Bespoke coaching platforms that replace Kajabi end to end. Built for coaches doing £20k+ a month, where product caps, 2.9% transaction fees, and a template-driven client experience start costing more than the platform saves.
Kajabi is a fine place to launch. It stops being the right place somewhere between £15k and £30k a month, when the platform starts shaping your business instead of supporting it. Here's what most coaches run into first.
Kajabi limits how many products you can sell on every plan. Run a group programme, a 1-to-1 offer, a digital product, a membership, and a course, and you're already at 5. Adding a new cohort means upgrading or deleting something that still earns. A custom platform has no product limits.
On a £5,000 coaching package, roughly £141 leaves your business before you've paid yourself. Skool's Hobby tier charges 10%. Across a year of serious sales, the percentage fee on hosted platforms costs more than building your own.
Coaches who've been around recognise a Kajabi site instantly. So do your clients. When you charge £5,000 to £15,000 per programme, what your client walks into when they log in matters as much as the content inside.
Kajabi was built to sell courses, so the analytics match that. Enrolments, completions, revenue. None of it tells you which clients are stuck, which parts of your framework aren't landing, or which interventions move the needle on the outcomes you actually sell.
Calendly for booking. Notion for delivery. Zapier to glue it together. ConvertKit for nurture. Most coaches we audit pay for 4 to 7 tools because no single platform does what they need.
For the full breakdown of when each of these costs starts to bite, read 5 signs you've outgrown Kajabi, Teachable, and Skool.
A custom platform isn't just a fancier Kajabi. It's the consolidation of the stack you're currently paying 4 to 7 tools for, with your framework baked in and your client experience designed end to end.
The honest read. Kajabi wins on time to launch and out-the-box convenience. A bespoke platform wins on fees, ownership, fit, and what it can do once you're past the early stage.
Founderise was running on the off-the-shelf coaching stack everyone starts on. Calls eating the calendar, manual onboarding for every client, a course platform for content, a community tool for chat, a spreadsheet for tracking. We rebuilt the business as a single platform with automated onboarding, AI-driven delivery, and accountability baked into every step.
Not every coach should be on a custom platform yet. These are the four signals that say it's time. Want a structured read? Run our platform readiness quiz.
Once Kajabi is taking £500 a month in percentage fees, a custom build pays back inside 36 months on fees alone, never mind the rest.
If you're deleting old offers to make room for new ones, the platform is now shaping your product strategy. That's the wrong way round.
If your programme needs adaptive content, structured check-ins, or any kind of outcomes view, you're already working around Kajabi rather than running on it.
Calendly, Notion, Zapier, an email tool, a community tool. When the bolt-ons cost more than the platform, the platform isn't the right platform.
Most coaching platforms we ship sit between £15,000 and £30,000 to build. The variance comes from framework complexity, how much you want automated on day one, and whether you need AI delivery agents or just a clean custom-built version of the basics.
After launch, running costs usually land at £150 to £400 a month. That covers hosting, AI inference, Stripe processing, monitoring, and ongoing maintenance. Compared with paying £119 to £319 a month for Kajabi plus 4 to 7 bolt-on tools, the running-cost picture often comes out flat or cheaper, before fees.
The build cost is where the maths matters. A coach doing £30k a month on Kajabi pays roughly £870 a month in transaction fees alone. Drop those by switching to Stripe direct, and the build pays for itself inside 24 to 30 months on fees alone, before counting the time saved or the experience upgrade.
Full breakdown of where the build cost goes, what's included, and how the ROI actually works: what a bespoke coaching SaaS actually costs.
Curious what your numbers look like? Run them through our coaching revenue ceiling calculator to see what your business could earn on a productised model.
If you're processing £20,000 or more a month through Kajabi, the platform fees alone usually justify a bespoke build inside 12 months. The non-cash payback (faster onboarding, less manual delivery, no product caps when you launch new offers) tends to matter more to coaches doing serious numbers. For a full read of when the switch makes sense, see our Kajabi vs custom coaching platform comparison.
Most coaching platforms we ship sit between £15,000 and £30,000 to build, depending on framework complexity and how much you want automated on day one. Running costs after launch usually land around £150 to £400 per month for hosting, AI, payments, and maintenance. Full breakdown in our post on what a bespoke coaching SaaS actually costs.
A focused first build can be live in 30 to 90 days. Larger builds with deeper automation usually take 9 to 14 weeks. The timeline mostly depends on how documented your framework already is and how clean the spec is when we start.
Same shape, different fingerprint. They're all built for course creators and community owners, not for high-ticket coaching delivery. They cap your products, take a cut of revenue, and box your client experience into a template. The five signs you've outgrown them apply across all of them.
Yes. Code, brand, infrastructure, client data. All yours, end to end. We can hand off cleanly if you want to bring it in-house, or stay on as the engineering partner for ongoing changes. Your call, not ours.
Most of the coaches we work with aren't. You don't need to be. We translate the framework you already run in your head into a product spec, then build it. You get a working platform without writing a line of code, and we train your team to manage it day to day.
Book a free audit. We'll map out where your current platform is costing you, what a Kajabi alternative would look like for your business, and whether a build is the right move right now (or if you'd be better off optimising what you have).