month for Starter, Builder, and Growth (about $29, $69, and $139 if you prepay for a year), plus payment processing of 2.9% plus $0.30 on US cards, plus an extra 7.5% platform fee on the Starter plan only. There is no free plan anymore. This guide walks the real math, including the point where the cheap plan quietly becomes the expensive one.

Teachable is a genuinely good course platform with a long track record, and nothing below is an argument that it is bad software. It is an argument that its pricing has moved, that the movement was substantive rather than cosmetic, and that the plan you would instinctively pick is often the wrong one. We will tell you plainly where our own product enters the picture, in one clearly labeled section near the end.

The three plans, and what each one actually gets you

Teachable's public grid has three tiers plus a custom arrangement for larger accounts. The prices below are monthly first, then the effective per-month rate if you prepay a year:

• Starter, $39 a month ($29 annually): one admin seat and up to 100 active students. This is the only plan that pays a platform fee, and it is not small: 7.5% of every paid sale, on top of card processing.
• Builder, $89 a month ($69 annually): still one admin seat, but the student cap rises to 1,000 and the platform fee drops to 0%when you take payments through Teachable's own processing. For most people actually selling something, this is the real entry plan.
• Growth, $189 a month ($139 annually): five admin seats, up to 5,000 active students, and the same 0% platform fee. The jump you make when you need a second person in the account, or when you outgrow 1,000 students.
• Custom: a higher enterprise-style tier exists on request, with no published price. If you are asking for it, you already have a salesperson.

Annual billing saves roughly 22% to 26% depending on the tier, which is a real discount by industry standards. Annual prepayment lands at $348, $828, and $1,668 a year for the three plans. That is worth taking once you are certain you are staying, and worth skipping while you are still deciding, because a year of Growth is a $1,668 commitment before you have sold anything.

The important thing to notice is what separates the tiers. It is not primarily features. It is three limits: the platform fee, the number of admin seats, and the number of active students. Every one of those is a meter, and meters are what move you up a tier whether or not you wanted anything new.

The 7.5% fee, and the $667 break-even

Starter's 7.5% platform fee is the single most consequential number on Teachable's pricing page, because it is the one that scales with your success while the sticker price stays still. Stack it with card processing and a US-card sale on Starter costs you roughly 10.4% plus $0.30. On Builder, the same sale costs 2.9% plus $0.30, because the platform fee is zero.

The crossover is easy to compute and worth memorizing. The plans are $50 a month apart ($89 minus $39). Starter's extra cost is 7.5% of revenue. Fifty dollars divided by 0.075 is about $667, so:

• Under about $667 a month in sales: Starter is genuinely cheaper. The fee on a small base does not cover the $50 gap.
• Over about $667 a month in sales: Builder is cheaper, and it keeps getting cheaper relative to Starter for every additional dollar you earn.

If you prepay annually the crossover moves down, not up: the annual rates are $29 and $69, a $40 gap, and $40 divided by 0.075 is about $533 a month. Either way the number is small. Six hundred and sixty-seven dollars is fourteen sales of a $49 course, or seven sales of a $99 one. Most people who are selling at all clear it, which means Starter is best understood as a plan with a built-in expiry date rather than a place to settle.

There is also a smaller detail worth folding into your model if you sell abroad: international cards cost 3.9% plus $0.30 rather than 2.9% plus $0.30, on every plan. If a meaningful share of your buyers are outside the US, your blended processing rate sits above the headline number, and that is true no matter which tier you are on.

What the June 2025 restructure actually changed

This is the part most pricing pages and most comparison articles gloss over, so it is worth being precise. In June 2025 Teachable retired its old lineup of Basic, Pro, and Pro+ and replaced it with Starter, Builder, and Growth. Existing customers were mapped across: Basic became Builder, and Pro became Growth.

If you stop reading there it sounds like a rename. It was not. Two things changed underneath the labels:

• The free plan was eliminated entirely. The old free tier let you publish one course and took a 10% cut of each sale. It no longer exists in any form. Teachable's cheapest ongoing option went from $0 to $39 a month overnight, and the only remaining way to try the platform is a 7-day trial.
• Caps were introduced where tiers had previously been open. Product limits and active-student caps arrived on tiers that had not been metered that way before. This is the substantive part: a plan that used to let you grow without counting now counts, and the count has an upgrade attached to it.

Put together, that means a lot of existing customers experienced a real effective increase, not a lateral move. Some paid more for the same thing. Some kept their price but acquired a ceiling they did not have before. And anyone who had been running a small paid course on the free tier lost their home outright. If you are researching Teachable because your bill or your limits changed and you are trying to work out why, this restructure is almost certainly the answer.

To be fair to Teachable: eliminating a free tier that took 10% of sales is a defensible business decision, and the free plan was never a serious place to run a business. But the honest framing is that the floor of the product moved up, and the tiers acquired meters. That is a price increase in structure even where it was not one in sticker.

The caps that force an upgrade

Because the tiers are metered, the thing that eventually moves you up is usually not a feature you wanted. It is a limit you hit. Three are worth planning around:

• Active students. Starter stops at 100, Builder at 1,000, Growth at 5,000. One hundred is low enough to hit in a single decent launch, and if you ever run a free or low-priced cohort to build an audience, those students count too.
• Admin seats. Starter and Builder both include exactly one. Growth includes five. We could not find a per-seat top-up, which means hiring one assistant or bringing in a co-instructor can push you from $89 to $189 a month, a $100-a-month jump for a second login. That is the sharpest cliff in the grid.
• The Starter fee. Not a hard cap, but it behaves like one: past roughly $667 a month it is simply costing you money to stay put.

None of this is hidden or dishonest. It is just worth modelling before you commit to an annual plan, because the plan you can afford today and the plan your business will need in nine months may not be the same one, and the annual discount only pays off if you stay put.

Who Teachable genuinely suits

Teachable earns its reputation. It has been doing this a long time, the course-building experience is mature and reliable, and if your business is fundamentally about selling structured courses to students, it does that job well. We would honestly point you at it if you are:

• Selling courses as the main product, rather than running a community with courses attached.
• Comfortable at Builder or above, where the 0% platform fee means you are paying a flat price and nothing else to the platform.
• Happy to have a small team on Growth, where five seats and 5,000 students is genuinely a lot of runway for $139 a month annually.

Where it fits less well is the shape of business that is a community first and a course second, or the person who wants to validate an idea before spending anything, because that second option no longer exists on Teachable at any price.

How that compares to a flat-price home (our pitch, disclosed)

This is the section where we sell you something, so weigh it accordingly. Drry makes a different pricing bet: a flat subscription and 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 stays yours.

• A real free plan: 100 members, 5 GB of storage, unlimited courses, and a community feed, with no card required. That is precisely the thing Teachable removed in June 2025.
• Then flat $29 or $99 a month for Creator or Growth. No percentage of sales at any tier, so the platform bill does not grow because your revenue did.
• Courses, community, funnels, and email in one place, so the front door of your business is not a second subscription bolted onto the course platform.

Run the earlier example through that: the creator grossing $4,900 a month pays a flat $29 or $99 to us plus Stripe processing, instead of the $367.50 a month that Teachable Starter's 7.5% fee takes off the top. That is a structural argument, not a quality one. Teachable is a good product; it is a good product whose cheapest tier is priced as a revenue share, and whose free tier no longer exists. If you want the feature-by-feature view, see Drry vs Teachable, and our pricing page shows every limit we just described.