Kajabi is a solid product. For course creators selling a digital download, it does the job. But you’re not selling a digital download. You’re running a coaching business with active clients, a structured methodology, and a delivery model that requires more than dripped video content and a community tab.
The ICF 2025 Global Coaching Study puts the average coach’s annual income at $49,283 globally ($71,719 in the US, about £53,000). If you’re earning well above that, say £10,000+ a month, and still running your business on Kajabi, you’ve probably already felt the friction. The workarounds. The things that almost work but don’t quite. The features you need that are locked behind a higher tier, or simply don’t exist.
This isn’t a hit piece on Kajabi. It’s an honest look at where it stops being the right tool, and what a purpose-built platform gives you instead. If you want the full picture of what productising looks like, our guide to turning your coaching framework into a platform covers the entire process. And if you haven’t run your own numbers yet, try our free revenue ceiling calculator to see exactly where your calendar caps you.
Where Kajabi works
Credit where it’s due. Kajabi does a few things well.
It’s genuinely all-in-one for simple businesses. Website, email marketing, checkout, course hosting, community, and basic coaching tools all live in one dashboard. For someone just starting out, that removes a lot of friction. You don’t need to wire up 6 different tools on day one.
The coaching product has improved. Since their September 2025 update, Kajabi added native scheduling, live video for up to 200 participants, and session recording. If your coaching model is primarily live calls with some content attached, Kajabi can handle the basics.
Funnels and email are built in. You can set up a sales pipeline, run email sequences, and process payments without leaving the platform. For a coach selling one or two offers, that’s genuinely useful.
The problem is that you’re not running a simple business any more.
Where Kajabi breaks for growing coaches
Once your coaching business gets past a certain size and complexity, Kajabi starts working against you. Here’s where.
Your methodology can’t be encoded
This is the big one. Kajabi delivers content in a fixed, linear sequence. Module 1, then Module 2, then Module 3. That’s fine for a self-paced course. It’s useless for a coaching programme where clients start at different points, progress at different speeds, and need different resources based on their situation.
Your framework probably has branching logic. If a client is stuck on X, they need resource Y. If they’ve already done Z, they skip ahead. Kajabi has no concept of this. It’s a content delivery platform, not a coaching delivery platform.
The result? You end up doing the routing manually. Sending Slack messages to point people to the right module. Keeping a spreadsheet of who’s where. Spending hours each week on work that a properly built platform would handle automatically.
The feature gates are aggressive
Kajabi’s pricing structure is designed to push you up the tiers. Here’s what you can’t do on the lower plans:
- API access: Pro only (~£295/month on annual billing, or $399 USD). If you want to connect Kajabi to anything custom, you need the most expensive plan.
- Webhooks: Pro only. No real-time data flow on Basic or Growth.
- Advanced automations: Growth and above. The Basic plan gives you bare-bones automation.
- Branded mobile app: Pro only. Lower tiers get the generic Kajabi app with their branding on it.
- Affiliates: Growth and above.
- Code editor: Pro only (or you pay an extra ~£73/month ($99 USD) for the Access add-on).
Any coach running a serious coaching business with 20+ clients needs API access, webhooks, and advanced automations. That means you’re on the Pro plan at ~£295/month ($399 USD annual), about £3,540/year, before you’ve even accounted for transaction fees.
The hidden costs add up
Kajabi advertises “0% transaction fees” on their pricing page. The reality is more complicated.
Kajabi Payments charges 2.9% + $0.30 (USD) per transaction on the Basic tier. Say you’re processing £15,000 a month through the platform. At 2.9%, that’s roughly £435/month in processing fees alone, and Kajabi prices its fees in US dollars so the per-transaction charge fluctuates with the exchange rate.
It gets worse. There’s a 0.7% surcharge on recurring transactions (memberships, payment plans), pushing the effective rate to 3.6%. International cards add another 1.5%. If you’re a UK-based coach with international clients paying in instalments, you could be looking at an effective rate above 5%.
For context, UK Stripe charges 1.5% + 20p for standard UK cards, 2.5% + 20p for EEA cards, and 3.25% + 20p for international cards. That’s a meaningful difference when you’re processing hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.
Want to use your own Stripe account instead? Kajabi adds a penalty fee on top: 5% on Basic, 1% on Growth, 0.5% on Pro. On the Basic plan, that’s a combined 7.9% per transaction. That’s not a payment processing fee. That’s a tax on trying to leave.
Not sure what your full stack is costing you? Our free frankenstack cost auditor adds up every tool and shows you the true annual figure, including the hours you lose to admin.
Contact limits include everyone
Kajabi’s contact limits aren’t just paying clients. They include email subscribers, leads, and one-time purchasers. The Basic plan caps you at 2,500 contacts. Run a lead magnet funnel and you’ll hit that within months.
