Teachable Fees Explained: Transaction Fees, Processing, and What You Keep

Teachable charges a 7.5% platform transaction fee on the Starter plan and 0% on Builder, Growth, and Custom, but every plan still pays standard payment processing of about 2.9% plus $0.30 on US cards. So a $199 course sale nets roughly $178 on Starter and roughly $193 on Builder. The plan fee itself runs $39, $89, or $189 a month billed monthly, or $29, $69, or $139 billed annually. The math that decides your plan is simple: once your monthly course revenue clears about $1,000, the higher plan usually costs less than the transaction fee it removes.

Below is every fee Teachable charges, what each one actually costs on a real sale, and where creators get caught out.

What are Teachable's transaction fees?

Teachable's platform transaction fee is the cut it takes from each sale on top of card processing. As published in July 2026 it is 7.5% on the Starter plan and 0% on Builder, Growth, and Custom. That single number is the difference between the plans that matter, and it is why comparing Teachable plans on their monthly price alone is misleading.

The 7.5% applies to the sale price before processing. On a $199 course that is $14.93 to Teachable, and then the processor takes its own cut. Creators who launched on Starter because it was the cheapest sticker price frequently discover they paid several hundred dollars in transaction fees during a launch week that would have cost $89 on Builder.

Teachable also sells Enterprise tiers priced annually, reported around $6,000 a year for Core and $12,000 for Pro, both at 0% platform fee. Those are for organizations training seats rather than individual creators selling courses.

What are Teachable's payment processing fees?

Processing fees are charged on every plan, including the ones advertised at 0% transaction fee, because they go to the card networks and the processor rather than to Teachable. As published in July 2026 the rates are 2.9% plus $0.30 on US credit and debit cards, 3.9% plus $0.30 on international cards, 3.49% plus $0.49 on US PayPal, and 4.99% plus $0.49 on international PayPal. A chargeback costs $15.

Two of those numbers deserve attention. The international card rate is a full point higher, so a course selling well outside the US carries a materially different blended cost than the same course selling domestically. And PayPal is the most expensive way for a US buyer to pay you, roughly 60 cents more on a $199 sale than a card. Neither shows up in a headline pricing comparison.

How much does Teachable take from a $199 course sale?

On Starter, a $199 sale paid by US card gives up $14.93 to the 7.5% platform fee and $6.07 to processing, netting about $178. On Builder or Growth, the same sale gives up only the $6.07 in processing and nets about $193. The $15 difference per sale is the entire argument for upgrading.

Read the last column as what the Starter plan costs you per sale. Divide the $50 monthly gap between Starter and Builder by that figure and you get the number of sales at which upgrading is free. At $199 it is four sales a month. At $49 it is thirteen. Below that, Starter is genuinely cheaper.

When should you upgrade from Teachable Starter?

Upgrade when your monthly course revenue crosses roughly $700 to $1,200, depending on your price point. Above that line the 7.5% you save exceeds the $50 a month the upgrade costs. The precise break-even is $50 divided by 0.075, which is about $667 in monthly sales, and most creators should build in a margin because launch months are lumpy.

The trap is a launch. A creator sitting comfortably on Starter at $300 a month who runs a launch week doing $8,000 pays about $600 in transaction fees for that week alone. Upgrading before the launch and downgrading after is legitimate and takes a few minutes. Very few people remember to do it, which is exactly why the fee structure is built that way.

Does Teachable charge a payout fee?

Teachable charges $0.25 per payout batch through Teachable:pay, not per sale. That means the cost is set by how often you get paid rather than how much you sell. Choosing weekly instead of daily payouts takes the annual cost from about $91 to about $13, and a monthly schedule takes it to $3.

For most creators this is genuinely a rounding error, and the tradeoff is cash flow rather than money. Daily payouts smooth income and cost about $7.50 a month; monthly payouts save that but concentrate your cash into one date. If your income arrives from several platforms on several rhythms, mapping those dates matters more than the $0.25. That is the case for keeping a payout calendar of every expected deposit rather than tracking one platform at a time.

Does Teachable have a no-cost tier?

No. Teachable removed its no-cost plan in 2025, and all four current tiers are paid, starting at $39 a month or $29 billed annually. Every plan includes a 7-day trial and a 30-day guarantee. If you see a comparison article describing a permanently no-cost Teachable tier with a 10% fee, it is describing the old structure and the numbers in it are stale.

What Teachable fees do not include

The plan fee and the transaction fee are the two lines everyone compares. The costs that actually decide whether a course business works tend to sit outside them: email tools, a landing page builder if you outgrow Teachable's, affiliate payouts, refunds, chargebacks at $15 each, and the sales tax or VAT handling on international orders. Teachable's higher tiers fold some of these in, which is a real part of the value and a reason the Growth plan is not simply an expensive Builder. That bundling question is exactly what decides Teachable vs Kajabi fees, where Kajabi's $90 a month premium buys an email platform you may already be paying for.

Production cost is the other invisible line. Recording, editing, and slide work for a single course commonly runs anywhere from a few hundred dollars to five figures depending on how much you outsource. Creators who already have written material sitting in documents and reports can shorten that a lot by turning the existing outline straight into a slide deck instead of building lessons from a blank page.

How do you track what Teachable actually paid you?

Teachable's own reporting shows sales and payouts inside Teachable. What it cannot show is your business, because almost no course creator earns only from courses. The workable method is one record per payout carrying the gross sale, the platform fee, the processing fee, the take-home, and the date, then the same record for every other platform you sell on.

Earnly is an income tracker built for course creators and other people paid by platforms rather than employers. It puts payouts from Teachable, Gumroad, Stripe, PayPal, Patreon, Substack, YouTube, Shopify, and four more on one board with gross, fees, and take-home per source, plus expected pay dates. For a Teachable creator the useful part is usually the comparison: seeing that a $49 product on Gumroad at roughly 12.9% plus $0.80 keeps less per dollar than the same product on Builder at 2.9% plus $0.30, on your own volumes. Earnly is informational analytics, not a bank, a processor, or a tax advisor, and figures are estimates to check against your Teachable statements.

The number worth watching

Track blended take-home rate, meaning total deposits divided by total gross sales, per platform, per month. It collapses plan fees, transaction fees, processing, refunds, and international card premiums into one honest figure. Most Teachable creators on Starter discover theirs sits near 88% while they assumed it was 97%, and that single number usually pays for the upgrade decision within a month. For the timing side, our Teachable payout schedule guide covers when the money actually moves.

Fee and pricing figures in this article are Teachable's published rates as of July 2026 and change without notice; confirm current pricing on teachable.com. This is general information, not financial or tax advice.