Teachable Pricing Plans: Free vs. Basic vs. Professional vs. Business

Teachable is a web platform that enables users to create and sell courses and educational content. Thanks to Teachable, you can build a site where you turn your passion into income. You can share your knowledge with the world and earn at the same time.

According to Teachable, there were over 100,000 instructors in 2020 who had built their online schools on Teachable. That number is sure to have grown.

Teachable is not the only LMS (Learning Management System) on the market, but it’s definitely one of the most popular in terms of monthly traffic. As attested by the stats from Similarweb, Teachable is more popular than some of the most widely known LMSs like Thinkific, LearnWorlds, and Podia. It lags only behind Udemy, which is understandable, considering that Udemy is the Amazon of e-learning – a massive marketplace of courses and students.

If Teachable is that successful, there must be something to it. If you’re interested in starting an online teaching business and think Teachable might be for you, but you want to weigh the costs – read on. 

In this article, we’ll focus on the Teachable pricing system – one of the most important aspects of any LMS. We’ll explore the different pricing plans and the features they include. So, let’s get to it.

The Teachable Pricing System Overview

Pricing Plans

These are summarized descriptions of the four Teachable pricing plans in Teachable’s own words:

In general, if you’re just starting out as an online instructor and want to dip your toes into the waters of the online education business, then you can sign up for the Free plan.

If you already have some experience in this niche, your business is growing, and you feel like it’s time to advance to a more serious level, then the Basic plan can be a good choice.

The Pro plan is, as its name says, for professionals. So, if you’re an experienced instructor with a loyal customer base who wants to find new ways to engage students, then you can consider the Pro plan.

The Advanced plan is for educators who have already built a name for themselves. We’re talking about established and renowned online education brands that boast a large community of students. 

Subscriptions

There are two subscription options with each plan: monthly and annual. As usual, an annual subscription means a discounted price. The downside of annual billing is that you need to pay in advance, which can be a large sum all in one hit.

Refund Policy

According to the Teachable refund policy, customers get a full refund if they cancel their subscription within 30 days of their purchase, regardless of subscription type. In the case of an annual subscription, the same refund policy applies to upgrades and renewals.

Teachable’s Free Plan

The Free Plan Fees

The Free plan is free, right? Well, not completely. Yes, you don’t pay anything to use the features available with the Free plan, but there are other costs to factor in.

For starters, when using Teachable for free, you need to pay $1 plus a 10% transaction fee for every sale you make. In addition to this, there are the usual payment processing fees charged by all payment service providers. Of course, these are not unique to Teachable but are still a cost to think about.

Payment processing fees are the same for every Teachable plan, but the transaction fees differ:

One thing we didn’t include in the table above is BackOffice fees. BackOffice is an optional functionality that automates payouts and paperwork (like filling out tax forms). Additionally, you can use it to activate PayPal and allow your clients to pay for your courses through this payment tool. 

If you enable BackOffice, you’ll need to pay a 2% transaction fee on top of the standard processing fees and your Teachable plan fee. However, as already mentioned, it’s optional, so if you don’t think you’ll really need it – don’t activate it.

The Free Plan Features

The Free plan includes a group of core Teachable features that you’ll be able to access regardless of the plan you choose. We won’t go over every single feature, but we’ll explore the majority of them. If you’d like to read about all of Teachable’s features in more detail, check out our Teachable review. 

With that said, let’s see the noteworthy features of the Free plan.

• Create Free and Paid Courses

Free courses can be very useful in the context of promoting your brand and giving your customers an opportunity to get to know you better as an instructor. It goes without saying that you don’t pay any fees when users sign up for them.

• The Teachable Payment Gateway

The Teachable Payment Gateway is native to the Teachable software system. Unfortunately, it’s only available to online school owners who work from a limited group of countries.

It takes two business days for your earnings from the daily purchases to be processed and appear in your bank account. So, they can’t be considered daily payouts due to the processing time. Monthly payouts, on the other hand, mean that your funds will be available on the first business day of each month.

The one thing you need to keep in mind is that no matter the schedule you select (daily or monthly), it takes about 21 business days for you to get your first payout. After this, the next payouts will follow the schedule you choose.

• Unlimited Students and Unlimited Hosting

There are no constraints on the number of students you can have, and you get unlimited hosting services. Previously, Teachable offered a lot more with their Free plan, but they’ve scaled it back. Having said that, it’s still a very reasonable selection of features for a free plan. 

• Email Support and Admin-Level Users

Teachable provides email support through a ticketing system seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST.

Additionally, with the Free plan, you can have only one admin, but as you go higher up the pricing ladder, this number grows (to 2, 5, and 20).

• Integrated Payment Processor

Teachable makes things super convenient for its customers. It allows you to run your online business without having to install third-party integrations to have access to such a fundamental business feature as a payment processor.