Growth gives you 25,000. Pro gives you 100,000. If you’re building an email list alongside your coaching practice, those numbers run out faster than you’d expect.
Reporting is surface-level
Kajabi gives you aggregate reporting. Total revenue, total contacts, basic email metrics. What it doesn’t give you is the data a serious coaching business needs:
- Where in your programme do clients stall?
- What’s the average time to first milestone?
- Which modules correlate with the best outcomes?
- What’s your completion rate by cohort?
Self-paced online courses average 10-20% completion rates. Coached programmes with built-in accountability can push that above 70%. But you can’t improve what you can’t measure. And Kajabi’s reporting won’t tell you where the drop-off is happening.
You don’t own your platform
This is the one coaches think about last but should think about first. On Kajabi, you’re a tenant. The platform decides what features exist, what integrations are allowed, how your data is structured, and what happens to your pricing next year.
Kajabi’s September 2025 price increase was their first in 10 years. The Basic plan jumped from $149 to $179/month (~£110 to £132). Growth went from $199 to $249 (£147 to £184). Pro from $399 to $499 (£295 to ~£369). All prices in USD, converted at April 2026 rates. Those increases happened overnight. You had no negotiating power, no alternative, and no easy way to migrate because your content, your clients, and your data all live inside their system.
When you build a custom platform, you own the code, the data, and the infrastructure. Nobody can raise your rent or change the rules.
What a custom coaching platform gives you
A purpose-built platform isn’t just Kajabi with more features. It’s a different thing entirely. It’s built around your methodology, not around a template that every other coach on the internet is also using.
Your framework becomes the product
Instead of fitting your coaching into Kajabi’s rigid content structure, the platform follows your actual methodology. Branching paths, conditional content, adaptive pacing, the works.
Client A is a startup founder who needs to move fast? The platform pushes them through your accelerated track. Client B is running an established consultancy and needs to go deeper? They get the extended version with extra exercises and reflection points.
This isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between clients completing your programme and clients dropping off at week 4 because the content wasn’t relevant to them.
AI handles the repetitive delivery
A custom platform can include AI that knows your framework inside out. Not generic chatbot responses, but AI trained on your methodology, your language, and your coaching style.
It handles the weekly check-ins. It nudges clients who’ve gone quiet. It answers the questions you get asked 50 times a month. It flags at-risk clients before they churn. All without you writing a single message.
We covered this in detail in our revenue ceiling breakdown, but the short version is: your time is the bottleneck, and AI removes you from the parts that don’t need you. If you want the full map of where AI belongs inside a coaching business (onboarding, delivery, accountability, content, ops), our complete guide to AI for coaching businesses walks through each layer.
Accountability is built into the system
The biggest gap in Kajabi is accountability. There’s no progress tracking against your specific milestones. No automated nudges based on client behaviour. No way to know that Sarah hasn’t logged in for 2 weeks unless you manually check.
A custom platform tracks every interaction. It knows when clients are on track and when they’re falling behind. It sends the right nudge at the right time, using your tone and your language. And it gives you a dashboard showing exactly where every client stands.
The Founderise platform we built does exactly this. It is projected to save the founder roughly 12 hours a week in manual follow-ups while keeping completion rates high across a growing client base.
You get data that actually matters
Custom reporting means you measure what matters to your business, not what Kajabi decided to put on a dashboard.
Completion rates by cohort. Time-to-milestone by client segment. Module-level engagement patterns. Revenue per client over their lifetime, not just the initial sale. Churn predictors based on behaviour patterns.
This data doesn’t just help you coach better. It helps you sell. “87% of our clients hit their first revenue milestone within 6 weeks” (a hypothetical, but the kind of claim a data-rich platform lets you make) is a much stronger pitch than “our programme is really good.”
You own everything
The code. The data. The client relationships. The infrastructure. Nobody can raise your price, gate a feature you depend on, or change the terms. You can switch hosting providers, add features on your own timeline, and integrate with anything you want.
And if you ever want to sell your coaching business, a proprietary platform with proven data and built-in delivery is an asset worth real money. A Kajabi account is not.
