Teachable Pricing: What’s the best plan to avoid those sneaky fees?

Like most online LMS products, the Teachable pricing structure offers a tiered payment approach for their platform.

Teachable currently has 4 plans, a Free version as well as a Basic, Professional, and Business:

Let’s break down what’s included in all of the plans:

• Unlimited video
• Unlimited courses
• Unlimited students
• Unlimited hosting
• Integrated payment processing
• Student management
• Lecture comments
• Basic quizzes
• No fees on free courses

If you want to read more about Teachable’s features you can find out in-depth Teachable review here.

What fees are included in Teachable.com Pricing?

To understand the different fees associated with Teachable, we must diver a bit deeper into the payment processing options Teachable offers.

Currently, there are three ways to collect payments:

1. Teachable Payments
2. Monthly Payment Gateway
3. Custom Payment Gateway

Teachable Payments

This option is available for course creators who operate in the US or Canada.

Teachable collects payments through Stripe and deposits them into your bank account either daily, weekly, or monthly.

The first fee associated here is the Payout Fee which is a flat $0.25 per payout.

For example, if you choose the weekly payout option, you’ll pay $1.00 in payout fees per month versus only $0.25 if you chose the monthly option.

The next fee to be deducted is the Payment Processing Fee which varies by how your student pays:

• 2.9% + 30¢ (US PayPal/card fee)
• 3.9% + 30¢ (International card fee)
• 4.4% + 30¢ (International PayPal fee)

For example, if your course costs $100, each sale you’d net:

• $96.80 (for US PayPal/card payments)
• $95.80 (for International card payments)
• $95.30 (for International PayPal payments)

Finally, Teachable takes a cut depending on your service plan and whether or not you opt-in to using BackOffice (an additional service that you can learn more about here).

Overall, the fees look something like:

Watch out for the sneaky “Reserve”

Here’s something you don’t see broadcasted in the pricing chart: Teachable withholds a 10% reserve.

While it’s not technically a fee, Teachable keeps 10% of every card transaction (after fees and commissions) as a reserve to ensure your school isn’t in debt if chargebacks or refunds are requested.

After 45 days these funds are returned to you.

Monthly Payment Gateway

If the above Teachable Payment option is not available to you, then the Monthly Payment Gateway will be.

In other words, the Monthly Payment Gateway is used by non US or Canadian schools.

Since this option utilizes Paypal, funds will not be paid out for at least 30 days on the 1st of each month (or the next business day if the 1st is over the weekend or falls on a holiday).

For example, if you made a sale on February 2nd, you would not receive the funds until April 1st (which is quite a long time if you are bootstrapping a small business).

The Monthly Payment Gateway fees are similar to the Teachable Payments:

The only difference being transactions processed by the Monthly Payment Gateway for schools created before 10/9/18 are subject to a 2% transaction fee.

Custom Payment Gateway

To keep things brief, the only fees associated with utilizing a Custom Payment Gateway are whatever you’ve been able to negotiate between PayPal and/or Stripe.

This option, however, is not available to everyone.

If you are using the Teachable Payment option, you can set up a custom PayPal gateway only if you are on the Professional plan or higher.

If you are not eligible for the Teachable Payment option, both Stripe and PayPal custom payment gateways are available so long as you are on the Professional plan or higher.

If you’d like to set up your Custom Payment Gateway, Teachable has an in-depth guide here.

The verdict: What’s the best Teachable Pricing option?

Choosing between which plan is best for you and your business comes down to simple math: what’s your break-even point?

In other words, to justify Teachable pricing, how many courses will you need to sell to offset the Teachable fees.

For most of you reading this, you’ll most likely choose between the free, the basic, and the professional Teachable pricing plan.

Let’s look at a real example minus the business plan:

As you can see in the graph below, with everything constant, the Basic Plan becomes the most profitable option after only 7 sales. The Professional Plan becomes the most profitable after 13 sales.

The verdict here is if you expect to sell a lot of courses month over month, go with the professional plan. If not, it’s our suggestion to start with the Free or Basic plan and see what your sales look like month after month. You can always upgrade to unlock the lower transactional fees.

Or, if you are adventurous enough, you could try a DIY route and build your own self hosted ecourse on WordPress with Learndash. We have our very own how-to article to help you out.