The built-in Teachable Payments processor is powered by Stripe. However, it’s important to note that it’s not available in every country. If your country is not on the list mentioned earlier, you’ll have to use another solution, such as PayPal. 

• Basic Quizzes

Quizzes make your courses more interactive, entertaining, and engaging. You’ll only get access to basic quizzes with the free plan, and they can’t be graded. For graded quizzes, you’ll need a higher-tier plan.

• Ability to Add Third-Party Apps

With the Free plan, you can integrate Google Analytics (web analytics), Sumo (website traffic enhancer), and Segment (analytics API).

• Lecture Comments

The role of lecture comments is similar to that of quizzes – they promote student engagement. Additionally, you can use them to improve your courses’ quality even more in the future based on the type of feedback and suggestions you get from your students.

• Course Design Templates

Unfortunately, Teachable offers only three designs (Teachable Classic, Simple, and Colossal), and the truth is that they’re not that different. Nevertheless, you’ve got to start somewhere when building your course site, and this is a decent start.

• Product Bundles

Teachable allows you to create a bundle of different courses and sell them together in a special offer. This is convenient for courses that are commonly bought together anyway and can increase your revenue.

• Student Management

Teachable gives you the necessary tools for managing different aspects of your students even with the Free plan. For instance, you can add filters that’ll help you organize your students into different groups and search them based on those filters. 

Teachable’s Basic Plan

The Basic Plan Fees

The Basic plan costs $39/month, and the total amount you pay with the monthly subscription for a year is $468.

On the other hand, if you opt for an annual subscription, the fee is $348/year. Remember, you’ll pay this amount in advance, but it’s the same as paying $29/month. Yearly, the annual subscription will save you $120.

Having said that, these are not the only fees. With the Basic plan, you pay a 5% transaction fee plus the already mentioned payment processing fees. There are also BackOffice fees if you choose this option.

The Basic Plan Features

Along with all of the features from the Free plan, you’ll get access to a range of additional features. The following are some of the noteworthy features of the Basic plan:

• Custom Domain

A custom domain name is a key feature of professional websites, and online schools are no exception to this rule. Thanks to the Basic plan, you can connect your Teachable school with a custom domain name bought from any of the popular web hosting providers like GoDaddy or Bluehost.

• Unlimited Video Bandwidth and Drip Content

As a step up from the Free plan, you get unlimited video bandwidth. This means you’ll be able to upload as many videos as you need of any size.

Your courses can be added to the platform as “drip content.” Drip content is when course material becomes available to your students in a sequential manner as opposed to all at once. When a student enrolls, they won’t have access to the full course material. Instead, they’ll be able to access the different sections one by one, depending on how you set the release dates. 

This is a good way to ensure that they gain a full understanding of one topic before progressing to the next one.

• Coupons

Coupons are an excellent way of promoting your courses and creating a loyal student base. Teachable allows you to use two types of coupon codes: multiple-use and single-use. 

Multiple-use coupons can be offered to a larger number of students – for instance, the first 100 students who enroll in one of your courses. In contrast, you can offer a single-use coupon to a single student, giving them an opportunity to enroll in another course for a discounted price.

• Integrated Email Marketing

Email marketing can contribute substantially to your success as a course creator. You can use this feature to create anticipation in your audience by giving them a chance to preview parts of the course, announcing the release date of a new course, or offering discounts and special deals.

• Third-Party Integrations

With the Basic plan, you can connect Facebook (ads, tracking analytics), Mailchimp (email marketing, marketing automation), ConvertKit (email marketing), Zapier Triggers (automation), and Circle.so (community management) in addition to the integrations available with the Free plan.

• Access to TeachableU

As Teachable itself defines it, TeachableU is an “online training school for course creators.” It provides you with helpful tips on how to choose the right course topic, instructions on how to create a course, and advice on how to build a loyal audience.

Of course, the educational material found on TeachableU is not the same as what you’ll find in the Teachable knowledge base. TeachableU provides more advanced and in-depth coverage of topics related to Teachable and online education businesses.

In addition to the core training on the subjects we already mentioned, TeachableU gives you access to their live-streamed partner workshops. The workshops are led by experts in different fields (for instance, culinary arts). They can be sources of invaluable information that help you advance your knowledge, improve your courses, and enhance your teaching techniques and methods even further.

• Custom HTML Blocks

This is one of the best features of the Basic plan. It’s important because it expands your customization options and allows you to extend your Teachable site with more integrations than those available through your Teachable admin dashboard.

In terms of customization, thanks to this feature, you can add an HTML block to any of your site pages, add a few lines of code (e.g., HTML styles CSS code), and style parts of your page the way you want them to look.

