Kajabi Subscription Courses: What Keeps Members Paying
“Passive income” is the phrase every Kajabi subscription pitch leans on, and it is the wrong way to judge the model. A subscription is governed by two numbers: the new members you add each month, and the share who quietly leave. Kajabi can set up the billing in about ten minutes — whether you still earn in month twelve depends on the gap between those two numbers. This guide covers what a Kajabi subscription course really is, what it costs to run, the one setup choice that decides your workload, and how to keep members paying.
A subscription on Kajabi is an Offer, not a course
In Kajabi, the course you build (the Product) and the way you charge for it (the Offer) are two separate things. You create the lessons once, then attach a recurring Offer that sells access to them. To make an Offer a subscription, you go to Sales → Pricing, open the Offer, and under the Pricing tab set Payment Type to Subscription.
From there, Kajabi supports weekly, monthly, or yearly billing intervals, and you can add an optional free trial or a setup fee — a setup fee is charged with the first payment and is how Kajabi structures paid trials. You can collect through Kajabi Payments, Stripe, or PayPal. Once a member checks out, the first payment runs immediately, and they keep access to the Product until they cancel or you revoke the Offer manually (Kajabi’s subscription-Offer documentation, accessed October 2026). The billing is genuinely the easy part. The hard part comes after.
What a Kajabi subscription actually costs to run
Before a single member pays you, you are paying Kajabi. There is no free plan. What is unusual for this category is that Kajabi takes no revenue share from your sales — you keep the subscription income minus standard card-processing fees. So what you are really buying each month is a ceiling: how many contacts and how many products your account can hold.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (effective /mo) | Products | Contacts | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $179 | $143 | 5 | 2,500 | One membership, small list |
| Growth | $249 | $199 | 50 | 25,000 | A growing catalog + automations |
| Pro | $499 | $399 | Unlimited | 100,000 | Multiple sites/brands, large list |
Kajabi plan pricing, checked October 2026 at kajabi.com/pricing; every plan carries a 30-day money-back guarantee. The “Annual” column is the effective monthly rate when billed yearly.
For a subscription, the contact number is the real constraint, not the product count. Your list grows every month you add members and prospects, and crossing a ceiling forces an upgrade regardless of what you are earning. Pay annually if the cash flow allows — it is the cheapest lever on this page, and it mirrors the annual option you will want to offer your own members. If you are still deciding whether Kajabi is the right home at all, our full walk-through of the Kajabi platform covers the features these plans unlock.
Evergreen vs monthly-enrolling: the choice that decides your workload
This is where most “set it and forget it” promises fall apart, because Kajabi supports two very different subscription shapes that demand very different amounts of your time.
Evergreen membership (low maintenance)
All current content is available the moment someone joins, and you can drip-release modules on a schedule so new members are not overwhelmed. Any lesson you add later appears for everyone automatically. This is the shape that actually earns the word “passive”: you maintain and occasionally expand one library, and the Offer keeps selling it.
Monthly-enrolling membership (a recurring job)
Here, members only receive content from the month they joined onward — someone who signs up in January sees January and every month after, while a February joiner never gets January. It sounds like a clever way to drive urgency, but Kajabi is explicit that it “doesn’t have an automated process for this type of model at this time” (Kajabi’s monthly-enrolling guide, accessed October 2026). You build a separate Product for each month and edit the Offer every month to include the new content. That is ongoing labor dressed up as recurring income.
Our take: unless you have a concrete reason to gate content by cohort, choose evergreen. The monthly-enrolling model trades your time for its urgency every single month, and the platform will not do the bookkeeping for you.
The churn math nobody puts in the sales page
Recurring revenue cuts both ways, and a quick calculation shows why. Say you have 100 members paying $39 a month — that is $3,900 in monthly recurring revenue. At 8% monthly churn (ordinary for consumer memberships), eight people cancel every month. To simply stand still you must recruit eight new members before you have grown at all; to add $390 of revenue you need eighteen. Churn, not acquisition, is what quietly kills memberships.
Three levers move that number more than any funnel tweak:
- Offer an annual interval. A member who pays for a year cannot churn for twelve months, and Kajabi lets you attach a yearly price to the same Offer.
- Engineer an early win. Most cancellations happen in the first 30–60 days, before a member feels progress. Strong onboarding and a visible path forward are the fix — the same mechanics that lift course completion rates.
- Keep the value arriving. A subscription is a promise of ongoing value; a monthly live call, a fresh lesson, or an active community gives people a reason to stay. Your email list is what reminds them it is happening — which is where Kajabi’s built-in email tools earn their keep.
Who should run a Kajabi subscription — and who shouldn’t
Build it if your topic keeps evolving (software, marketing, fitness programming, or a language or trading practice that benefits from repetition), you can realistically commit to a monthly cadence of new value, and you already have an email audience to seed the first members. Under those conditions the recurring model compounds in your favor.
Wait if your knowledge is a finite, learn-it-once-and-you’re-done skill — a single certification prep, a one-weekend workflow. There is nothing to keep paying for, so churn will be brutal; a one-time course or a time-boxed cohort fits better. Also wait if you have no audience yet, because a subscription needs a steady trickle of new members just to offset churn, and that is hard from a standing start.
Start small, price annually
Begin on the Basic plan with a single evergreen membership, add an annual option from day one, and treat your first 60 days of onboarding as the product. Kajabi makes the billing trivial; the income comes from the cadence and the churn work you do after setup, not from the setup itself. And if your topic is genuinely “done” once learned, sell it once — do not dress a one-time course as a subscription.
FAQ
Does Kajabi take a percentage of my subscription revenue?
No. Kajabi does not take a platform revenue share, so you keep your subscription income minus standard payment-processing fees. You do, however, pay the monthly plan fee whether or not you make a sale.
If I raise my subscription price later, do current members pay more?
No. Kajabi states that a pricing change to an existing Offer does not affect people who already purchased it, including recurring Offers. Existing subscribers keep their original rate, and only new customers pay the updated price.