The honest comparison
Let’s put the two options side by side for a coach earning above the ICF average with 20+ active clients. Kajabi prices are converted from USD at April 2026 rates (~£1 = $1.35).
| Kajabi Pro (annual billing) | Custom platform | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | ~£295/month ($399 USD) + processing fees at 2.9%+ | Hosting only (typically £50-200/month) + Stripe at 1.5%+ |
| Year 1 total cost | ~£3,540 (subscription) + processing fees | £15,000-£30,000 (build) + ~£1,200 (hosting) |
| Year 2+ cost | ~£3,540/year (and rising) + processing fees | ~£1,200-£2,400/year (hosting + maintenance) |
| Methodology delivery | Linear content drip | Adaptive, branching, personalised |
| AI coaching support | None | Built around your framework |
| Accountability | Manual | Automated, behaviour-driven |
| Client data | Aggregate only | Granular, custom metrics |
| Ownership | Renting | You own everything |
| Migration risk | High (data locked in) | Zero (you control the stack) |
Build and hosting costs are illustrative ranges based on our experience with coaching platforms at this scale. Your figures will depend on complexity.
The maths is straightforward. Kajabi costs less upfront but charges a higher payment processing rate than direct Stripe, with rising subscription costs and no asset value. A custom platform costs more in year 1 but the subscription savings and lower processing fees compound over time, and the platform becomes an asset you own.
When Kajabi is still the right choice
Kajabi isn’t bad. It’s built for a different stage of business.
Stick with Kajabi if:
- You’re well below the ICF average (~£4,400/month) and still growing
- Your programme is primarily self-paced content with occasional live calls
- You have fewer than 15 active clients
- You don’t need adaptive delivery or AI-driven accountability
- You’re still validating your framework and methodology
Kajabi is a good starting platform. The mistake is staying on it long after you’ve outgrown it, because migration gets harder every month you wait.
Move to custom if:
- You’re earning around or above the ICF average (say £4,000+/month) and delivery is eating your calendar
- You have 20+ active clients at different stages of your programme
- Your methodology requires conditional logic, branching paths, or personalised pacing
- You need real data on client outcomes, not just revenue dashboards
- You want to build an asset, not rent a platform
If the first list describes you, Kajabi is fine. Use it, grow your business, and revisit this when you’ve hit the ceiling. If the second list sounds familiar, you’ve probably already felt the friction, and every month you delay the switch costs you time and money.
What happens when you switch
The transition from Kajabi to a custom platform doesn’t have to be a cliff-edge migration. Here’s how we typically approach it:
Phase 1: Architecture audit. We map your current framework, your delivery model, your client data, and the specific points where Kajabi is falling short. This takes a week.
Phase 2: Platform build. We build the custom platform around your methodology. Authentication, payments, content delivery, AI-driven coaching, automated accountability. The typical timeline is 30 days from kickoff to a deployed platform.
Phase 3: Parallel running. New clients go on the custom platform. Existing Kajabi clients finish their current cohort where they are. No disruption, no rushed migration.
Phase 4: Full cutover. Once the current cohort wraps up, Kajabi gets cancelled. Your data, your clients, and your business run on infrastructure you own.
The build cost depends on complexity, but for coaching businesses at this stage, it typically sits between £15,000 and £30,000 based on our project experience. We break down every phase of that cost in our full pricing guide. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to the £3,500+ a year you’re paying Kajabi in subscription fees alone (growing annually), the higher processing rates versus direct Stripe, the hours you’re losing to manual workarounds, and the revenue you’re leaving on the table because your platform can’t scale with you.
The bottom line
Kajabi built a good product for course creators. But you’re not a course creator. You’re a coach running a real business with a structured methodology, active clients, and a delivery model that requires more than linear content and a community forum.
If you’re earning well above the industry average and your business is still running on Kajabi, the question isn’t whether you can afford a custom platform. It’s whether you can afford to keep paying Kajabi a growing percentage of your revenue for a tool that doesn’t do what you need.
Your framework is worth more than a Kajabi subscription. Build for it.
Related reads
- How to productise your coaching framework into a scalable SaaS. The full guide to what a productised platform looks like and how to think about the shift from manual delivery to platform delivery.
- How to turn a 1-on-1 coaching programme into a scalable digital product. The tactical 5-step transition plan: mapping your programme, picking the product shape, encoding the decisions, choosing a stack, and pricing the new offer.
- Why your coaching business has a revenue ceiling (and how to break it). The problem-side view: why your revenue is capped by your calendar and what actually breaks through.
- What a bespoke coaching SaaS actually costs (and why it pays for itself). The full cost breakdown: build phases, running costs, and when the investment pays for itself.
- Platform readiness quiz. Eleven questions across framework, demand, operations, and business model. Tells you whether you’re genuinely ready to leave Kajabi behind or whether the groundwork isn’t quite there yet.
- AI for coaching businesses: the complete guide. What AI actually does inside a modern coaching platform, where Kajabi’s AI features stop short, and what a custom AI layer replaces them with.
Ready to see what a custom platform would look like for your specific coaching business? Book a free architecture audit. We’ll map where Kajabi is holding you back and what the alternative looks like.