Podia pricing explained: the 5% decides your plan, not the features

By Marcus Webb · Pricing verified on Podia's pricing page October 23, 2026 · Hands-on testing in progress — see note below

Podia sells three plans that look like a feature ladder and behave like a fee schedule. The headline difference between Mover and Shaker is not products or videos — it is 5% of your sales against nothing, and a subscriber cap that most sellers hit long before the fee becomes the expensive part.

The three plans, as published

Prices as displayed on the yearly-billed view of Podia's pricing page. The page offers a monthly toggle; we did not capture the monthly figures and do not print estimates of them.

Every plan includes the same foundation

Podia puts the whole product in all three tiers: community, online courses, digital downloads, coaching, live and in-person events, a website and blog, custom domain, landing pages, 1,900+ embeds, built-in checkout, sales tax handling across 230 countries, 20+ currencies, and migration help. That is worth stating plainly, because it means the upgrade decision is not about capability. You are not buying features at $84 that you lacked at $42. You are buying a higher ceiling and a smaller fee.

The arithmetic that ends the Mover question

Mover costs $42/month plus 5%. Shaker costs $84/month plus nothing. The difference in subscription is $42. So the break-even is the sales volume at which 5% equals $42:

$42 ÷ 0.05 = $840 in monthly sales.

Sell more than $840 a month through Podia's checkout and Shaker is already the cheaper plan — before you count anything else. That is a low bar. Two $450 courses, or forty $25 downloads, and Mover has cost you more than Shaker would have.

Stated annually: $10,080 of sales in a year is the point where the 5% has paid for the upgrade. Below that, Mover is genuinely cheaper. Above it, Mover is a more expensive way to be on the same product.

The cap that decides it first

There is a second limit that usually arrives earlier than the fee: 100 email subscribers on Mover. Most course businesses reach 100 subscribers in the first months, and Podia counts email subscribers as its own axis — separate from products and videos. If you are selling at all, you will hit 100 before you hit $840 a month. When you do, the choice is not "should I pay the 5% or upgrade" — the cap has already chosen for you.

Which makes Mover a fair description of itself: a plan for someone testing whether they have a product, not a plan for someone who has one.

What the $1,008 actually buys over a $204 alternative

Compared with an all-in-one that charges a flat fee regardless of seats and contacts, Podia's Shaker tier is expensive. At 500 subscribers, Shaker is $1,008 a year; a contact-capped all-in-one plan covering 5,000 contacts runs around $204 a year on annual billing — roughly a fifth of the price for overlapping jobs. We laid out that comparison in Podia vs systeme.io.

The extra money is not wasted, and it is not mysterious either: a polished course player, a checkout that handles tax in 230 countries, 1,900+ embeds, an affiliate system on Shaker, and an interface a non-technical creator can run without a tutorial. Whether that is worth $804 a year depends entirely on whether the alternative's rougher edges would cost you more than that in your own time. That is a judgement about you, not about the software, and any review that pretends otherwise is selling something.

How to choose in one pass

• Under 100 subscribers and under $840/month in sales? Mover is fine, and its 5% is a tax on a business that does not exist yet.
• Over $840/month, or over 100 subscribers? Shaker. The fee argument is settled by arithmetic.
• Over 500 subscribers? Earthquaker, or start questioning whether subscriber count is the metric you should be buying against.
• Not sure you will sell anything? Use the 14-day trial, which requires no card and no plan choice until you are ready. Podia is unusual in not asking for payment details up front, and that is a real advantage when the honest answer is "I do not know yet".

What we cannot verify

Prices were read from Podia's pricing page on October 23, 2026, on the yearly-billed view. We did not capture the monthly-billed prices and have not estimated them: if you intend to pay month to month, check the toggle before budgeting. We have not captured Podia's seat limits — that matters for a team purchase and we will not guess it. We have not run a launch on Podia, so deliverability, checkout conversion and support response times are unverified. The 5% figure is stated as Podia publishes it; whether it applies to every sale type, including coaching and events, is something a live account would settle and we do not have one. See How We Test and why we do not publish unverified prices.