In a similar fashion, you can integrate Teachable with third-party software not included in the list of official Teachable integrations. For example, Teachable doesn’t offer the option of adding a blog to your Teachable site. However, blogging is essential to attracting more customers and boosting your site traffic, which often translates into higher conversion rates. 

Through a custom HTML block, you can add DropInBlog to your Teachable site and launch your blog in a matter of minutes. DropInBlog is simple to use and easy to integrate, so extending your site with blogging functionality should be a breeze. For more on this method of extending your Teachable site capacities, check out How to Create a Blog on Teachable.

Teachable’s Pro (Professional) Plan

The Pro Plan Fees

The Pro plan is priced at $119/month (paid monthly) or $99/month (paid yearly), which means that the annual subscription costs $1,188. So, assuming that you use Teachable for at least a full year, you save $240.

There are no transaction fees with the Pro plan. As we mentioned before, payment processing fees and the optional BackOffice subscription fee will apply in addition.

The Pro Plan Features

As you’d expect, the Pro plan includes some more advanced functionality on top of the Basic plan. Let’s have a look at some of what you get.

• Live Chat 

Email support can be very helpful, but live chat rocks, especially when you’re facing a serious issue and time is of the essence. The Teachable live chat support is available during business days from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST.

• Graded Quizzes and Course Completion Certificates

Graded quizzes are a more advanced version of the Teachable quizzes. In contrast to the basic quizzes available with the previous two pricing plans, graded quizzes are much more engaging and amusing. Also, they serve as a better indicator of the level of a student’s understanding of the course material. 

With the Pro plan, Teachable allows you to create and issue certificates of completion. Giving your students a tangible confirmation of their achievements can be a big drawcard to your courses. This is especially true in the professional context; a certificate shows that someone has gained new abilities and skills, making them more competitive in the labor market.

• Upsells and an Affiliate Program

An upsell is a simple way of increasing your sales by offering your students a course similar to the one that they’ve bought or by giving special offers on top of an already purchased course. 

Developing an affiliate program is one of the most convenient ways of promoting your online school and expanding your customer base. Your affiliates do the heavy lifting, you just need to reward them with a certain percentage of the sales they’re involved in, and that’s it. 

• Advanced Reporting and No Teachable Branding

Thanks to this feature, you can have access to analytics and stats related to your courses, students, upsells, and videos.

The Pro plan gives you a chance to strengthen your brand even further and give your Teachable site a more personalized look and feel. One caveat: the login and checkout pages, as well as myTeachable (both the mobile and the desktop versions), will still keep some traces of Teachable powering your site.

• Group Coaching Calls

Group coaching calls refer to webinars organized and led by Teachable in-company experts, held three times a week. These events are not generic; instead, Teachable focuses on organizing different sessions for customers with different experience levels. This feature used to be available only with the highest-tier Advanced plan, but Teachable decided to make it accessible to a wider audience.

The Advanced Plan

The Advanced Plan Fees

The Advanced plan is fully customizable upon request, so you’ll have to contact the sales team directly to discuss your needs and budget.

The Advanced Plan Features

The Advanced plan provides customers with the necessary tools to run their scaled-up online education business. To that end, with this plan, Teachable offers features like:

• Advanced Developer Customization

Teachable allows you to do some tweaking with the other plans as well – you can do some basic editing of your site’s theme, write global CSS rules, add HTML and CSS code within the header tags, and so on. 

You can make advanced changes through a tool called Power Editor. It allows you to customize your site template and write custom HTML, Liquid, and CSS code. However, when making edits, be cautious. If your custom code breaks something, the Teachable customer support team won’t be able to help you.

• Custom User Roles

This feature enables you to assign custom roles and permissions to different users in addition to the standard five types of roles and their default permissions (primary owner, owner, author, affiliate, and student). The following is a list of some of the custom types of permissions that you can grant:

1. Create and manage courses.
2. Create and manage users.
3. Erase users.
4. Customize site.
5. Moderate comments.
6. Send emails.

This feature gives you more options and more control in the whole-of-school management realm.

• Bulk Import Students

The Advanced plan allows you to add as many new students as you want by importing their basic information via a CSV file.

FAQs

Final Thoughts

In this review of the Teachable pricing plans, we’ve explored the four pricing plans in detail, one of which is forever-free. 

The scope for starting to scale your business with Teachable is broad. You get a decent suite of features with the Free plan and then gain even more with each plan above until you reach a point where you can customize to fit your needs – with the Advanced plan. 

The ability to add custom HTML blocks, as well as its price, makes the Basic plan very appealing. With advanced features, the Pro plan is highly recommended by Teachable itself. While it’s not cheap, it does come with an impressive list of features.

Each of the Teachable pricing plans was designed with a different type of audience in mind and for businesses in different phases of development. Just because a pricing plan includes a ton of advanced features does not necessarily make it a good choice for every user. 

So, keep exploring and choose the pricing plan that matches your needs best.