Teachable pricing explained: the plans were renamed, and every review is out of date
If you have read a Teachable review this year, you have probably read the wrong prices. The tiers are no longer Free, Basic and Pro. Teachable's own pricing page now publishes Starter, Builder and Growth — the free plan has been removed, the transaction fee on the entry tier is 7.5%, and the $39 "Basic" that most reviews still describe is a different product at a different price.
The current plans, from Teachable's own data
| Starter | Builder | Growth | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly billing | $59/mo | $119/mo | $239/mo |
| Annual billing | $39/mo · $468/yr | $89/mo · $1,068/yr | $189/mo · $2,268/yr |
| Transaction fee | 7.5% | 0% | 0% |
| Products | 5 | 10 | 50 |
| Affiliate program | — | Yes | Yes |
| Remove Teachable branding | — | — | Yes |
| Upsells & cart recovery | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Certificates | Yes | Yes | Yes |
The free plan is gone
Teachable's own FAQ now answers the question directly: it is a paid service with a 7-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. There is no indefinite free tier in the current lineup.
This matters more than the rename, because the free plan was Teachable's best-known feature — reviews still lead with "$0 plus $1 and 10% per sale". That product no longer exists as described. If you came to Teachable to validate a course idea without paying, the trial is 7 days, and the entry cost afterwards is $59 a month or $468 a year.
The fee arithmetic
Starter takes 7.5% of sales. Builder takes 0% and costs $60 a month more on monthly billing, or $50 a month more on annual. The break-even on annual billing:
$50 ÷ 0.075 = $667 in monthly course sales.
Sell more than $667 a month and Builder's annual price is already cheaper than Starter's — before you count the affiliate program and the extra five products. On monthly billing the bar is $800. Below those numbers, Starter with its fee is genuinely the cheaper plan.
The upgrade to Growth is not a fee decision — both take 0%. Growth buys scale: 50 products instead of 10, branding removal, imported students and admin permissions. It is $1,200 a year more, and nothing in the fee structure forces it.
Why the reviews disagree — and why that is a lesson
Search for Teachable pricing and you will find three different price sets on page one: Basic $39 with 5%, Basic $59 with 5%, Pro $119 with 0%. All of them describe the previous lineup. None of them match Teachable's current published data.
This is not those reviewers being careless in a way you are immune to. It is what happens with any pricing that lives behind a JavaScript-rendered page: the numbers get copied at review time, the vendor changes them, and nothing in the old article knows it is wrong. We hit the same wall — Teachable's page renders blank for simple fetchers — and only got the real numbers from the structured data Teachable publishes inside the page itself. Our own policy on this, and the label we put on any figure we could not verify, is written up in why we do not publish unverified prices. The general skill of catching this before it costs you money is in how to read a SaaS pricing page.
What five products actually means
Starter caps products at 5. For a single-course business that is not a limit — one course, one workbook, one coaching product, and you still have two spare. It becomes a limit if you sell many low-priced items: a catalogue of twenty templates needs Builder or Growth, and no amount of fee arithmetic changes that.
What Starter does not include is the affiliate program. If distribution-through-others is your plan, that is a Builder feature, and it stacks with the fee break-even: at $667 a month of sales you upgrade for both reasons at once.
How this changes the Teachable vs Podia question
With the old prices, Teachable's entry tier looked cheap and Podia looked expensive. With the current ones the comparison flips at a lower bar than most people expect, because Podia's mid tier has no fee. We worked the numbers out in Teachable vs Podia; the short version is that past roughly $333 a month in sales, Podia's $84 plan beats Teachable's $59-plus-7.5%.
What we cannot verify
Prices, fees and product limits were read from the structured pricing data embedded in Teachable's own pricing page on October 23, 2026, in USD. We have not signed up for a trial, so the practical behaviour of the 7.5% fee — whether it applies to upsells, payment plans and coaching sales as well as base course prices — is unverified. The Enterprise per-user figures in the page data are partial and we have not printed them. Student limits are described as unlimited for courses on the plans we read, and we have not stress-tested that. Whether Teachable retains any legacy grandfathered pricing for existing customers is unknown to us and unknowable from the outside. See How We Test.